Transcript (Abridged): Earthly Reads: Prentis Hemphill on What It Takes to Heal /S1:6
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Ayana Young Hey For The Wild community, Ayana here. Welcome to the sixth episode of our new book study series, Earthly Reads, where we'll learn alongside some of our most beloved authors. After listening to this shorter conversation, head over to forthewild.world/bookstudy to learn more and to purchase access to the full course. We'll be offering significantly more content and access to live recorded conversations with the authors on our website. We hope to see you there.
Prentis Hemphill How do we want to live on this planet together? And struggling through that and being affirmed in that and all the things that can come...That's, to me, what the political realm is about. It's like, how are we going to do this? There's finite resources. There's needs that we have as human beings. How are we going to make decisions in a way that does not increase suffering? Because we know that by increasing suffering, we make everyone suffer, and we eventually make ourselves suffer too.
Ayana Young Hello and welcome to For The Wild podcast, I'm Ayana Young Today we are speaking with Prentis Hemphill, author of What It Takes to Heal. Oh, Prentis, I'm really happy to be with you again, and I'm just really heartened to get to discuss your new book, What It Takes to Heal with you today.
Prentis Hemphill I'm so happy to be here. Thank you.
Ayana Young There are so many notes I have and places that I could begin, but when I was looking through my notes before we hopped on. I'm definitely in a question around the word 'heal' even, and I think that's an interesting place for us to start. And in the book, you talk about trying to find a definition for healing, saying quote, "For a long time, I searched for a definition of healing. Most times, what I came across in the world of psychology was the treatment of symptoms, not the root cause or healing as defined by the ability to get back in the saddle and become a more productive citizen. In other circles, healing was an escape, a disengagement from life, high end retreats, and self care classes where you could pay to temporarily keep the messy problems of the outside world at bay. Most of the time, we define terms according to our context. So it's not surprising that our terms for healing reflect the destructive, individualistic, and productivity-oriented tendencies of our society," end quote.
So if we could just start off by pulling apart this word 'heal' and how we can grapple with the ways our culture shapes our idea of what healing is and looks like.
Prentis Hemphill Yeah, you know, I really like definitions, as fleeting as they can be. I really like defining words or trying to understand what a definition is doing, or how it shapes us in return. And, you know, when I think about words, I'm not a linguist, but sometimes I read linguists and get really curious about their field of study because we have these words that maybe have a meaning that they came with or, someone was like, "Something's missing here. We're going to create this word or repurpose this word." And then it starts to carry everything else that we put into it—things that are adjacent to it, things that, you know, our interpretation of it and the word gets kind of clogged, in a way, with our times and our uses for it. And so sometimes I like to, you know, pull some things out of it and say, "Is this what we mean? Is this what we really want this word to do right now?" You know, because words themselves are imperfect. No matter how poetically we speak to each other, it's hard to point to the experience that I'm trying to language.
So with the word 'heal,' you know, I think in the last period there's been injected into it, all of our, like I said in the book, individualistic, but also kind of perfectionist tendencies. You know, like, I'm gonna finally be good or better; good enough. I'm gonna get it right. And I think a lot of us have held that word, that way, that. If we heal, then all of the bad stuff in us will be sloughed off or whatever it might be.
It also then can be kind of co-opted in that way, especially when it has those kinds of tinges to it, it can be co-opted in a way to sell you things. You know, to sell you more of something—the right potion, the right retreat, whatever it might be. But healing, I think, when I get real close to the word and I look inside of it, I think what it offers me is actually a kind of circular understanding. When I let go of the destination or the purity-making aspects of it, I find something else that's less linear, that is more of a process that points us in a direction or maybe points us towards a posture, a way of being with the world and what happens to us. And that's what I'm really curious about because I don't think that we get healed finally, but I think that we can engage in practices that have healing in their intention. And I'm curious about a world that's kind of centered around that—that we know that ruptures will happen, that traumas will happen, that pain will happen, but what would it mean to orient our practices, our rituals, around healing and repair and transformation?
Ayana Young Yeah, I'm really glad that you...Not that you said that healing isn't the end goal, or like, there's an ending to it, but that you talk about it as cyclical, and it's not a destination, I guess. It's not like, Okay, we're gonna do all this work and then we will be healed. And I sometimes get frustrated by the healing industrial complex, or even the rhetoric of we need to heal in order to dot, dot, dot. Although, of course, I see that there's truth to that, that if we're trying to do social, environmental justice work, if we're in movement spaces, even in our own families, in our day to day lives, that if we're not working on healing, that it is really difficult to make change outside of that. If we're trying to make changes outside of ourselves, from an unhealed or unaware healing process place, I think it's probably nearly impossible to change outside issues.
Part of me thinks, gosh, I'm really worried that if we think that we can't heal the outside before we heal the inside, can we ever heal anything outside? Because our culture, humanity at large, may never get to a quote ‘healed place.’ How many of us are even aware of healing or attempting to heal in those moments?
And then the bigger question, and I’m sorry to go there already, but has humanity ever been in a healed place? Is this traumatized nature part of our human nature? I'm really challenged right now in that thought process.
Prentis Hemphill Yeah, I mean, I think I would tend to agree with the first part of what you're saying about, you know, the sequential nature of how we tend to hold things because I've heard it also from the other end of like, once we heal the external world, so to speak, or once we get all of that in order, then the people that it produces will be healed people. And putting it in that order. I think I have questions about both. I think it's the same question that I have about both. And I think that in perfect nature of how we communicate something that's, you know, really much more of a weaving together, it causes that irritation, like, That's not quite right. That's not quite right.
But what I hope it leads us to, is being able to hold the complexity of both. You're right. It's not even necessarily about being engaged in our work, but I think it's about that orientation. It's about that posture—how I do so-called external work. If I do it with unawareness, what will happen, what will be produced in the relationships or the outcomes will in part be some of the residue of what I'm unaware of. When I do it with more awareness, then the moment itself can be transformative. The moment itself is an opportunity for healing on every level. So it, to me, it's not even so much like, what comes first? What do we do first? It's sort of how we do it. What's the orientation that we're bringing to it? Are we learning in it? Are we feeling in it? Are we growing in it? Are we connecting it in it, whatever it is that we're doing? Because I think that's how the orientation influences any sort of outcome.
So I think it's always a both/and. That's sort of why I wrote the book, to say both/all together. It sort of has to happen all together. How we are impacts what we do and how the world impacts who we are. And it can feel like a lot to bear, but it is the reality. And so how do we do that? How do we live into that?
Your second question was something. What was your second question? Can you say it again?
Ayana Young The second question was around this idea that have we ever been untraumatized or a healed species? Has this ever been some, you know...I guess part of me brings us up, because I hear a lot of rhetoric of when we were or back then, we were better or there was a time when we humans weren't so bad or something. And I'm not saying there weren't moments or certain groups of people, but the history that I've looked back at, I'm like, Well, we've kind of always had, as a species, elements that are violent or intense or moving from places of stealing or scarcity or taking over or dominance. Not that my research hasn't led me to some people somewhere, but, overall, sometimes I feel like it hurts us now to somehow think that our species was better some other time and now we're bad.
Prentis Hemphill Yeah, I'm generally not a very nostalgic person. I wish that I could, in some ways, subscribe to ideas that point us to some more perfect past. I'm not that person and I say that humbly, there's a lot for me to learn and it's not really my way of being in the world. And, I will say alongside that—just to stay on the thread of nuance—is that I do think that it can be more or less. We can be doing more or less harm, and we can be more or less anti-aliveness, more or less geared towards suffering. Yes, I think suffering exists.
I think, in a way, trauma in the sense of people being overwhelmed by an experience, their physiology being overwhelmed by an experience, and that impacting how they live into the next moments, I think that that is something that human beings have probably experienced for as long as we were human beings, and maybe before. And, I think that it can become intensified. Our lives can become less spacious. We can be as a species less attuned to that. We can create accelerated traumas for people, more intense traumas for people. I think that is also kind of an axis to which to examine this and I think we are in a moment where the intensity, the acceleration, the force, the lack of attentiveness or care, I think that's some of how I would define this context.
And I do think trauma has a way of multiplying itself. I think it's a little bit viral to me, in that way. And when we concentrate it in this way, I guess I worry. I pay attention to how it will multiply, and what the multiplication will mean if we don't have in our ways of doing, ways of being, rituals or ceremonies that can help us digest and process what it is that we are experiencing. So yeah, I don't feel romantic about any past, and I feel like there is something to this moment, to this present that feels like it has its own weight and intensity, and therefore, in a way, a lesson for us to learn.
Ayana Young Oh. Well, this brings me to the idea of healing across generations and parenthood. And you write quote,"In family systems therapy, the term transformational character refers to the person in a family who takes on the work of interrupting and changing generational patterns. We become who we are, in part because of the family system that shaped us, but we can become even more of who we are when we resist, when we take a look at where we're from, where we want to go, and then begin to transform our future," end quote. And of course, we could look at this as like our family, you know, our blood family. We could look at it as our, our even larger context, like world human family. I'm really curious with this. I think about myself and my own family, I know that you have become a parent—so have I recently—so definitely this is on my mind.
There's a lot of questions. How do you navigate a world where it seems that hurt is inevitable, especially as a parent, and maybe how this has shaped your approach to healing?
Prentis Hemphill How old is the person in your life?
Ayana Young A year and a half?
Prentis Hemphill Sweet.
Ayana Young Yeah, such a little comedian.
Prentis Hemphill That's so fun.
Ayana Young So fun. So crazy and fun, yeah.
Prentis Hemphill Oh yeah, oh yeah. Having a child has changed everything for me. It's really changed everything for me. I think, you know, I was talking to a group last week and saying, you know, the thing that is actually impossible to teach someone else to do is so necessary for anything that we might call healing or transformation, is the move of surrender—of surrender in some ways one's own body, for the body to lead without us having to mechanically think through the body's next move, but for our own bodies to lead. When I do body work with people to let your body shake or do whatever, you know, unwind. It's a struggle with people to surrender to those other ways of being.
And that's not something anybody can really tell you how to do. I can just say there's a way that you let go and let something else lead. Parenting has taught me that in such a profound way. I mean, one, there's the connection between surrender and sacrifice. There's a lot that I have to just give and move out of the way of because there's this other life that is really dependent on us. And yeah, there's that piece. It's not as much about my preferences or what I think. There's something else moving. But there's also this surrender I found in parenting of I have to live with a little bit—and I don't know if this is true for...I don't know who it's true for. It's true for me—but I sort of have to live with a little bit of heartbreak all the time as a parent because you watch the world. You know, where my child is three and a half, and questions about race are beginning to enter in. To explain race and to reveal to a child—a Black child, in my case—what this story means without trapping them in it, it's a heartbreaking thing to do. To say there's this myth running around that involves you without knowing you, and you'll have to figure out for yourself through probably a bunch of painful moments, how to navigate life around this myth without internalizing it, without separating yourself from your own center.
And you know, we're not at that level of conversation now, but that is the conversation that I have to have. People having children now, we have to have conversations about climate change. There are so many things. I look at the world even this moment. I'm like, gosh, there's so much that is destructive, that has been let loose, that is being kind of celebrated. And then there's the horizon of what I don't know, what I don't know about AIand how the world that she will live in will be so drastically different from the world that I was raised in. And what do I have to equip her with in order to navigate that well? And I don't even know what that terrain will be like. There's a heartbreak in there. There's a heartbreak because I know there will be pain. I know there will be suffering. I know there will be fear. I know there will be doubt, and everything in me as a parent wants to prevent that from happening at all times.
So, yeah, it's um, I have to surrender, then, to what is outside of my control. You know, there's this thing that we do or have done, and not everybody does it, and I don't think everybody has to. But as a species, overall, we've done this thing where we've created other little versions of ourselves, and that has a logic to it. And I, in a way, kind of dropped to my knees to that, even though I don't understand it. I don't understand why. I don't understand how to right that with what I see in the world. There's something I have to drop to my knees that's not even just about me or my child, but it's about something else, and it's a deep surrender. Like I said, I live with a little bit of heartbreak all the time. That's just the honest truth.
I don't know that I answered your question, but what it means for healing. I guess what I would say, what it means about healing for me...I write some in the book about how how easily the things we carry get transmitted, how easily our own fears get transmitted, especially when you're with a young person who is still pretty open—they're receiving everything without a lot of story attached to it because they don't know yet what it all means. So they receive it and you can easily transmit something that you don't intend to transmit, but is a habit in you, or is a fear in you, and you can really easily show them that this is the way we encounter the world, or this is what we do when we have a big feeling, or whatever it might be. And so it's called on me to bring more awareness to that. You know, even if it is still there, can I talk to my kid about it, about what I am experiencing, what I see?
It really shows me there's just so much in our interactions with each other, how we speak to each other, what we're bringing to the moment and it sets the foundation in adults. People are reactive to those things. In children, it's like I'm actually setting the emotional foundation for her. So how can I bring more awareness to that without becoming paranoid about how I am, but just softer for both of us. Sorry if it went on too long.
Ayana Young No, I was in it with you, every word I was following and contemplating. It's complex. I can think about it, but then it's life every day, every moment, and it's going so fast that I am just living it. I'm just practicing in the moment, every moment. I don't have too much time to sit back and let it sink in and move from that place. Not that I feel urgent, but it's a fast moving thing, leading parenthood, and yes, my child as well.
But yeah, I really hear you and I have really worked on my own paranoia, and I'm honestly very surprised that I'm not more paranoid about having a child, or raising her. I think my mom was very afraid, and I then thought I would be afraid, and that I would want her to be afraid of the same things in order to protect her and for her to protect herself.
I think what you were talking about the heartbreak, it's like really allowing the heartbreak to enter, and surrendering to that heartbreak, to me, alleviates some of the fear and the paranoia because I'm not trying to escape it. Of course, I don't want her to get hurt, but I'm not thinking that there's a world where she won't.
Prentis Hemphill Yeah, exactly, exactly, exactly,
Ayana Young So yeah, coming from that place is....I never saw it coming until I'm here, and then I'm just like, Oh, okay, this is what makes sense.
Maybe going back to the quote I read earlier, I'm wondering, what does it take to be this, quote, ‘transformational character’ because I think that's kind of what we're talking about as parents—how to transform, potentially, the fears in us to not continue them on. Or it doesn't have to obviously just be fears, but what does it take to be that character?
Prentis Hemphill I think it's really just about being your own process, being in your experience of life, and saying there are things that I intend to transmit and tend to do in the world. There are values that I hold. There are ways of being that I want to practice and letting that be at the center of what you do, letting it be a little more felt in your relationships. That, to me, is what it means to be a transformational character. It means, in part, to know that relationships are where the action is, and that relationships are the reality of our life on this Earth. That we are related to each other. We're related to the trees outside. We are related in this ecosystem.
It doesn't mean that we don't have hard decisions to make, or that there is no pain, but to know that fundamentally we're related, and so the part of that relationship that is yours to create or to offer into, to do that with as much awareness. Again, it's like finding that distinction that I hear you making around parenting. There's a distinction between awareness and a kind of hyper vigilance, you know.
Like I can be with my child and be in a flow. It's like we're playing, Okay, we're doing this. Okay, we're doing this. And there are moments where I feel frustrated or something, and I can feel the choice point—like I want to force something to happen because I have to go or because of whatever it might be. And sometimes that is what I choose. And then sometimes I go, What is it that you're trying to do? You know? Because sometimes my daughter will be really working on something, I'd be like, "Okay, I've let you know that we're gonna leave soon, and you're still kind of caught in this thing." And to turn towards her, to turn towards the relationship, and be like, "What is it that you're focused on right now? Is there something I can help you with," rather than always going, "I need you to come right now." You know?
There are those choice points that I can find it because I know the alignment in myself, and when I feel off of my own center, I go, "Okay, what's the move that I make that not only is helpful to her, but it also recenters me to do?" And I think those are the moves that a transformational character makes. They're saying in the systems, in the family, in the organization, in this ecosystem, all the places where I am participant, I want to be bringing some level of awareness and intentional practice to how I'm doing those relationships.
Ayana Young I love hearing your personal stories because I really see myself in them, and I'm like, Oh, yep, been there just an hour ago.
Prentis Hemphill Yeah.
Ayana Young I could stay on parenthood this whole time, but I will move on to other things that I really wanted to talk to you about.
We kind of touched on or at least brought up the idea of healing within movements and somatics beyond the individual. And so I'd love to touch on your work, thinking about healing within political spaces and social movements. And there's a quote and you write, "Getting involved politically opens us up to the messy world of other people, which may seem frightening, but we've seen that we need other people for our own well being, and we also need people for safety and for building power. We need people because we grow in relationship. When we dig in together, when our ideas are tested and held up to another's light, we become more than we could have been on our own," end quote.
And I'm sure that right now, this is a really challenging thought process to people. It's, you know, a very divided space, especially in the United States. And so I am wondering, how do our social movements mirror our lives?
Prentis Hemphill Are you saying, how can they, or how do they?
Ayana Young Well, I was thinking ‘do’, but I could also go with ‘can.’
Prentis Hemphill Yeah, that's a good question. I think that our social movements are, you know, a great place to practice what it is that we want to live, that we want to nurture in ourselves and in each other, that maybe we're not very good at, or maybe we haven't seen modeled very much, or maybe it's like there's just not enough room for this in the world. We can try out new ways of governance, of decision making, of whatever it might be. So I think that's really the exciting part about building movements and building organizations.
And they're also subject to everything that we've learned along the way, that we haven't actually become conscious to—the lessons around how we treat each other, how we treat ourselves, how available our imagination is; our creativity; our visioning; how we do conflict is in there, too; how we've seen conflict modeled; what conflict means to us. We bring all of that to social movements. And so, it ends up being a place of promise, you know, a place of real practice, I think.
And it can become mired in not only the human stuff because I really think, you know, conflict, for example, is just gonna happen. It's just gonna happen. But we can become mired in the unconscious aspects of it. You know, what conflict am I really trying to address by having this conflict with you? And if I don't know that, we can become even more deeply entrenched, and it can become a non generative kind of conflict. So there's something to the ‘how we do social movements’ that I think is one of the things I was trying to say in the book. It's important for us to look at these places of interfaces, relational places, just to bring as much conscious awareness to those as possible because they can be really generative, transformative, or it can be the places where we leak power in a way, where our power gets drained out. Our movements can be stunted or destroyed, or be more vulnerable if we don't have an orientation to those places of rupture and deepening as generative.
So I think they can be so many things, our social movements, because it's just about us kind of working through ‘how do we want to live on this planet together?’ and struggling through that and being affirmed in that, and all the things that can come. That's, to me, what the political realm is about. It's like, how are we going to do this? There's finite resources. There's needs that we have as human beings. How are we going to make decisions in a way that does not increase suffering? Because we know that by increasing suffering, we make everyone suffer, and we eventually make ourselves suffer too. So are there ways that we can work through this?
It's very complex. It's not all rainbows and unicorns. I say this often. You know, I live out in the country and living more rurally you are...There is a beauty and a brutality to the whole experience of being alive. The paradigm that we're in on this planet it's kind of a rough one. There is death. There is violence. There are all these things. And how do we structure our societies and our world in ways that don't amplify that? You know, make it always the go-to? There are lots of ways of living.
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Jackson Kroopf Thank you for listening to the sixth episode of For The Wild, slow study series Earthly Reads with Prentis Hemphill. To get the full experience, join our book study, where we will gather with authors like Prentis as well as adrienne maree brown, Tricia Hersey, Alexis Pauline Gumbs, Céline Semaan and Marcia Bjornerud for an even deeper dive into their recent writings. To learn more, please visit forthewild.world/bookstudy or join us on Patreon.
The music for this series is from the compilation “Staying: Leaving Records Aid to Artists Impacted by the Los Angeles Wildfires.” The musicians featured in this episode are John Carroll Kirby, Laraaji, Muwsi, and Lionmilk.
For The Wild is made by Ayana Young, Erica Ekrem, Julia Jackson, Jackson Kroopf, Kailea Loften and Viva Wittman. Thanks For listening.
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