Transcript: PRENTIS HEMPHILL on Choosing Belonging [ENCORE] /281
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Hello and welcome to For The Wild Podcast, I’m Ayana Young. Today I’m speaking with Prentis Hemphill.
Prentis Hemphill There's no magical return. We're not all going to return to an unblemished time in history. And if we know that, I mean that's at least what I believe. I don't think there is a blemish time in history, if we know that, if we're here now, what do we have to do? Who needs to have conversation with whom? Who needs to heal what relationship? Who needs to ask for what permission? Who needs to offer something back? I think that's where we're at right now.
Ayana Young Prentis Hemphill is movement facilitator, Somatics teacher, and practitioner, and working at the convergence of healing, collective transformation, and political organizing. Prentis has spent the last 15 years bridging wellbeing and power building as a part of movement building organizations, most recently as the Healing Justice Director at Black Lives Matter Global Network. In 2016, Prentis was awarded the Buddhist Peace Fellowship Soma Award for community work inspired by Buddhist thought. At present, Prentis is the founder and leader of The Embodiment Institute and The Black Embodiment Initiative as well as host of the Finding Our Way Podcast.
Well, Prentis thank you so much for joining us on For The Wild Podcast. I'm really looking forward to this conversation that I don't think we've breached many of the topics that we will hopefully cover today.
Prentis Hemphill Absolutely, I feel really glad to be here. Thanks for inviting me.
Ayana Young Wonderful. Well, in preparation for our conversation, I really started to think about the history of disembodiment and the ways that dominant culture has isolated somatic intelligence from mental intelligence in contrast to a time before industrial civilization where, in many ways, our survival was really predicated on being embodied. To begin, I wonder if you could speak to this severance and who does it serve when we cease practicing embodiment?
Prentis Hemphill Hmm, I think I want to start that with you know, there's a couple of ways to think about embodiment, actually. And one way is to pay attention to what it is that we have made habit, in our own bodies, and in our own system. So in a way, there's always an embodiment, just what are you choosing to embody? And how do you sustain that in your own body and in the collective body also? So first, I would say that we're in a time, there's another way that I would say, “Yes, we are in disembodied”, but there's a way for us also to pay attention to what it is that we have embodied, what do we choose to do? And then what's the physicality and physiology of that embodiment too I think is important for us to notice.
But to your question around disembodiment, which the way that I hold that question is, that move away from paying attention to the signs and the language of the body kind of below our heads, what's happening in those spaces. It is ultimately a way of creating in our person a dynamic of domination, where the mind or the thinking self dominates over the flesh so to speak so that we are expected to do, we expect from ourselves and we expect from other people, that whatever the mind thinks is possible, the body should obey, and that split of keeping us out of a cycle of sustainability or relationship with ourselves also translates to our relationship to land, our relationship to each other, dynamics of gender dominance, of racial hierarchy, class systems, all of these things in some way I think are related to the ways that we have embodied dominance over even ourselves and our own feelings. And I think that that serves, ultimately, whoever steals, really whoever is interested in taking from people who aren't able to feel their own lives, taking through the method of forced labor, taking people's land, taking the time that people have taking people's attention, to profit off of it, it serves people who take and don't give back. And that's why for me, it's so important that we start to recover practices and really create practices of centering our feeling selves, our bodies, our relationships, really, because it starts to illuminate what we really need, what's important, what's possible, between us what it really feels like to create intimacy with one another. So that to me, is the kind of embodiment that I'm working towards.
Ayana Young Thank you for grounding our conversation with that intro, that was really helpful. And yeah, I’d like to bring into conversation some sentiments around trauma and oppression that I’ve heard you share in conversation with Mark-Anthony Johnson and Francisca Porchas Coronado; which is that trauma is inevitable to all life on Earth, but oppression is how we organize and distribute that trauma amongst ourselves; and I think listeners would really love to hear more about this relationship between trauma and oppression, and how this approach really informs the work that the Embodiment Institute is doing.
Prentis Hemphill Yeah, I mean, again, it's kind of like embodiment, there's a couple of ways to look at it. So oppression is trauma, in many ways, it's what it is, it's a collective trauma and, you know, it occurred to me a couple of years ago, and just kind of thinking about it, that we often think about oppression, primarily through and only through maybe the kind of way the systems shape people's lives, but not always really feeling into what that means for the day-to-day for a person's actual lifespan, what it feels like to feel the weight of oppression, daily, regularly, always. And it occurred to me that, you know, oppression really is the attempt, I think, to ensure that some people experience pain, with the hopes that other people wouldn't, and to organize the world and society in that way, in an attempt to kind of outsource pain, and the concentrated ultimately, in the people that we've deemed less valuable. And we do that through systems. But I wanted to really illuminate that what we're talking about is people's lives. It's not just an idea, or theory, of oppression, but that it exists as a million traumas that aren't heard, it exist as decreased lifespan - time that people don't get to have, presence that people don't get to have with their loved ones. That's what it means. That's what it actually means. I think that in some ways, that's the intended purpose of creating a system and a society that really relies on oppression to function.
In terms of the work of The Embodiment Institute, yeah, a lot of the work that I try to do there and we're trying to create is, how do we undo some of that? Now we know that it's not all about our capacity to heal, there need to be real, systemic, and structural shifts that make it easier for people to live and stay alive. But we also know that there are certain things that oppression does to a life, certain things that it does to each of us and then there are ways that it gets amplified or concentrated or focused depending on how your identity is perceived in the world. So when I think about, for example, kind of what anti-Blackness is meant for my life, it's meant increased policing of myself and people I care about, which translates to a kind of hypervigilance that I then have to hold. Colonization has been a disconnection from land and environment, so there's a whole resource of grounding and attachment that I haven't been able to access because of the way that my story thus far has gone. That doesn't mean that we can't recover these capacities in relationships, and I hope really, that that's what we, you know, we're going to focus on in The Embodiment Institute is how do we recover some of the capacities that oppression and disconnection and a culture of denial have tried to institute inside of each of our body? So that's the question. That's the question, how can we create a space that contributes to the lived experience of liberation and freedom for more of us, all of us?
Ayana Young Well, yeah, I'm thinking for many of us, the word trauma is sort of inherently linked to notions of healing, specifically healing with an endpoint in mind, and something I’ve really been working around is this question of how much trauma we can seek to resolve in this life given the generations and generations it’s taken to come into existence, and I wonder if this line of thought sort of plays with your framing of trauma and oppression, and if you could speak to this thought around our limited capacity to completely navigate out of trauma?
Prentis Hemphill Ah, what do I think about that? You know, I think one of the frameworks that is embedded in my work, and what I am trying to do now, is a framework for me that comes from my past as a therapist, that I don't talk about that much, and my family systems training, thinking about transitional characters. In family systems, you think about transitional characters, as a person that can kind of transform their life, and it changes their family's lives. But I've been thinking a lot lately about, you know, what our healing contributes to our lineage. And I think about that much more extensively than the kind of biological lineage that we’re given. But what are our healing work contributes to, yeah, life across time behind us and in front of us? I've been really interested in that question. Maybe it's a kind of adjacent question to the one that you're asking. It's like, what impact can we make across time in our relationships? I don't know if it's too much to undo in one life. It may not be. It may be. I think I don't know enough yet about it, to be honest, to really settle somewhere. I know that it doesn't serve us to be in an approach our own healing that is never satisfiable, that never lets us enjoy our lives, never lets go, that never is able to love ourselves, accept ourselves as flawed, you know, it can't tolerate the places where the impact of history just lives where we tell the story of what's happened before. I don't think I'm interested in that kind of healing, where we become perfect. But I also don't know necessarily what can and can't be done in the lifetime, but I hope that I can, you know, ask me in 20 years what I think about that I might have a different idea.
Ayana Young Okay. Noted. Yeah, it's, it's hard to say and I think there are so many questions that are unanswerable and there's so much beauty in that too, and release of control, release of needing to know, and maybe even allows us to be more present if we're not so attached to some type of completeness.
Yeah. I glean that The Embodiment Institute is really interested in embodiment in terms of how it impacts our ways of being with one another, and something I’ve observed in activist culture; is that there has been an emphasis on the self in terms of being your own person, defining strong boundaries around your preferences, and really centering one’s truth as being the most important thing - and no doubt a lot of this has really grown out of incredibly important dialogue, but it seems that nowadays it can lapse into these patterns that are really antithetical to building communal power and staying in relationship with one another, so I’d like to ask about the importance of course correcting this aspect and how embodiment is central to our ability to build strong relational skills?
Prentis Hemphill I think there's a few different things in there for me, I will start with, yeah, the measure inside of our work in The Embodiment Institute is relationship, that it's not about “I’ve healed and I know it, the end.” But it's like you're in a process that manifests itself, you manifest yourself in relationship and that can include a relationship to yourself, but it also includes relationship to place, relationship to the people around you, the systems that you are in, the communities that you are committed to, what are you doing inside of those relationships, I think is an important indicator of how we've processed through experiences that we've had, I would say most of the traumas that people experience are relational ones. So how we measure healing, and again, you know, I was trained as a therapist, it can be such an individualized measure of how someone is doing but not necessarily relational, which, you know, the way I come up, you exist because you are related to others or in relationship with others, and I mean that expansively.
In terms of the kind, of course-correcting inside of the movement. I don't know that I like intend to do that, necessarily. And I guess because in part, I don't think that the kind of individualism or self-protection that we feel there, maybe there's a new intensity to it, but that's kind of always been the struggle, in some ways is that there are groups and pockets of people that would protect themselves over everything over the collective. It doesn't feel so new a dynamic to me. But I think the path forward or the work to do is always how we can kind of be in relationship with each other. And I do think that that takes boundaries. I think boundaries are a relational skill, especially when power dynamics have, I was actually just kind of writing a thing about this, before we got on, that I think that boundaries are evidence of our interconnection, not a denial of it, I think, when we start to deny our connection, that becomes something different, that's a wall, that's a generalized way of approaching connection. But a boundary is a responsive parameter that allows me to be in the relationship often, that's really what it is about. It's a relational skill, and when groups of people or when individual people have been taught that their parameter or their bounds exist, even around the space that you occupy, it is necessary for us to develop relational skills around boundaries, because some people have to tolerate being told no. And that will actually create the opportunity for balance too. So I think, I think we're in such a tangle, there's so many skills and so many tendencies. But for me, it's just like, how do we keep focusing on increasing our capacity to be centered, being clear and precise about what that is? How do we keep practicing inside of relationships authenticity, and the possibility of intimacy? How do we keep resisting a kind of tendency towards power over and domination that exists in us and keep moving towards the kind of power with, that doesn't diminish our own power? Those kinds of things are the things I'm interested in, that I feel like I focus on,
Ayana Young You know, another facet of this work that I think would be really interesting and helpful for listeners to hear about is around the idea of having positive arguments, or maybe regenerative conflict, because I think about the world we live in, especially the sort of acceleration of the political sphere entering into our lives; and we are given zero examples of how to have arguments and debates that move us forward; instead we’re shown probably the most polarizing and vitriolic examples that really only serve as a base form of entertainment if nothing else, and so maybe that is sort of where the cultural denial fits in too, but how can embodiment practices assist with this?
Prentis Hemphill Yeah. That's really interesting. When I teach that conflict course, you know, we talk about conflict aversion, like you mentioned, and I say, “Well, most, so many of the shows on TV these days are just people outright fighting”. So there's something about it, we're suppressing something at the same time, we're just consuming so much of it, too. I'm probably not the one to call it positive conflict, in some ways, I want people to know that it sometimes hurts, it’s sometimes hard. There is, you know, there may be facilitators, there are likely facilitators, better than me at it, but I do think one of the first things that I do I feel like is important is normalize that it's hard. That it’s hard, your body doesn't always know the difference between this person is coming at me, and this person is having an ideological difference than me, values difference than me. Because it feels like it's attached to our survival. Sometimes it very much is. And our bodies are responding whether or not we pay attention to that or not, your body's going to respond in some way that is meant to save your life. We can try to bypass that. But even the most centered, grounded person is going to be reactive, it's not about not being reactive, it's about returning to a wider capacity more quickly.
So I want people to know that it's hard and we're not always “good” at it. Sometimes it hurts, sometimes we say something we wish we hadn't. It doesn't mean that we want to do that. But I want people to know going in that sometimes it's hard. But what we're moving towards, where it gets really generative is when we are vulnerable, that they're, you know, one of the things I often say to when I'm facilitating is that there's a direct correlation between your satisfaction and your vulnerability. I'm not saying that it's equal, but I'm saying there's a direct correlation between the likelihood that you'll be satisfied and your willingness to be vulnerable. So I want people to know that, that's what we're trying to get to, we're trying to settle enough with one another. We're trying to risk enough with one another. To get to, “I'm hurt here.” “I am worried that this means that you think this about me.” The things that are hardest to say. Sometimes it means “I don't want to be in relationship with you anymore.” That might be the hardest thing to say, not everything is about coming together and holding hands at the end. But it may be about the thing that needs to be said the most.
So I think embodiment helps us by discerning in this immediate moment. What is life and death. When we're able to take a deep breath, our body is able to process able to record “Okay, I'm here, I'm not being chased by this person, but I am being hurt by this person.” Right? Or I am upset maybe I'm hurt about something that actually is not even real-time, just reminiscent of. Embodiment also helps us settle into those experiences, our wisdom. I know that if I do this, most likely it's not going to turn out the way that I want to, if I get up right now and turn this table over, likely won't resolve itself the way I want to. Embodiment is the resource because it helps connect us to the greater resource, which is the Earth, the ground. You know, when we hold contractions when we are reactive, it's pulling ourselves away from what resources us most, the breath, the body, the ground, and it pulls us into action, rightness, doing something fixing it. So embodiment is tapping into that resource that exists underneath and around us.
Ayana Young That's beautiful. Yeah, I'm just looking at the ground where I am and feeling that that deep comfort and knowing that they're here, and they always are, whether I acknowledge them or not. Thanks for the reminder. I know it seems sometimes so silly that we even need that reminder. But I know that I do. I really do a lot, and in a post titled “Letting Go of Innocence” you write; “It’s time to let go of our interpersonal obsession with innocence and guilt and see those concepts as what they are. Having facilitated conflict and transformative justice processes I can feel how programmed we are to grasp for innocence. Innocence offers safety, while guilt leaves you at risk for expulsion and isolation. Neither are fixed states, identity traits, but we treat them that way. And so many times in supporting people to wade through hard feelings, hurt feelings, harm, I’ve found that so many of us want innocence separate from accountability.” And this binary approach to guilt and innocence, feels as salient as ever because I see how many are so quick to assign guilt and in turn, are also incredibly quick to seek out groups that they believe are able to absolve them, so I’d like to bring this up in context to conflict and why it’s really imperative for all movements to move out of this binary?
Prentis Hemphill Yeah, I wrote that after facilitating some conflict and being on the phone with people that were just vying for innocence with me and I, there was a part of me that was like, I'm not a judge, I'm not going to bestow innocence on you. But at the same time, I could hear their desperation in a way, their fear of what would happen if they were made guilty. And all of that, all of that obscures what actually happened, what actually needs to happen. What do we do from here, and that's the most important work. To me. That's where things really change, or things really transform is when we get down to that, but if we are afraid, if we're afraid to say, if we're afraid to reflect, then we don't ever get to that work and I think that's what the judicial system has really trained us into, that we have to vie for our innocence, or else. And so we do that amongst each other, but we never get to what now? We never get to healing, we never get any of that. That's much more transformative. And I think, you know, the binary way of approaching our goodness, our innocence, is so detrimental to liberation of any kind, to being authentic in any way, to having sustainable relationships. It's a paradigm that, you know, we talked earlier about culture of denial. You know, James Baldwin, really taught me this, that that is, you know, as an example, whiteness, that is one of the things that gets folded into the concept of whiteness is perpetual innocence. And so no matter what whiteness does, it has to be innocent because of how it was created. Now, this isn't white people, but it's like the concept of whiteness must be innocent, must have a justification for what it's done. And that's where I think we get I mean, also, kind of Christian hegemony also offers us this and kind of like good and evil, these binary ways of being, but it really keeps us kind of like scrambling for these assignments or these declarations, especially for people or groups that don't have access to innocence very often, we have to scramble because we know what guilt brings. But I think there's another way I just think it requires a different attention inside of our cultures and inside of our groups or communities. That it's, it's, we can stay in a little bit more complexity, we can do a little bit more thoughtful work there. We can ask who is hurt and what can be done. We can care for healing, we can tend to one another, it just requires a lot of things that are not quick and easy, flashy, for us to really live in that space in between.
Ayana Young Wow there's so much there. Yeah. The innocence guilt binary thinking about also what, you know, what is connected to whiteness in our culture, and how somehow, even if, like part of these, like, well sometimes, let’s just say corporations are guilty, but they are somehow deemed innocent because of the pervasive whiteness that upholds them. So it's just really, I definitely want to shatter the binary, then there's that also, that part of me that's like, and what's so frustrating is that it's not even, even when the binary is put in place it's not actually, it's not, right. It's not correct. And so it's like, yeah, this isn't even working. I mean, I've watched so much in the legal system, even in my own life, just be crazy. I mean, like, it doesn't even it's not even rational. And so, yeah, gosh, I just have so much that came up for me in your response.
Prentis Hemphill Yeah, and the corporations, you know, it's like, are they innocent or are they guilty? That matters to the point of what are we going to do about them? What are they doing to people? What do we do next? What's actually the impact? Can we measure that and take that seriously? It's like, we can't stop at these terms. Because we’re not thinking through what are they teaching us about who we are? What are they telling us about our culture? What do we need to do to transform? Trying to pin them down in this way, obscures the real work, I think.
Ayana Young Yeah, because it right, it's too theoretical or something, it doesn't come back down to the ground. How do we even deal with, even if we were to say they are guilty, how do we even materialize that?
I’d like to highlight some of your thoughts around reclaiming our right to feel, but also maybe interrogating a bit around our capacity for feeling. You’ve written about the connections between freedom and feeling, and as I sit with this, I’m thinking about my own capacity for feeling, and if I’m being honest I go in waves; I feel a lot and I act, and then I need to feel less as sort of a survival mechanism; but I do wonder how much of that is sort of a desensitization process that has unfurled in my lifetime; and whether or not this is authentic or where my own capacity might be stuck, and I’m not asking about myself I’m just using myself as an example, so with that as a preface, I wonder how you see the beginnings of recovering our capacity to feel taking shape?
Prentis Hemphill Hmm. I think for me, when I think about freedom, and the freedom that I want for all people and the freedom that I want from my people, I want us to be able to inpartm feel our lives and feel the joys and feel the sorrows and feel the grief and feel the love and feel all of those things. And there are so many ways that we are not able to feel the ups and downs, the ebbs and flows, and that our ebbs and flows are often very dramatic highs and lows. So that is kind of how I came to feeling, you know, I was like, what, in some ways, what good is freedom if we don't feel it? And what I'm actually interested in is the feeling of freedom - being discovered being, you know, blossoming inside of people, and what it takes to create an environment where that's possible. That doesn't mean we feel good all the time. It just means that we feel our lives as they are, and we have enough space to do that.
Recovering the capacity to feel, for me, it's been you know, it's been a kind of thawing, I think, in a lot of ways I was taught that I couldn't feel, it wasn't time to feel, it was inappropriate or dangerous to feel, or honestly impossible to feel everything that I might feel if I opened myself up to it. And so for me, it's been a journey of getting curious about myself, you know, I feel my freest when I can be present. When I'm here, like, I'm here with you, right now, we're having this connection and we're having this conversation, that's when I feel free. That's what I want for all of us. I'm not, at the moment, being bombarded with a lot of things that aren't here. I can feel this. And there's no bad if we are, it’s just, where's the space and time, which not all of us have, to sit with the things that are revisiting us that are asking us to learn from them that are asking us to feel them, that's what I'm trying to do in my work is create the spaces so people can feel the things that are haunting them, so that they can feel their lives right now. Which I think helps us be more in them more engaged, to make decisions that are responsive to live our time and enjoy our time here, while we're here.
Ayana Young I’d like to move into some reflections you’ve shared about what we’ve experienced most recently, and in a post titled “Contagion, Consent, and Connection” you write; “As an embodiment teacher, I keep thinking about what our somas are learning in this moment. What are they deciding is the truth about interaction and connection now, and what is safe for human relationship. I’ve watched human physical connection, at least in public, dissolve in a week.” And I’m really curious about how the psychology of fear, which you know, I want to state we obviously have a lot to be fearful of, I’m not diminishing that, but how that translates into our body?
Prentis Hemphill You know, it's interesting, cuz I feel like, over the period of these COVID times, we've seen a lot of things, I think, you know, and I’m making big generalizations, but I think we're in that period, at least with folks around me, of fatigue, you know, both in the grief that people have experienced, the fear and the adrenaline that has just had to run through our bodies. You know, when it first hit, I was watching it in January, and trying to let people around me know that I thought this thing was coming. And I was afraid and trying to like, not appear too fearful, I think is what I was doing. Because I didn't want to alarm other people. But I wanted people to prepare because it seemed like something that was happening and going to be in front of us. Soon.
My mother's a nurse, in a Texas hospital that has been hit by COVID in a really heavy way. She's older, and I was very, I mean, she's the demographic of people that struggle the most in a lot of ways, and I had a lot of fear, had a lot of fear for a long, long time and found myself just really adrenalized for a long period of time, around COVID, you know, certain kind of hypervigilance, you know, I'm making the kind of internal distinction for myself between being cautious and taking precautions, but it's the kind of what I was trying to speak to in that piece was like, yeah, there are things we have to do now. And I'm taking it very seriously, you know, the precautions we have to take. But then there's also the mood that we bring to those things, also the story that we tell ourselves about what's happening, and how that can be so dominated by fear. And again, there's so much to actually be afraid about. Absolutely. And what I was trying to kind of point to in that piece was like, we could tell ourselves a story that is too dangerous to be connected to one another, that fear could go that far. Our fear could get overwhelmed, our systems could get overwhelmed, or we could say, it's too dangerous. It's not possible to make connection. Or we could say “Oh, I'm a human being and I long for connection”, that principle of connection that I've longed for. So how do I create a connection in my life that's not necessarily the same as creating more contact in my life? How do I infuse the moments where I am connected to people with more intimacy, with more revealing, so that it starts to satisfy that real need for connection that I have, in a way that's possible in this moment. So that we can be afraid, we can have fear, but fear isn't necessarily shaping every aspect of how we relate and live and we get to infuse. We get to have choice at those points. How are we going to do this? How are we going to do this in a way that fear might tell us to just pull away from it all together.
So that's really been my attention in my own life over this last year. It's like how do I infuse more presence, more intimacy, more connection so that something gets touched? And honestly I feel like it's really transformed my relationships, like some relationships have become very sacred, some have come out of nowhere, some have come like a blast from the past, some have ended in this moment. Because the intimacy that was required was too much. So I think that um, I think that fear wants to cast a really wide blanket over everything, it wants to have us withdraw, protect, and I think that embodiment helps us ask the questions where we didn't think questions are possible. How might I do this? That's what embodiment does for me. It creates possibility. Oh, fear says that's not possible embodiment says, but how would I do it? If I longed for that? How would I do it in this context? How would it feel Can I open myself up to those So yeah, that's really been my guide.
Ayana Young I want to also mention in the last post I mentioned, you talk about how this moment is really providing us space to re-examine how consent plays out in the world. And you write “We have, for one, the ability to practice consent. Consent around proximity, consent around touch. Many of us are realizing how unpracticed we are here. This isn’t just because we’re all disrespectful people but also because of how many of us are a part of cultures that have norms, especially around touch, that are not consent based. Do you reject an elder’s kiss? Redirect that handshake, decline that hug? Do you ask before you initiate those same gestures? People have always needed distance, whether expressed or not, because of what is communicable. For many of us, choice has not been something we allowed for own bodies, let alone been curious about in others. Practicing consent brings us closer to a shared reality of experience, where multiple needs can be honored and known.” How do you see us carrying what we’ve learned during this time forward?
Prentis Hemphill Oh, wow. Will we? Yes, we will. Everything is always happening, so yes we will. Yeah, you know, if I'm real, in that moment, when I wrote that I was actually struggling a little bit to understand the complexities of consent. I had just moved to the U.S. from Hawaii, and been there for, my partner's from Hawaii and the culture there is that basically, people kiss you, when they greet you and I was texting my friend there and I was just like, how are people dealing? Like, what is happening because it is just breaking down an aspect of culture that I think probably many people have, I can't speak for people, but mixed feelings, complicated feelings about but I was like, oh this is infusing a new thing into spaces where we has assumed that this was the accepted norm. And I was feeling conflicted about that, like, how's it gonna undo this practice that has been alive in Hawaii for so long? Something about that doesn't seem right to me. And then, you know, I don't have an answer to that I'm not going to land anywhere in particular on that, because I don't think it's necessary to. But I do think it has infused consent in a different way.
It's also revealed where some people resist acknowledging the parameters of another's space or being, you know, the resistance to that. But I hope that we will have a little bit more consent around proximity. I think that that will serve us just because there's been maybe it's almost like a reset. There's been so many things we've taken for granted. What are we going to choose about how we relate to one another now? I think that we will, I don't know how well people have rested in this time. I don't know. You know, in the beginning of this time, I prayed every night for kids who couldn't leave a home that was challenging for them to be in. So I hold that reality that some people are at home and have suffered because of that. I know that that's true. And I know that for myself, I have been home and I have loved it very much. And I have created a new capacity for closeness and intimacy in my own home that I hadn’t. I was traveling so much before this year like so, so much and now I'm just at home and I thought I would have a lot of anxiety around that. But I feel like it's been amazing. So I hope for some people that there's a, I keep saying this word intimacy, because it's really important for me, that there's a reigniting of the space of intimacy of, of deep connection with those that they've potted up with, or that they live with, or that they have, you know, zoom parties with, I hope that that is true and I hope that that permeates into the broader culture, because I know that's not everybody's experience. So I think that's one of the things that I hope we get off of, zoom. Now, that's, that's gonna be hard. Zoom and Instagram have become places where avatars are thriving. I hope that we kind of let that go a little bit. But I doubt it.
Ayana Young I think a lot of folks are in that boat and I agree with you on that. In certain ways they are are magical technologies that allow us to connect with one another, like at this moment, but I definitely see the flip side and I think the memes around being on zoom are hilarious. I really appreciate when people make fun of and be in laughter around the ridiculousness of these technologies. And you know, not take it too seriously, although it's very strange, and, you know, very, potentially problematic. So I hear you, yeah. And there was a conversation you had with adrienne maree brown titled “How the Wonder of Nature Can Inspire Social Justice Activism'' published in Yes Magazine! you share: “Sitting on that ground, it occurred to me, through my body first, then my thoughts, that the Earth, the land was the key. The Earth has held everything that’s ever happened to us. And in psychology we see health indicated by our romantic or familial or work relationships, but there’s never an assessment of our relationship with place and land. It was a huge realization for me to feel that as a healing justice organizer and practitioner, I could borrow from the ground because it has always had the most capacity. And I can keep pointing our people in the direction of the ground and the land to hold what seems impossible. For Black people in the U.S., this is a complicated conversation and one I feel is critical to our collective healing.”
Prentis Hemphill I forgot that I wrote that, until just now when you brought that back, and it’s like oh wow, yeah.
Ayana Young Yeah, it’s powerful I think about this a lot, how if we want a chance - we need to reconnect, but it becomes complicated because of histories and severances...and somehow in the past couple of years; I think this complication has really been commodified by massive corporations who have heard these conversations, and think about the amount of money that can be made in encouraging folks to reconnect with Earth; and while it’s had some positive impacts, it’s also really unspiritualized this practice, I wonder if you could share what an embodied and spiritual approach to mending one’s relationship with place and land means to you?
Prentis Hemphill Yeah, you know, this is something that I'm very much in process around. I moved - I’m from the South and moved back to the South last year and it has been quite a journey. And I live, you know, I live out in the country, and I live not terribly far from where my ancestors were brought, enslaved, to United States, and where they settled for many years. And it has been grieving around all of that, to begin a relationship with land and place. A few things that come to me when you ask the question, one, a good friend of mine, Sendolo Diaminah, who is an organizer here in Durham, North Carolina, we were sitting on the porch last summer, and he said, you know, the stories are around us, even if we don't know them. We can feel them, you know, the stories, the history, we can feel them. It's here. It's mediating our relationships with one another. And that just felt so real to me, that so many of us are trained out of paying attention to the ecosystem in which we are, that creates us, makes us every day. But it still does. And it is still doing whether or not you know where your watershed is, whether or not you know the quality of your soil, or which zone you're in, or what, what the native plants are to a place, there's still very much impacting your life. So it's, for me an ongoing process of grieving, the painful process of losing knowledge, and I feel like there are a couple of losses of knowledge that, you know, I have to grieve, for my ancestors who never saw their land again, the land that they grew up on, and they knew so well, that they cared for, I'm imagining how much that hurt, probably much the same as not seeing the faces of their family members again, you know, but to also, you know, I was interviewing someone recently, they were talking about their great-great, great grandmother bringing seeds and her hair, to this continent, on the slave ships, so that her food could be grown here too and sustain her family. I have to feel those stories, I have to know that I'm grieving that. And then, you know, I have to grieve for the people, the knowledge, especially in this place, where I live, there was just such a massive displacement of the people who are Indigenous to this place, massive, massive displacement, and efforts to erase. And I have to care about that, because that shapes my relationship, it shapes what I can know, it shapes what we can know, to live in the wake of such an attempt to erase knowledge. Now, we know that it's not erased, we know there are people who hold it, but there are many things that are lost and have to be rediscovered over time. And that's just a way that's going to be.
There's no magical return, we're not all going to return to an unblemished time in history. And if we know that, I mean, that's at least what I believe, I don't think there is an unblemished time in history, if we know that, if we're here now, what do we have to do? Who needs to have conversation with whom? Who needs to heal what relationship? Who needs to ask for what permission? Who needs to offer something back? I think that's where we're at right now.
And I'll also just say, lastly, that what I found so far is like growing food, relating more to land. It's not just some beautiful, magical relationship, it's like every other relationship, it's hard. It's beautiful. It's messy. You know, we had birds last year, and many of them were just killed in one night by a raccoon that was hungry, do you know what I mean? That happens, that’s life and we have to know that. That relationship has every lesson in it that we can learn about attachment, about loss, about love, about sacrifice, but it's going to be like every other relationship, it's going to be full of beauty and pain and it's going to keep teaching us you know, when we long for attachment when we don't have anywhere else to go. It's right there for us to attach to there's a place where you always belong, and it is planet Earth, and I don't mean that in some cheesy kind of way - you just do, but you have to choose it. You have to choose that belonging which means you have to learn, you have to be yourself, you have to not know, you have to learn the name. I always say to people, learn the name of the tree outside of your window, learn what its poisons and medicines are. Start there and then the world will keep just revealing its magic to you.
Ayana Young Wow, that was so moving to hear you speak those words and yeah, personally I woke up with this feeling of loneliness and this kind of chronic like low fog, and hearing you say that really brought me back to my senses and brought me back to the Earth. Which does always hold me and I am so grateful for them for always being here even when I'm naughty or not good and messy and sloppy and all of those, all of it, you know all of our humaneness and gosh, I think just hearing that from another human is so heartening and relieving and like, okay, deep breath like, here we are. And so I yeah, I just appreciate you saying that on a collective and a personal level and Prentis, thank you so much for your time and attention and presence and depth. I mean, this conversation put me in chills more than once and I just am so grateful for this time with you. And as we close, I would just like to offer any final words or ways to direct listeners to learn more about your work and that of The Embodiment Institute…
Prentis Hemphill Yeah, I'm doing most of my work through The Embodiment Institute right now. So in the next year, we are building out opportunities to come together around what it means to have a body, why that's important for our healing. What is rest mean? What does resilience mean? What does it mean to heal shame? In this context that we're in, we have a project called the Black Embodiment Initiative, which will, is kind of rolling out our Black space, where we're going to be kind of working to heal in particular, the way anti-Blackness shapes are realities and we just hope that this can be a place to really ignite our curiosity, our healing journeys, and our kind of work towards becoming more embodied.
I also have a podcast called Finding Our Way, which will be launching its second season soon. I don't want to tell you the date. I don't know exactly when this podcast is coming out, but soon I don't know exactly when. And I think those are the main things main places where I spend my time these days. But I feel really grateful for the invitation for the thoughtful questions, they felt depthful from the start, and I really, really do appreciate that, it means a lot to me to be able to jump into the deep waters together. So thank you for that.
Francesca Glaspell Thank you for listening to For The Wild Podcast, the music you heard today was by Tan Cologne, This Flame I Carry, and The Breath. For The Wild is created by Ayana Young, Erica Ekrem, and Francesca Glaspell.