Transcript: CHIARA FRANCESCA on Embodied Care /266
Ayana Young For The Wild is brought to you in part by the Kalliopeia Foundation. We are grateful for their continued support and the support of grassroots contributions from listeners like you. Learn more at Kalliopeia.org. To make a donation, visit ForTheWild.world/donate, or find us on Patreon. If you’d like to support us in other ways, consider sharing our episodes through social media or leaving us a review wherever you listen to the podcast.
Ayana Young Hello and welcome to For the Wild Podcast. I'm Ayana Young. Today I'm speaking with Chiara Francesca.
Chiara Francesca And with that to never approach the choices that people are making as good or bad but to approach the choices that people are making as the very best choice that they can make under the circumstances in which they're living.
Ayana Young Originally from Italy, and currently residing in Chicago, Chiara is a queer artist, writer, organizer, acupuncturist, immigrant, and former teen ma’ living with multiple disabilities. Their clinical focus is on mental health, trauma, CPTSD, and queer/trans health. She is committed to building collaborative spaces for community care and centering collective health in and out of movements for justice.
Ayana Young Chiara, I am so happy and really filled with joy to be speaking with you. Just want to say that I feel really connected to your work, and it always brings me a smile and groundedness and a feeling of not being so alone. So thank you.
Chiara Francesca Oh, my goodness. Thank you. That is so humbling and just so kind.
Ayana Young Well as we open, I just want to recognize that we are all experiencing the world through our bodies. And these bodies are marked by trauma and love and pain and health and all that goes on around us. Taking the time to ground ourselves in our embodied reality seems particularly important for your expertise, Chiara. So I'm wondering if you could give us some insight into what it means to be aware of our bodies and the way that they feel in this world.
Chiara Francesca Maybe it would be nice to begin by, you know, as you ask that question, I think about all the bodies that are hearing our voices in this moment, wherever they are, and just taking a moment to take a collective breath, together perhaps. And to acknowledge that as our disembodied voices reach all of us, we sit with our flesh and bone, organs and all of it, as we are so used to being in our brains and in our thinking body. And also, as I think about embodiment I think about the path that it took to be a little bit more in my body, at least. How so much of that path involves not being in my body, and these associations and the contentious relationship to disembodiment and disassociation.
And really one of the keys to being more in my body was to start seeing disassociation as a friend, instead of being at war with it. And to see it as one of the sets of tools that got me to stay alive. And to really transform the relationship to the ways in which my body has responded to trauma and responded to external stimuli or responded to just being alive in the world. And instead of forcing embodiment, or almost having hacks for coming back into my body, appreciating and becoming just as good friends to the moments in which I had to leave my body behind. So that's what comes up with that question. And I think, in my work as a healthcare provider, there is a lot of holding space for folks to become friends with all of the strategies that kept us alive. And also then to expand and learn other tools and to always connect and bridge our bodies to the systems that they are living in, reacting to, and learning to move for.
Ayana Young Yeah, and in your work of acupuncture, you experienced this embodied reality not only through your own body, but also in connection with others. As both a participant and a practitioner, how does acupuncture blur the lines between self and other, and show us the ways even our physical lives are not separate from those of others in our community?
Chiara Francesca Talking about acupuncture - I think it brings me immediately to how I learned acupuncture and to be really aware of the specific context in which I learned that medicine. Because of that, I have a very specific angle at which I understand and answer that medicine. And to be more specific, I learned acupuncture in a really specific context that is divorced from its source, which is Chinese medicine, and divorced from the reality in which the medicine arose. I learned acupuncture as an Italian immigrant in the US, learning in a school that is mostly white teachers, that is chaired by a white man, and where most of the students are white (even though the city itself it's two-thirds BIPOC). So the version of acupuncture that I learned is imbued in that reality.
I learned Chinese medicine in a US environment that is white supremacist, and also where the medicine itself was fetishized, and where the power relationship of how the knowledge was passed to other people was unchecked and unquestioned. I'm not talking about you know... I graduated in 2018, right? So this is recent history. And talking to other people around the country, the reality of what Chinese medicine schooling looks like in the US is close to what I described. What I experienced was not a fluke or an anomaly. And so because of that, it does not feel… It's hard for me to talk about anything that is specific to acupuncture as a medicine because the way that I learned it was so distorted. I just want to mention as part of that, that there is work being done now to think through what a more liberated pedagogical system might look like (to learn Chinese medicine and other medicines). And that questions who needs to be centered in teaching the practice and how the practice itself needs to shift to not replicate colonial and white supremacist dynamics. I just want to uplift the work of Influential Point and Dr. Tamsin Lee, who have been really vocal in picking apart and surfacing how the acupuncture field has worked in the United States. When I think of embodiment and acupuncture, I think more about how I came to acupuncture and the lineage that I hope to practice acupuncture out of, which is the lineage of Healing Justice and of liberated medicine within a US context.
So my first encounter with acupuncture was actually at the Allied Media Conference in Detroit, which is a big movement conference that has happened in Detroit, I think since 2007, and this was in 2010 or 2009. And the way I encountered acupuncture is that I showed up to this place that was called The Healing Justice Practice Space. It was a free space for folks that were there for the conference to come and sit and receive your acupuncture. So as I sat in a circle, this practitioner came to me and put needles in my ears. I remember being nervous, and also looking around and being in a communal space with other people that I did not know but I trusted because we were all movement comrades. And the needles in my ear immediately had this effect on my nervous system, where I felt relief from the anxiety that comes at being at a huge conference with lots of sensory stimuli, and also that the space itself mattered so much. It was a politicized space; it was a communal space. And it was a space where I could show up with less defenses up.
So I came to acupuncture through this framework of Healing Justice and through being in relationship with politicized healers, like Tanuja Jagernauth, Adela Nieves Martinez, Stacy Erenburg, and Violeta Donawa, and these are just some of the folks. The framework for Healing Justice itself is grounded in the work of movements for justice and liberation. And as I understand it, it has crystallized in the work of Kindred Southern Healing Justice Collective, the People's Movement Center, and some of the architects of this framework are Cara Page, Charity Hicks, Anjali Taneja, Mia Mingus, Shira Hassan, Susan Raffo, Mariame Kaba, and many others that have dreamed up the possibilities for Healing Justice.
And also acupuncture has been used as movement medicine in the US by the Black Panthers and the Young Lords famously, which set up a detox center at Lincoln Detox in the Bronx, and were doing ear acupuncture as a mutual aid, community-centered practice to help folks through addiction and PTSD. And one of the people that was involved in the Lincoln Hospital detoxes, Mutulu Shakur, is currently incarcerated for a murder that he says he didn't commit, and there's a campaign to free him if people want to look it up and support that. So that's kind of the soup and the roots, both in the sense of being trying to be aware of the distortion that I learned medicine from, and also that the roots from which I practice comes from movements of social justice. And that informs how I show up for this work.
Ayana Young Thank you for sharing that origin story. I went to the Allied Media Conference, maybe it was the last one before COVID, and it was really life-changing for me. So I was happy to be reminded through your story.
You’ve spoken about the emotional experience associated with acupuncture. How might acupuncture bring us to spiritual and emotional realizations, and how does our understanding of emotion and physicality change when we recognize what we hold in the body?
Chiara Francesca Yeah, so much comes up with that. Yes, how do we understand how emotion plays out in our bodies? What comes up with that is multi-layered. There is the piece of divorcing emotions from our bodies as if they are separate entities. There is the reality of how disassociation plays into that and how hard it is to feel what our bodies are saying when we are in survival mode. And there's a cognitive reality to that. When we are in survival mode, what's happening in our body is that the amygdala and the survival centers are online, and then the cognitive function, the capacity to even feel things like pain, or the sensations in our bodies, are diminished. And with that, I think there's a lot that is not a choice, it's kind of a physiological reality of what happens when we are in stress mode, and how there is a separation between the body and the mind that happens. And also, what comes up with that is the reality of what the system is asking of us as people who have bodies in our day-to-day reality.
So I think about myself and my own health, and most of my patients, and I think of the fact that most of us are dealing with something that I now understand as systemic illnesses. And what I mean by that is illnesses that are caused by overwork, by stress over money, by multi-generational trauma, by lack of access to quality food, and pollution and chronic stress. So, as we think about our bodies and our emotions, our bodies are in the soup of such larger contexts in which they have to do the best that they can. And the best that they can much of the time is to temper down or shut down the messages that are coming up. Because if we listen to those messages, we might not be able to show up for work in the way that our boss wants us to show up for work, or to walk around the city and withstand seeing our fellow humans suffering. So when I think of what embodiment means, and coming back to the body to connect with the messages that it's telling us, I think about systemic change and what compasses we need to build that orient us towards systems where we can grow our humanity, as Grace Lee Boggs says, and where we can sit and listen to what our body is saying. And not only can we listen, we actually are able to follow those cues - we're able to follow those messages. And we don't have to tell our body to shut up, because we need to get through another day.
Ayana Young The practice of listening to the body, when there's so much societal pressure telling us to be disembodied and to push through and ignore ourselves - it's such a challenging practice at this time.
I’d like to transition to thinking about another extension of work around the body: disability justice. Your work in the field is particularly interesting to me as you navigate the space not only as an academic but also as a community member and practitioner. How does the disability justice framework shape how you interact with individuals and communities?
Chiara Francesca Yes, disability justice is a complicated beast. And part of that is, I think a lot about “why does disability justice feel so different from other movements for justice?” And I think one of the best answers I can come up with for myself is that the experience of being a disabled person operates so differently across what it could mean to be disabled. So in concrete terms, my experience as someone who's half-blind with a visible disability and other disabilities is so different from somebody who uses a chair or has been in an accident and lost a limb or any of the spectrum of what disability can look like. And that reality is twofold: on one side, it makes organizing quite difficult because there is such a huge spread of experience - not to even talk about what it means to be a poor, working class, disabled person, and what it means to be a disabled person with access to healthcare, or money. Those experiences are so different. So that can be really tricky when it comes to movement building and organizing and bringing people together.
The opportunity that I've seen is that learning how to organize across difference is something we have to do anyways, right? Like in the movements and even out of movements. So that disability justice might have thought about this question of “how do we organize across difference?” maybe for longer or in a different way than other movements for justice. And that's not to say that there's not tensions or divisions, but also questions like, “what choices will benefit the most of us? What are some things that we can build community around?” or, “what are the common challenges that we can tackle” are questions that have been part of disability justice for a long time. And then I also think about just how much the field has changed since I was growing up in the 90s. Disability was societally seen as kind of an unequivocally negative thing, right? That being disabled meant a lot of things but it was seen as a reason to devalue someone or to treat them as less than.
And I think a lot about how that has shifted and how we think of identities that we have no control over in movement work, and how both see disability as negative. And now I am in stasis sometimes - so I feel like my disability is actually romanticized or fetishized. And how also, that doesn't feel like it's pushing towards a more fully human way for people to see me. And I think of that for other parts of my experience and other parts of my identity, like being an immigrant, or being working class, or being queer: I didn't choose any of those things, right? And yet in my life, I have seen how they have shifted from something that for which I was treated as less than to something that sometimes is fetishized. And it just leaves me wondering about the pitfalls of demonizing or romanticizing parts of people's lives that they have no control over.
Ayana Young There is a lot to just explore with the topic of disability justice, and I'm grateful that you shed some light for us. So in the guide, What could a more just healthcare and healing practice look like? one of the things you write is “let's talk about what building a trauma-informed harm reductionist, accessible, anti-racist, anti-capitalist, ethical healthcare and healing practice could look like.” And yeah, I would just love to learn more about this harm reduction framework, and how we ensure that we care for the caregivers as well.
Chiara Francesca Yeah, caring for the caregivers has been on my mind a lot as I see more and more people that I'm in community with just approach or be past burnout. And I think the seed for that guide was coming home from a visit to the free clinic here in Chicago (or the Medicaid clinic, or like the clinic where you can use your Medicaid card), and just being so frustrated by what the standard of care is. And also being on the other side as a healthcare worker and having people come in for acupuncture and be grateful and say thank you for things that felt so basic, right? That the very act of telling someone “you have a choice over what happens in this room, I'm not going to do anything that is going to be a surprise. I'm going to speak out loud, what's going to happen before it happens, and then ask you if that's okay, or not - and check in many, many times throughout the session, so that you can tell me if we keep going, if we stop, if you have a question.” And with that to never approach the choices that people are making as good or bad but to approach the choices that people are making as the very best choice that they can make under the circumstances in which they're living.
And I understand that as one of the hearts of harm reduction: that somebody has full sovereignty and agency over the choices that they make. And because we are not in their body, and we're not in their life, we actually cannot make a judgment around those choices. And I think about trauma when it comes to that too. I think of the way that trauma has been one of the most significant forces in my life because it shaped my decision to immigrate, and it shaped my decision to become a parent, and to learn English, or to stay in certain relationships. And it has determined what jobs even I could or could not do. For somebody outside of that experience, it might have been really hard, if not impossible, to understand why those choices were the very best choice I could make at that time. So that's how I try to approach folks that come into the clinic: by holding that they are making the best choices that they can, and then to hold space for transformation. And I mean, maybe this goes back to what we were talking about with disassociation at the beginning of the conversation. We cannot force our way to embodiment. What we can do is just hold space for change and to put as many things in place as we can for that change to be a way for trauma, and towards what looks like wellness for us. And with that I think that a lot of that conversation, in the US especially, is so individualistic. It's so much about self care or, “how do we set up our life perfectly in our individual bubbles so that we can heal.”
And the more I think about how trauma has played in my life, and the more I see trauma playing in people's lives that I'm around (including my patients), the more I see that so much of healing is a collective endeavor, and so much healing happens when we have systems in place that allow us to feel safe. And that means affordable housing, that means access to food, that means access to health care, that means access to mental health services, it means walking around the neighborhood and not having the cops arrest you. Not having to be stuck in survival mode is what allows healing to happen. And not to knock the individual strategies that we can all learn, but this systemic is where the deep change happens.
Ayana Young Yeah, I was really following the way you were explaining how we heal, and what we need to be able to get to places where we have the space to do that. I wonder too how healing can be a process rather than a singular act. Harm certainly does not happen all at once, and neither can healing. How is healing different from simply “finding a cure,” and how may a shift away from looking for easy, one-step solutions change the way we view harm and healing and honor more subtle forms of healing?
Chiara Francesca Oh, yes. Yes so much to that. How does healing happen outside of finding a cure? One of my least favorite sayings is “the end justifies the means,” because it's the same as creating just worlds, right? It's a process, it's the becoming, it's a state of change that we are always trying to orient towards justice. And when I think about that, “the end justifies the means,” which is unfortunately used in organizing (or I've heard it in movement work and organizing), I always think about how the means is actually all we’ve got. We don't have the end and we don't know at all what that end is going to look like. What we have is the in-between, and the learning, and the building, and the messing up and then trying again: and that's the work. And that maybe what matters more than to think about these ideas of utopia, or what the end might be, is to think about what kind of compasses we want to build and follow. And I think a lot of the compasses that we follow: when we're in it, it's hard to stop and realize the underground currents that end up steering our direction.
And I think that there's something about being an immigrant that helps us surface that: because coming to the US, to me, this culture has never been normal. It's never been invisible because it's just the way it is. And so what I see as the compass in the US, in dominant culture it's so much about accumulation: whether it's an accumulation of power, whether it's an accumulation of money, and even an accumulation of happiness, and happiness as an individual pursuit - so this idea that we could always be happier, we could always be more fulfilled. I mean, there's some quote from Goop that is exactly that, it's like, “you might be healthy and okay but could you be more fulfilled?” And happiness becomes a commodity, too, that we can accumulate. And so that's always oriented towards this not-yet-here future that is perfect.
So what happens if we take away the idea that there's a perfect future and instead, we look at the reality of “how do we orient ourselves in the now?” and “what does it look like to build systems that are human-centered versus systems that are destructive?” And I think a lot about “how do we diminish preventable suffering right now?” It's not about utopia; It's not about a time where suffering doesn't exist and we're all healed. It's about how there's so much harm that is occurring right now that doesn't have to occur. And I think about the military, I think about the carceral industrial system, and privatization, and capitalism. We know that those systems increase suffering, and I think about what it would look like increasing the quality of life for marginalized people, which also means for everyone: through healthcare for all, affordable housing, reparations, redistributing wealth, free childcare, and forgiving student debt. And then what can happen when we start orienting towards a system that prioritizes people's wellness instead of profits is that the next step is actually beyond that curtain, and we have no idea what it's going to be, but I trust that as we orient towards justice, the futures that we build are going to be better.
Ayana Young I'm so with you. I'm feeling really jazzed from the energy that you're exuding while speaking about this. I did have another question around trauma and healing and I guess what I'm thinking is that we hold these collective traumas in our bodies, and I would like to extend this idea even further by thinking of the ways that the earth may hold trauma as well. How do you see issues of environmental health as pertaining to those of human health? Can we even separate the two?
Chiara Francesca Yes, of course not! Right? Of course not: we cannot separate the two. And this is something that in acupuncture, as a medicine as I understand it (even the way that I learned it), that there is much more of a systemic view of the body. So a simple example of that is that if somebody comes in with a headache, most of the time, the points for that headache are not going to be on the head, right? They're going to be on the hand, they might be on the feet. So the way to think about the body's health, and then the body as connected to the health of everything around it, is that there are so many forces that are tugging at what we think of as health. And the way forward, oftentimes, is to zoom out and to look at how these things tug at each other in the positive and in the negative.
And I mean, this is also part of my cultural tradition, growing up in a place where the way that you eat and the way that you dress, and the way that you orient yourself is really different depending on the season. So that in the summer when it's a million degrees out, you do your life from seven to eleven in the morning, then you go inside from eleven to five-thirty or six, and then at six, you come back out until midnight. So, instead of pushing through to maintain a rhythm that is divorced from your environment, you incorporate how your environment affects you, fully acknowledging that your body is deeply affected by how hot it is outside, or how humid it is, or the cold winds. And you develop (or you're taught to develop) this respect for how you are part of that environment instead of pushing through and building artificial ways to have the same schedule, regardless of it being August or January, right. And again, this is not necessarily a pitfall of American culture. I think this is more telling of how much capitalism has demanded that we leave our bodies behind and pretend that the environment doesn't exist, and keep producing.
Ayana Young It's really so interwoven and so much of the labor of care goes unnoticed within capitalist systems. Disability justice advocate and organizer Mia Mingus writes about care, saying “I want to be with you. If you can’t go, then I don’t want to go. If we are traveling together, sharing political space together, building political family together, then I want to be with you. I want us to be together. We resist ableism dividing us. I resist my disability being pitted against your disability. We will not be divided.” This type of intimate, relational care is deeply illegible to many of the systems we exist under today. How can we look at care not just as transaction, but as relationship?
Chiara Francesca Oh, yes. Mia Mingus - such a shout-out. She was one of the people at the Allied Media Conference. The memory I have of being around her is that it was one of those pivotal moments where I think I started shifting my sense of being a disabled person as somebody who moves through the world. You know, with my hair (I mean, just to give you the image), with my hair in front of my face so that people wouldn't see that my eye was blind, I just have that memory of entering the room and literally like moving the hair out of my face as we were there for a workshop on disability justice. And I'm just so grateful for her work and how it changed my life and so many other people's lives. And in thinking about relationships, we talked about big systems, and we talked about individual healing, and how trauma kind of shows up systemically and individually. And I think that this quote really gets at the heart of the fact that a lot of community building and a lot of organizing comes down to relationships, and to conflict resolution, and to healthy communication, which are things that we are not taught as the norm. And again, that's true in my life but it's true in a lot of folks' lives, right? When we don't have the tools to be in relationship, to work through conflict, to employ healthy communications - that's when things fall apart. And that's when campaigns fall apart, organizations fall apart, and projects disintegrate.
And I think about that as how trauma shows up in organizing. There was this TikTok song, where this person was singing his really fun dance song that said something like, “your trigger triggers my trigger, and then my trigger triggers your trigger, and we go around and around and around,” and I feel like that feels like an accurate depiction of movements sometimes. Like, we are reacting to each other's trauma, and then relationship becomes really difficult. And even if trauma is not part of our life, knowing how to be in relationship with each other is really tricky without tools to work through conflict and to communicate across difference. So I think about the importance of building tools for conflict resolution, for mediation, for self-awareness, for regulating, for even knowing what it feels like to be deregulated in our bodies, and how that shows up, in organizing, and also in our friendships, and romantic relationships, and all that stuff. And this ties into abolition too, of course, in the sense that if we are to create systems of justice outside of the carceral system, that these tools are necessary: not just for organizing, but to ultimately build more just futures. And this quote from Mia feels like it embodies all of that. That when there is a pause, or when somebody stalls, or when it's demanded of us that we slow down or not just keep going and going and going, that that's a very useful place to be in to kind of be able to reflect and be able to ask, “why is that person being left behind?” And what tools are needed to bring everyone, and if not everyone, the most, most people that we can have with us as we move towards justice.
There is this book - I think it's called, Don’t Leave Your Friends Behind, but it's about parenting and parenting in movements - which those experiences, to me in my life, I felt really similar: like being disabled and being a parent, and how those experiences... there was not space for those experiences to exist within not just dominant culture but within a lot of movements for justice. And the hopeful part of that is that, you know... my kids are 21 - they’re turning 22 next week - and the reality of movement work from when they were little kids and I was dragging down to like marches and things to now is really different. We are having conversations about having free childcare at events, and engaging with children, and smiling at them, and welcoming them into movements. And similarly, as a disabled person when I started showing up in movement spaces as a teenager, not only was it not friendly to disabled folks, it was hostile, right? The kind of dominant idea was that suffering just was an indication of how committed you were to the struggle. And that pulling an all-nighter, or being physically in pain, or putting yourself in danger, or whatever it is, was prized. There wasn't even a conversation around access. Whereas now, it's a lot more common to even do a zoom call, and for somebody to ask, “what are your access needs?” Not because they know I'm disabled, just because that's something that is becoming part of movement work. So that makes me really hopeful.
Ayana Young Me too. I've seen a huge change even in the last year. Well, thank you so much for diving so deeply with me. As we wrap up, I want to think of a particularly striking quote from your forthcoming book, We Will Build a New Compass: “So how are we gonna do it differently this time? What are the conditions in which trauma and abuse of power thrive? And most importantly, what are the conditions under which humane behaviors of care and community growth take root and flourish? A well person is less likely to harm or create trauma. A well system is less likely to harm and create trauma.” So Chiara, if there's anything you want to share about your book, or just any last thoughts before we wrap up, the floor is yours.
Chiara Francesca Oh, my goodness. What comes up, honestly… we started talking about this I think before we even started recording, and we were talking about imperfection and struggle, and how much of that is underground and not surfaced. I feel like I spent some time talking about my practice in acupuncture and trying to kind of move from a place of rootedness in the Healing Justice Movement. And I think one of the biggest assumptions that gets made is that somehow I have it figured out, and I really don't have it figured out. And I think it's really important to say that in the sense that I have not figured out how to have a sustainable model for practicing medicine, and for practicing healthcare, in a way where I can sustain myself, and where I can show up for people in a way that does not replicate systems of oppression.
In a really real sense, I have to have multiple jobs to be able to survive that are outside or doing acupuncture. And I've been stuck in cycles of burnout and doing the work and then being laid out since I got out of school. And I want to be open about that because so much of what we don't see is the struggle. And then we think that we are deficient somehow. I definitely thought that I must be doing something wrong and whatever, that it's our fault if our bodies are falling apart, or if we're not able to make rent. And again, I think I had to really sit with that, and with looking around at other folks that are in similar situations, and thinking about bringing it back to the systemic, and how trying to live and build lives and practices outside of dominant culture is really, really hard. And it looks like swimming against the current most of the time. Not only that but also kind of the metric for success, or for what sustainable looks like, or for what change looks like, I think we might need to do some work around that. And how something that existed for a few months might be a huge catalyst for change that we can’t even see. Or if you are somebody who's a care worker and did it for two years, and now you need to step away, that's not a failure, right? That idea of doing something forever, or making money, or any of those metrics are not so useful, and I think really end up making us feel like we are not doing the work - when what might be more useful is to appreciate the little moments, the little cracks that we are opening for other possibilities to emerge.
Ayana Young Beautifully said, thank you so much. I really just feel so relaxed in my body from this conversation and inspired and excited to stay connected through your artwork and your writing. And I know this is not the last time I will feel and learn from you.
Chiara Francesca Thank you so much. So much to say, and again, let's be open and trust that there will be so much more space for these ideas to emerge and for all of us to think through them together.
Francesca Glaspell Thank you for listening to For The Wild Podcast. The music you heard today was by Cy X, Te Martin, and Secret Cigarette. For The Wild is created by Ayana Young, Allie Constantine, Erica Ekrem, Emily Guerra, Francesca Glaspell, Julia Jackson, and Priya Subberwal.