Transcript: NKEM NDEFO on the Body as Compass /227
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Hello and welcome to For The Wild Podcast, I’m Ayana Young. Today I’m speaking with Nkem Ndefo.
Nkem Ndefo And so while the idea of getting away from it, to do restoration is important, we also need ways to restore it while we're still in it. Because not always away can we get away.
Ayana Young Nkem Ndefo is the founder and president of Lumos Transforms and creator of The Resilience Toolkit, a model that promotes embodied self-awareness and self-regulation in an ecologically sensitive framework and social justice context. Licensed as a nurse-midwife, Nkem also has extensive post-graduate training in complementary health modalities and emotional therapies. She brings an abundance of experience as a clinician, educator, consultant, and community strategist to innovative programs that address stress and trauma and build resilience for individuals, organizations, and communities across sectors, both in her home country (USA) and internationally. Nkem is particularly interested in working alongside people most impacted by violence and marginalization.
Well Nkem, thank you so much for joining me today in this conversation. Like I was saying earlier, I feel like with all the noise in the world, and the stress that we're all living through, having conversations like this are foundational for us to keep going in a good way. So thanks for sharing your time with us today.
Nkem Ndefo Thank you so much for the invitation to join you in conversation. I'm very excited to speak with you.
Ayana Young Yes, me too. So Nkem to jump right in, can you tell us about how your work and the Resilience Toolkit seeks to address the reality that over the past couple of years embodiment has been popularized without it being really rooted to co-liberation? How does your understanding of embodied resilience differ from the sort of diluted understanding of resilience that has been appropriated to maintain the status quo in many ways?
Nkem Ndefo You know, even like the term ‘resilience’ and just even to backup there, like sometimes I think about do we need to use another word, because it's been so co-opted? Because it's become really a means of punishment, to say to so many people “be more resilient.” It's a way to individualize systemic problems. It's a way to absolve systems and structures and history of any complicity and the suffering that people have now, the trauma, the stress, toxic stress, but I can't really find another word so I’m about reappropriating, the word resilience and recontextualizing it and connecting people to the systems and the ecologies we live in.
And even to have to use the word embodiment is strange, because it implies that we were not embodied before that there was some kind of separation from our heads to our bodies from, you know, some disconnection. And in many ways there are, but that we even need a concept like this to say where do you source your resilience from? Where are the sources, and that the body is a huge reservoir of resilience in the sense of resilience being a flexible strength to meet challenges, and that the body holds a lot of wisdom and capabilities when we bring it along for the ride, that we don't just try to push through intellectually. So in that way, it's embodied resilience, it's using your body as a guide, a compass, as a companion, a kind of source of strength to meet these challenges flexibly.
So, I'm going to leave it there. I mean, I can go further in terms of, you know, how the Resilience Toolkit frames embodied resilience, and what are the connectors between the person, or the people, and meaning people groups of people and their ecology, but you tell me.
Ayana Young Yeah, why not? Please take us there.
Nkem Ndefo So often in the wellness world, where it's about lowering your stress, and always being calm, and you see it a lot in, I don't know, if you want to use the word, it's pejorative, a new age sort of sense of, spiritual emphasis or spiritual bypassing or toxic positivity about always be calm, and always take the high road and always this, and what happens is, is that people are having legitimate responses, legitimate trauma responses, legitimate stress responses to conditions of adversity, be they interpersonal, be they collective, be they structural, and people are made to feel that there's something wrong in them for having these responses. And that they should, you know, if they can just settle, they'll be more productive. And I think of how mindfulness has been co-opted in, in corporate America, and other you know, and as that that has spread across the globe, this idea that you're going to do some mindfulness at your lunch hour, when you should just be relaxing, you're gonna do some mindfulness so you can be more productive. And nowhere does the organization look at how they're contributing to the lack of wellness in their workforce.
And so, in the Resilience Toolkit, our core objectives are to say, you know, yes, we know that a big source of the, the suffering comes from history and structure and culture, and that people cannot be solely as individuals responsible for that. But we also know that systems don't change themselves in that sense, right? An oppressive system doesn't become liberatory of its own volition, there are people who are instrumental in shifting and very intentionally making those liberatory changes. And that those of us who are typically tasked with doing that are the ones who are the most marginalized, and are the most vulnerable. And so in essence, we do need more resilience to be able to shift the systems. And so this is this paradox here. But it's the reality where I think most of us find ourselves and so how do we become? The Resilience Toolkit helps us become more aware of what our actual responses are. When are we activated in stress? When are we settled? And then to ask ourselves, a very important question is, is my reaction right now, is it adaptive? Because it's often a biological reaction that becomes psychological ,that becomes cognitive. But in biology, is it adaptive or responsive to this situation? Is it really helping me? And most of the time, we find that we're overreacting for a host of reasons. And it's not that our reaction is wrong, per se, it's just stronger than is useful, and by learning and choosing from a sort of a menu of body based tools, how can I downshift my stress response? Right, so I'm not blowing off this extra energy in an over response, and then it allows me, as I settle into a more adaptive stress response to the moment, to access what's been locked inside of me, what's been hijacked because of the trust, stress or trauma response, the excessive one, and I get access again, to more creative and flexible visioning. And I'm more open to collaboration. I know how to rest, I know how to recover. And in that way, I am more poised for sustainable work for liberation. And there's, like, you know, a better chance when we're collaborating, when we've got more creative visions, we can really kind of, you know, work on the systems and open them up a little bit so then they're not pressing down on us so much, and so it's back and forth, a recursive loop between us settling, working to open up the systems and then the systems giving us more space so we can settle more. So, there, I said a lot more.
Ayana Young Such a beautiful opening. And, yeah, I’d like us to focus on how cultivating embodied resilience helps us build capacity for discomfort, and this is so vital right now because I am sure we are all seeing so many conversations collapse or remain stymied because people are freezing in their discomfort. Similarly, I’ve heard you speak about the function of numbness; and how BIPOC also go numb to sort of stay afloat in spaces where white people are, for the first time, having to dismantle their privilege, and in doing so are opening themselves to a flooding of pain, previously hidden by oppressive systems. How does embodied resilience mitigate our propensity to disconnect amidst difficult conversations?
Nkem Ndefo So when we can lean into our body for some wisdom, you know, I find that the body can't lie to us, like we can lie to ourselves in our thoughts. The body may have responses that are like maybe you're having an old trauma response to what's happening right in this moment, and so you think in some way your body is lying to you, but it's not, it's telling the truth, it just doesn’t have the time right. It’s talking about something in the past. So in that way, it's this idea that the body has this wisdom, and it kind of tells us, like, if we can cue into, “Hey, I'm in this conversation right now. And it's a hard conversation, and I noticed my mouth went dry, I noticed I'm holding my breath, I noticed I am having a hard time hearing what's being said, my mind is jumping ahead to what I want to say”, if I can become aware of those as stress responses that are starting to crest over my threshold for staying present. If I can become aware of that, and I have some kind of tool to help myself recognize “Wait a second, is it really that dangerous right now?” And most of the time, it's not that dangerous. And I can, again, downshift my response a little bit, it allows me to stay open and my hearing shifts. Right? And it's really, these are biological changes, the more stressed we are, our hearing tunes away from the range of the human voice, and more to a low sort of danger sound in the environment, we literally don't hear each other.
And so in order to be in a conversation of any kind, let alone a difficult conversation, the capacity to listen is so crucial. And so being able to listen to my body's own signs that I'm exceeding my threshold, and settle myself lets me stay in connection lets me stay open and have that spaciousness around the ideas, around people's feelings and my own feelings and, and ability to sit with that discomfort. And on the flip side, as you spoke about, is recognizing when things might not be safe, right? It might not be safe as a BIPOC person to be in a room, in a group, in a collective with white folks awakening to privilege and struggling with white guilt and white shame. That might not actually be all that safe of a space for a BIPOC person, and for us to recognize, like, you know what, this is not alright for me, and that I did go numb, and that may be I've exceeded my threshold, because it's not always that when you've exceeded your threshold that we are the people that need to settle. Sometimes we need to remove ourselves from the situation and say the situation just isn't okay for me at this moment, with my capacity, or the degree of safety. And my awareness of what my system, what my body is telling me helps inform my decisions.
And you know there's a time in when we're doing racism repair, where affinity groups make a lot of sense, until people have a better set of skills to enter into hard conversations and stay in hard conversations in ways with a certain skillfulness. And that embodiment skill, because we see a lot of anti-racism initiatives flounder, because they're highly cognitive, especially when we're talking about corporate spaces where we're like, here's a your equity checklist, and so we're doing it by force of compliance. Or, you know, when we end up in a space where people are so hyper vigilant, afraid to say anything, to hurt anybody's feelings, that it shuts down capacity for connection.
And so there's a basic set of skills about trust and safety, which are really body based skills, we can't make trust and safety in our heads. It just doesn't work, I think about this very interesting study that was done in Sierra Leone, after the Civil War, where they used some sort of restorative practices, and it was a very interesting study, because i they randomized 200 villages where half went through restorative processes, and the other half did not, and they followed them for three years. And like you would expect, you went through restorative processes, and you find, you know, measures of people's social engagement, and what they say is how much they trust, their neighbors and their community is higher in the groups that had gone through restorative processes. But when it came to psychological measures, they were worse than those who had not. And the authors of the paper said that restorative processes are not the same as trauma healing. And I would go one step further is that we know trauma is a process that is not just cognitive, and it's not just emotional, it's also biological. And in fact, it's probably biological first, before it becomes emotional before it becomes cognitive, just thinking about how we know the body works. And that if you don't address the body, someone comes to you and they're having an emotional outpouring, and you, you know, in an restorative process, and you, you know, there's amends that are made, and you cognitively say, I forgive this person, but you still have that lump in your throat, you still feel that clutch in your chest, that pit in your stomach, if those aren't addressed - those are what, come back, and those are what grow as we revisit them over and over. And they rise up into our emotional state and into our thoughts and begin to hijack our behavior, much to our consternation, we're like, I forgave them, why am I still? And so I think about that when we're doing racial healing processes that if we ignore the body, we ignore it at our peril, because our efforts will be short lived, the body will remember.
Ayana Young I recently read a piece titled “How to Fight Without Hating” by Valerie Brown in Tricycle Magazine, and Valerie writes; “Our hearts are broken open by grief, fear, and anger. How do we fight injustice and not hate those who perpetuate it? How do we fight injustice and support ourselves? How do we deepen our resolve for a more just and equitable world within that unjust and inequitable world? How do we face the fear of failure within ourselves and in society?” And I think so many are trying their hardest to not be overwhelmed with frustration and anger every day, and I wonder if maybe you could respond to this in terms of how embodied resilience can also relieve feelings of hatred when they come up as we try to communicate change?
Nkem Ndefo I mean, I think a lot of it is there's a sense of capacity question, right? The capacity to sit with hard and big things without shrinking, collapsing, going rigid, like, typically how we respond is how we respond. And it tends to, we tend to each have our own patterns. Some of us when we hit our threshold, we disconnect. Some of us shut down, some of us act out, some of us get rigid and controlling, you know, and maybe we have a few patterns, right, but we have our style or our little insignia. And so when we reach our threshold, regardless of the stimulus, it tends, we tend to go into that response. And so it's about how do we grow our window of tolerance or ability to sit with hard things without going into our pattern?
And I think what I find is this idea that I presented earlier that so many of us are in an over response, most of the time and that we're constantly exceeding, and part of that is, you know, late stage capitalism that asks us to constantly be in production and constantly to be in consumption and, and to push, push, push. If there's rest, it's certainly not recovery. And so so many of us, when we truly stop our window of tolerance, where we can stay connected to ourselves in a calm and you know in a spacious way is actually quite small because when you're constantly pushing, you decrease your resilience, you decrease your reserves. It's like, you know, we overspend our bank account, be it energy, be it money, you know, you spend up your reserves, are depleted, and you're more reactive and you have a harder time tolerating things. And most of us know this intuitively. Yet still, this is how we conduct our lives. This is how the culture asks us to conduct our lives. And so the ability from moment to moment to track what is the most adaptive response, allows you to not exceed your threshold when it's not necessary, because when it is necessary then you can dig in and go into your reserves.
And I think a big lesson for me, and where I learned this is I have ME/CFS or Myalgic Encephalomyelitis/Chronic Fatigue Syndrome, and, you know, I was quite sick for some period of time on and off. But the last several years were very, very rough. And one of the hallmark symptoms of the disease is activity intolerance, basically the theory is that our mitochondria are not producing energy appropriately for a number of reasons, almost like a kind of hibernation, if you want to think cellular hibernation. And so anywhere where I would expend energy, like I would have a payback afterwards, it was like it's called post exertional malaise. It's more than malaise. It's all the symptoms flare. And so I learned pacing, which is don't spend all your energy in one place, I had to really be very, very careful and measured and say, “Okay, I'm doing this activity, am I spending more energy than I have?” Making sure to dial it back and really learn what is rest and what is restoration. And I think that has heavily influenced how I think about the world. And I see that when I am able to listen to my body's rhythms, and when my body is asking for rest and I can give it, when I don’t have to push. For many years, I was a single mom and working and going to school and when you have to push, you push. But many times we’re pushing when we don’t have to push, and so when we can dial that back that grows this reserve, that embodied resilience, that gives us the capacity in hard conversations, in movement work, to be more spacious to have more grace, to have more compassion, where we may feel anger, but it doesn't calcify into hatred.
Ayana Young You mentioned wanting to discuss appeasement as a biological and cultural response, and what I really appreciate, and want to highlight about your work is that you talk about how we need to think about appeasement, not just as a fight or flight response, but as a “protective response to hierarchies”. Can you define appeasement for us and share the forms it takes on?
Nkem Ndefo Appeasement has been something that I've been very interested in, in the last few years a lot of thinking and reflection and a lot of talking and conversation and I'm actually just starting some writing on it now. There’s very little research about it. So I mean, we know what the word appeasement is in like a colloquial sense, right? It's like placating or, you know, playing nice. I think what's important is that the biological discussions around stress and trauma are actually a predatory model of one species. They lean into animal based, non-human animal based predatory models of a predator and prey, as opposed to really looking at them - as humans, that's not the main source of our stress, we are apex predators. So it's really not us being prey, that we're really talking in scientific terms, it's your conspecific, it's species to species, and it's usually not kill or be killed, we're talking about social hierarchy, for the most part, that is the bulk of where things come from. And that, so when we talk about fight/flight, and we know that most of the research done around stress response has been done in white men in North America and Western Europe and then extrapolated, or, you know, without thought to everybody. So this idea that, who gets to fight and flee. If you're in a situation where somebody has more power than you, by dint of their identity, what the culture has given them or their role in the organization or the group structure that you're in, right? And something happens, they do something to you. In that situation, your fight and flight are not options, they actually make things worse. And so it's a very privileged place to think that you can fight and sometimes it's a very, very privileged place to think that you can run.
I mean, I think about it, there's an example I use often when I teach, it was a situation here in the US, actually, in Southern California, where a group of young Black women had rented an Airbnb and they were checking out of the Airbnb and putting their luggage in their trunk of their car and a white neighbor saw them, didn't recognize them as owners of the home and waved at them, and the women didn't recognize the woman, they don't know her, they didn't wave back. So the neighbor called the police. And the police, in typical U.S. fashion sent a helicopter and multiple cars. And what ensued was a tense situation. And it was diffused, and nobody was arrested. And, you know, it was cleared up. But what I find instructive here is that these Black women, when you see you're surrounded by police cars, you're terrified, and you would want to run but if you ran, what would happen? It's a privilege to run, they don't have that privilege there. If they were to fight and sort of mouth off to the officers, we know that they could likely not survive the interaction. Again, no privilege to fight. And so what happens is they appeased, and appeasement takes a number of different forms. And in this particular instance, the form it took was they laughed and joked with the officers, they laughed and joked with the officers. And so what happens is the officers leave the experience and say, “Look, they were happy, you know, everything's fine, we did fine.” The women leave that incident and say, “We were terrified, we were afraid for our lives.” Look at the disconnect between those two experiences, because part of what makes appeasement work is it has to be a little bit invisible.
Right. And so the police force actually did a press conference afterwards and said, will show you the videos, the women were happy, and they were laughing. And this goes to show that there's a masking that happens. And it's not just that we're socially conditioned to do it, because you could say that, because we see, bears do it, we see non-human primates appease, we see dogs appease, so we know that there's some biological underpinning, or when there is social hierarchy and I would, I'm venturing to think that most of us were not on the bottom end of the social hierarchy, spent the greater part of our existence, in appeasement. And that actually is the most common form of our responses that we live in.
And in my speaking to audiences, you know, in the US and Africa and Europe, this has resonated with all different kinds of audiences where they say, “Yes, this is what I am experiencing”, and to hear it named so clearly, people are quite relieved and to understand that, there's a lot of shame when we have appeased, we may leave a situation and say, “Well, why didn't I speak up? Why didn't I do anything?” When in fact, our body has locked us into a freeze on top of the roiling fight flight that's kept inside. The freeze is holding us to keep us safe. So it's almost a combination of those two. And when people can hear “Oh, that's why I didn't respond”, it moves from a shame to a self compassion, I was keeping myself safe. And the other important piece to tie into this is that we can have appeasement responses. And we can settle our responses when we realize they're stronger than they need to be. They're not useful or adaptive. I don't need to be appeasing in this situation. But appeasement cannot be solved by the individual alone. Because it's a byproduct, or a feature actually, it's not a byproduct, it is a feature of social hierarchy of inequity.
Ayana Young I think many of us would willingly admit that in the past year, we’ve found ourselves in a permanent state of stress. And, I also think about this in terms of the Anthropocene, and that many of us will live through a period that is characterized by a certain degree of uncertainty because of Earth’s own distress. So we really need holistic perspectives on stress and anxiety that acknowledge the impacts of living in a stress-inducing ecology longterm. Can you speak to the importance of ensuring we don’t get stuck in “cycles of stress and trauma” in relation to the ways in which stress hijacks our capacity to imagine and create?
Nkem Ndefo I was teaching in London last year, and there was a little contingent of folks who work around building awareness around climate collapse, climate crisis and what they were finding is that people just shut down, it's so overwhelming, that they literally just shut down, they can't even engage in the conversation. And so the question is, is like, how can we engage people if they can't even hear us? And it comes back to this ability to sit with, you know, to grow your capacity to, to sit with hard things, which is to recognize when you're pushing when you don't need to, so your nervous system gets a chance to rest and restore and rebuild some of that flexibility that it needs to expand around these really hard things, and have spaciousness and almost like, sometimes I have this image, and this image over the years of like, when you have a big feeling. And it's bigger than you, and it just spills out all over you. Right? Like it's just bigger than your body, it fills the room. And it's like really hard to be spacious, to have vision, to do all of anything when you're just contending in this thing, and about the impulse to how we grow ourselves so that we are bigger than the feeling itself. And we recognize that the feeling is a part of us, but that there are other feelings, and that there are other experiences, and other thoughts, and other sensations. And in that way, we can start to move with, instead of being overwhelmed by and so it comes back to really the same process.
And people have different impulses about why they may want to learn this set of skills, they may want to learn it because it's 2020 and 2020 is all of the things, they may want to learn it specifically because they want to do racial healing work; “ I’m having a hard time sitting and then collapsing into white shame, and I can't stay in conversations around racism”, they may want to say like, “When I start doing work around climate issues, I just become so overwhelmed, and then I can't sleep” and then you know, what good are we to anybody? And so people have a tendency to either put up walls to do their thing, to tune it out, they have to leave, the burn out in movements, to have to disengage.
You know, being a single mom and having kids and not being able to travel, was really good because I stayed put while I did the work. And I worked with groups over long periods of time, and I worked with groups that didn't have the ability to pick up and go places. I’ve done a lot of work with gang intervention. So these are people who are formerly in gangs themselves and live in the same communities that they grew up in, these are people who can't go on retreat. So I needed to say like, how do we develop methods for people when they're in it, that they can use while they're in it? And never did I think I would live through a pandemic. I don't think any of us did. But it's the same thing. This is like, it's something that's all consuming. It's all the time, the climate issues are all consuming all the time, the race issue is all consuming all the time. And so while the idea of getting away from it, to do restoration is important, we also need ways to restore while we're still in it, because not always can we get away. Not always can we get away.
Ayana Young Well, I'm, you know, wondering about the psoas muscle plays a vital role in stress response; becoming activated when we enter a period of fight, flight, or freeze. And I think about the trauma that is held in that part of the body...and it really emphasizes something that we should all know, which is that working with the body is so vital, we can’t treat it individually, but that is exactly what is done under Western systems that are hyper obsessed with the siloing of intellect, body, and spirit and so I wonder if you can just remind us what happens when we don’t address the body, and even how beginning to think about moving our bodies in different ways is vital to relieving suffering?
Nkem Ndefo The idea that, you know, I was having this conversation earlier this week, with somebody who said, “Well, I know other people do emotions, but I'm an action person, like I don't do emotions”, she said. And the thing is, emotions, or even the biology underlying the emotions, sometimes doesn't care what we think. Often it doesn't care what we think, it's just going to have the reaction that it has. Because when we come to talking about stress and trauma, it's about survival, trauma in particular. And so your body has those primitive responses that come first. Sometimes I'll use an example of like, you know, most cultures have games that involve balls, and if you're sitting on the sidelines, watching whatever game that is that has a ball and something comes hurtling towards you, if you pause to give it a lot of thought about what is this thing coming hurling towards me, it hits you before you can move, if you pause to have a feeling, “Oh, it's kind of scary, that thing is hurtling towards me”, it also will hit you. What actually happens is your body moves once it recognizes it's in danger, and then you say afterwards, “Oh, that was so scary. Did you see what just happened?” That's how it works. And when we can remember that, you can understand that the stressors and the traumas that we're experiencing, our bodies are going through that. So if we don't pay attention to the body piece, thinking back to the example I gave from the study in Sierra Leone, the body will come back and hijack us. So make friends with it or not, it's still going to do what it's going to do. So I prefer to make friends with it and work alongside.
And to the comment about the siloing that happens. I mean, it's hard to break that pattern or move away from it, because there's a move about either the psoas or I hear it also about the vagus nerve. Right, and where people talk about the psoas in relationship to its role in, in the trauma response, because it's the muscle that contracts and helps us fold our top and bottom part of our bodies, above the waist and below the waist where we are crunched into a ball to protect ourselves - if you hear a loud sound you kind of jerk and close in, right? So that’s the psoas in action there. So it's certainly part of it, but it's one player in the whole thing, in the symphony.
And people talk about the vagus nerve, and there's, you know, different branches of the vagus nerve, often when people are talking about it, the branch they're talking about is the part that is involved in settling the stress response. And then people talk about the vagas, which again, is one player in a symphony, as if it is the only thing and so there's a reductionist impulse, because we're talking about complex systems and they're hard to talk about with nuance. So we use some things as proxy, but sometimes when we're using it as a proxy, we forget and we confuse it with the whole thing. And so I would just like to expand that line to recognize that this is a symphony that involves your immune system, your central nervous system, your peripheral nervous system, your gut, are predominantly hormone systems. These are the systems that are involved in stress, and in trauma, and they're all talking to each other all the time. Like one of the big things, again, through my illness that I was able to discover is that a big part of my reactivity, it comes from my immune system. And that the immune system will drive my stress response, and so if I'm having a low level allergic reaction to something, I will be more stress reactive. But our over-psychologicalzation of our culture is to look for the psychological reasons for stress only, just like it ignores the ecological reasons for stress. We also ignore biological reasons for stress. So just expanding the lens to look at all of those is useful in practice, like, if you're a highly allergic person, you're also usually probably highly stressed and more likely to be an anxious person as well. They tend to go hand in hand, but it's often all shoved off onto psychology. So I don't know, I might have lost the thread of your original question, but I appreciate the impulse in the direction it took me. Tell me Did I answer?
Ayana Young Yeah. I mean, the questions are just diving boards. So I think so. Yeah, and it's good for me to personally think about it, I've been working through stress and, as I know, so many folks are, and it's nice to just sit with you in the thought process of it all. And yeah, and I'm thinking about how wellness and self care have been industrialized, in the West. I've heard this narrative of healing as a permanent state, that we are always healing, which to some extent I understand, but I think you make an important intervention by pointing out that healing is intended to allow us to live our lives, we actually aren’t meant to heal forever. And I think about how, this idea of infinite healing might mean that we are in a state of diminished power as well, which limits our ability to aid in co-liberation. Can you share why you think it is so important to complete the healing cycle, and how this completion also relates to safety, and how becoming “healed” allows us to feel safe, and become safe?
Nkem Ndefo I don't know if I would go so far as to say completion, I think sometimes the impulse around healing, there's a lot of suffering, right. And so the impulse is like, I want to relieve the suffering of myself and of others. Right, and very noble and important work, what happens is, I think we can get stuck in never good enough. So almost, it's like a capitalistic impulse of never good enough around healing, where we get stuck in using it as a way of controlling our environment. “Well, if I can just tinker and improve, tinker, and improve, tinker and improve.” It's a way to deal with uncertainty. And I think for myself, there were times with my own illness about looking at the idea of always healing as actually quite ablest. Is there an acceptance that I could have limitations, can I accept my limitations? How do I balance the tension between could I improve? Or can I accept where I am? It's a very hard question that I've navigated in various places in between pulling between those tensions, where “No, this is where I’m accepting having this illness” and then “No, maybe I’d like to try one more therapy.” And how do we walk back and forth between those?
I think they're cycles of healing, rather than being done, kind of cycles or seasons might be a better way. There’s periods where we are more intentional in our healing efforts. Then also remembering to stop and celebrate what is working, like the idea that there's always something to be healed comes from a stress activations cycle like itself, “I'm stress activated, so I'm going to see what's negative here. I'm going to see what's problematic” instead of seeing also what is working given what is right and what is good and what is pleasurable. So there's that as well.
You know, when they say like when your feet hurt, all you can think about is your feet. And when your feet don't hurt, you just walk, you just walk. And that feels very liberating to me. But some of us, our feet might hurt a little all the time. And that might be part of our experience and will never change. Can we make that okay, too? So there's a lot of threads in here, about ableism, about control of the unknown, about acceptance, about the impulse to relieve suffering and heal. And I think avoiding absolutes, can I heal a little bit and I feel a little safer. I think about my own journey, having lived through sexual abuse at a very young age, and so young that I could never remember really what safety was, it wasn't a concept for me, like, I guess this is what safety is. And only through healing later, years later, into my 30s into my 40s, did I say “Oh, is this to safety people were talking about?” And then maybe a year later, two years later, I go through, you know, another, you know, there's again, seasons of healing and like, “Oh, wait, this, this is what they're talking about?” And I would say, I'm 50 now at 48, I had dropped into another level of safety that I had never experienced in my life before. And I said, “Wow, this one's delicious.” Could there be more possibly do I need to insatiably hunt for it? Can I accept this as good enough? These are the questions that come up.
Ayana Young In a conversation you had with Alex Howard titled “Building Capacity for Healing Racial Trauma” you talked about how Western culture does not have good repair models, we have domination and submission models. And this reminded me of something I read from Glenn Albrecht, where he writes; “This form of political-economy has been called “corruptalism.” Even better, perhaps, would be “corrumpalism” (from the Latin corrumpere, “to destroy”). Corrumpalism is the ability to corrupt and destroy the integrity of a social system and its biophysical foundation by perverting all forms of development.” It’s clear we have to break this model of domination and destruction, and so I wonder if you can speak a bit to where you source inspiration for models of repair and symbiosis? And how we can bring ecological thinking into healing and change work as well?
Nkem Ndefo Well, I'm an empiricist. But also, like inveterately curious. One of my questions always is “How many tabs are open on your browser?” Because I've got way too many. I'm curious about all kinds of things. And so it's not always clear to me during, because again, I'm going in there and tinkering and trying with different people about where - I'm like, “Oh, that worked.” And I'm not sure if it was an intuitive hit. I am trained as a nurse midwife, and for some years, I did home birth. That was a big teacher, birth is a fantastic teacher, things are heightened in many ways at those moments, I love, I'm a lover of liminal spaces, and because there's just so much openness and possibility and in all senses both, you know, sometimes that's good. Sometimes it's not so good. Sometimes it's scary to be all the things. And I would love being in the room with a birthing person, their support people, some baby trying to come Earthside, myself and maybe an assistant, and really doing homebirth, like our parameters were safety and the birthing folks wishes. And how we would try, just try different things, and as long as everyone was doing okay, we could try, and we discovered some really, you know, there’s a lot of wisdom to tap into, from my training and my teachers, and there's also the inspiration in the moment of what can be discovered only in that space at that time, and how that can be carried over, whether it was, you know, a different position or a particular tool or an approach that came, that was born out of out of that crucible, because birth can definitely a crucible, not always, and so I think I take that spirit, that's sort of my spirit of working around what, what this looks like.
I still think of myself as a midwife, even though I don't attend births anymore, physical birth. Right now my big concern has been with adequate preparation, preparation for transformation, which I think is really overlooked, because if we don't prepare well, people don't have the capacity to stay in conversations for any length of time, they don't have capacity for staying connected and collective visioning, things collapse, become rigid, people attack one another, it breaks down. So right now my inspiration is really my life as a gardener. Preparing soil, planting seeds, nourishing the soil, nourishing plants, observing what the plants tell me by how it's growing. So right now that that's really, in fact, I'm building out a big embodied anti racism project for a very large public health care system in the United States. at a scale that boggles my mind sometimes when I think about the hundreds of thousands of patients, people they see every year and the tens of thousands of staff, in all different departments doing all different things. And how we're using the gardening metaphor here, and to lean into that, to slow people down when they're like, we're preparing soil right now slow down, we're gonna have a really anemic harvest, if we don't slow down and really, really feed the soil. We're going to plant a few rounds of cover crops here and mulch them in. So I'm open to all different other kinds of models as well, again, inveterate curious and federally curious. I like your diving boards, thank you.
Ayana Young Well, Nkem, thank you this has been such a beautiful deep dive off the board with you, and thank you so much for your time. And, as we come to a close, I’d just like to offer the space for any words or resources you'd like to direct listeners to
Nkem Ndefo You know, I feel pretty complete. I feel like we touched on a lot of things and hopefully opened up some areas for folks to ponder and reflect on and maybe some things were tied up in a bow, but I hope not too much. Because that's not good either. Follow those curiosities. And maybe I'm going to add one more thing that has been on my mind lately. I see a fair amount of people who do liberation work with a great interest in spaciousness and freedom, rightly so. It becomes though, that anything that is tight and small, is bad. And things that are big and spacious are good. And a dialectic is set up, and it becomes rigid. And it becomes as problematic, that rigid dialectic of small and bad, and open big good, becomes a problem in and of itself because you lose your ability to be responsive. There are moments that call for a directive notice, there are moments that call us to hold space in a very open and loose way.
I was speaking to a student, maybe it was yesterday, I don't know the days blur together a bit but and I had said, “It's like you're so beautiful, and the way you hold space in that open, gentle way. But if somebody was cut and bleeding in front of you, and they're bleeding out, is that a time to just hold space? They need you to be directive.” And so for those of us who are doing movement work, and really prizing these open spaces, how do we find places to, how do we find okayness in us to be able to be as comfortable when places are tight and small? That we're still able to creatively vision and work collaboratively and listen to one another, in those tight spaces, and how do we recognize that there might be times when tight spaces are actually the best answer or at least good enough. So that's what I would say.
Francesca Glaspell Thank you for listening to For The Wild Podcast. The music you heard today was by Harrison Foster, Marian McLaughlin, Ariana Saraha and Emily Ritz. For The Wild is created by Ayana Young, Erica Ekrem, Francesca Glaspell, and Melanie Younger.