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Save the date & join us for our next webinar in September --
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Hello generative somatics (gs) community,
gs teachers are doing incredible work out in the world. Please join us in celebrating and learning from them!
Each in their own in way is expanding the circles of understanding about politicized somatics and its relevance to organizing, movement building, and taking action towards the world we long for. We are so grateful that all of our teachers are a part of the leadership that makes gs what it is.
With love and rigor,
Chris & Spenta
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Chris Lymbertos
gs Program Director
Spenta Kandawalla
Senior Program Consultant
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Congratulations to gs teacher adrienne maree brown on the success of her most recent book, Pleasure Activism: The Politics of Feeling Good that debuted as #6 on the New York Times non-fiction paperback bestseller list!
Excerpts from
Pleasure Activism
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Section Five: Pleasure as Political Practice, Feeling from Within: A Life of Somatics
:
"One of the reasons the generative somatics approach works for me is that it is concerned about somatics as a collective way of understanding trauma & pain. It isn't about going away from the community to heal, which was the main way I had experienced healing work prior to somatics. It isn't about being a special "healer" who is apart
from community. generative
somatics feels into how, in a collective or group, patterns of pain can indicate the mass, or intergenerational, trauma people are surviving. And how each of us has the power to help each feel more, heal, and move towards our longings for liberation and justice together."
(pgs. 273-278)
"[In 2017], we brought the course [T1/T2] to Detroit for the first time, and it was an incredible experience to share this liberation technology with a place that has given me so much, with people I love and am growing with. It was also thrilling to grow skills with Detroit and midwestern and southern organizers who often get overlooked by efforts based in New York City or the Bay. I can already feel the impact in the community of having more organizers who can feel themselves, who have been practicing returning to center and moving towards longing, all of us organizing ourselves around what we long for rather than what we are against.
I believe somatics, in coursework and/or bodywork, is one of the most effective ways to get a group of complex, contradictory humans into alignment with a liberated collective future. Seeing, feeling ourselves, as we are, with agency to shape the future....that's the miracle."
(pgs. 273-278)
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We want to celebrate the leadership of gs teachers Donaji Lona and Natalíe Ortega who are leading a politicized somatic healing group in Spanish. The group, which they are hosting at the San Francisco Women's Building, is making this methodology accessible to Latinx movement leaders in their own language and culture.
"Politicized somatics has been led in Spanish by individual practitioners in one-on-one sessions, and in fact that is the way that I got access to somatics in the first place and in some gs Movement Partnerships for several years. Now we are happy to offer this experience in this group. We can't wait to see what will be possible!" - Donaji Lona, gs teacher
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 Sumitra Rajkumar in Psychology Today
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We're thrilled to share that Sumitra Rajkumar, gs teacher and practitioner based in New York, was profiled in two interviews by Jason Tougaw for the The Elusive Brain blog of Psychology Today. The first article focuses on the importance of a politicized approach to somatics and trauma healing. The second article is a conversation between Jason and Sumitra on what somatics looks like in practice, focusing on their relationship as a practitioner and client.
Excerpted quotes from Sumitra:
"Initially I was skeptical of somatics. I was concerned it might just be some hokey New Age thing, some bland and typical Orientalist American appropriation of healing modalities from around the world. I really got hooked when I realized how deep, pragmatic and effective somatics was, how it acknowledged its syncretic and at times yes appropriative lineage, but leveraged these for change rather than being stuck and made small by those contradictions.
I noticed how much people felt impacted by the work and how it seemed to support collective group dynamics to be more communicative, less conflict averse, more connected and resilient and therefore more brave and drama free. We need to build democratic power in this country to push back against incredibly repressive and unequal forces in structures and in individuals who embody those structures too."
"I think those of us interested in the lineages and innovations of somatics at this moment in history or in how we galvanize humanity towards becoming a better species-being, as Marx would say, need to stay smart and rigorous and funny and loving all at once to become a collective body that's a healing force to be reckoned with."
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Save the date for our next webinar!
Pleasure Activism: what's somatics got to do with it?
A conversation with adrienne maree brown
Wednesday, September 25th
5-6:30pm PT / 8-9:30pm ET
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| Images: 1) adrienne maree brown's instagram post of the New York Times paper where Pleasure Activism ranked #6 on their bestseller list for paperback non-fiction. 2) gs teachers & students with copies of Pleasure Activism. Top to bottom: Chris Lymbertos, Donaji Lona, Cindy Eigler with her children, and Kamaria Carrington. 3) Flyer for the somatic healing group in spanish. 4) Artwork by Kelly Breez from Jason Tougaw's conversation with Sumitra in Psychology Today. 5) Group photo of Advanced gs Teacher Training with Sumitra sitting in the middle of the front row. |
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