This Week on For The Wild

KIMBERLY ANN JOHNSON on Pleasure as Pathway /331

“We can have more resilience in our own system by establishing a relationship with pleasure.”

Feeling into the state of our nervous systems and our relationships with each other and ourselves, this episode offers a powerful perspective on the importance of recognizing and tending to how life feels. Together, Ayana and this week’s guest Kimberly Ann Johnson discuss the depths of pleasure and the dimensions of healing. Kimberly brings deep knowledge regarding reproductive and sexual health, especially paying attention to the often untended somatic nature of sexual boundary repair and the complicated nature of what we bring into sexual relationships. 

This conversation is steeped in trust and intimacy. Kimberly’s focus and understanding offers a guide to the ways we might come to handle and regulate our own nervous systems in order to act in alignment with our desires, rather than with the prescribed roles we have been put into through societal conditioning. 

Kimberly Ann Johnson is a Sexological Bodyworker, Somatic Experiencing practitioner, yoga teacher, postpartum advocate, and single mom. Working hands-on in integrative women’s health and trauma recovery for more than a decade, she helps women heal from birth injuries, gynecological surgeries, and sexual boundary violations. Kimberly is the author of the Call of the Wild: How We Heal Trauma, Awaken Our Own Power, and Use It for Good, as well as the early mothering classic The Fourth Trimester, and is the host of the Sex Birth Trauma podcast.

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The Edges in the Middle, II: Báyò Akómoláfé and V

“We are being invited to lose form.” - Báyò Akómoláfé

Continuing the conversation series, “The Edges in the Middle,” presented in collaboration with UC Berkeley’s Othering and Belonging Institute, For The Wild is delighted to share Báyò Akómoláfé in conversation with V (formerly known as Eve Ensler, playwright, author, and founder of V-Day and One Billion Rising). Speaking on the theme “The Promise and Limits of Restitution: Returning to ‘Congo,’” Báyò and V dance together in a conversation that shows us portals of possibility that edge us towards deep change. Discussing the Congo as both place and portal, Báyò and V contemplate the persistent and fugitive glimmer of possibility within trauma and repression. As we pay slow, deep attention and care to unraveling and processing our stories, how might we create the sacred space from which movement and growth may flow?   

“The Edges in the Middle” is a series of conversations between Báyò Akómoláfé and thought companions like john a. powell, V, Naomi Klein, and more. These limited episodes have been adapted from Báyò’s work as the Global Senior Fellow at UC Berkeley's Othering & Belonging Institute. In this role, Báyò has been holding a series of public conversations on issues of justice and belonging for the Institute's Democracy & Belonging Forum, which connects and resources civic leaders in Europe and the US who are committed to bridging across difference to strengthen democracy and advance belonging in both regions and around the world. Báyò's conversations encourage us to rethink justice, hope, and belonging by sitting amidst the noise, not trying to cover it up with pleasant rhythms. To learn more about the Democracy & Belonging Forum, visit democracyandbelongingforum.org.

"Shallow attention both feeds the attention economy, but it also comes out of it. It's the thing that draws you into it, but it's also the thing that it teaches you."

This month we re-broadcasted our interview with Jenny Odell, initially aired in February of 2021. Our attention has operated as currency for the past couple of decades, but with the invasiveness of social media and technology, our ability to exit and enter the attention economy has been severely hindered. As we feel pressure to post and comment on everything for an unknown audience, do we inherently limit our capacity for complexity and vulnerability? And what are the extended ramifications of becoming illiterate in complexity? How does this ripple out into all of our relationships? In lieu of the demanding world buzzing inside our devices, guest Jenny Odell shares the brilliance of doing “nothing”, tending to the ecological self, and growing deeper forms of attention through a commitment to bioregionalism. Jenny Odell is a writer, artist, and enthusiastic birdwatcher based in Oakland, California. She is the author of How to Do Nothing: Resisting the Attention Economy. Odell teaches digital art at Stanford University. 

Dive Deeper

• Saving Time by Jenny Odell

• How to Do Nothing by Jenny Odell

• Opinion | What Twitter Does to Our Sense of Time by Jenny Odell

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