Where Personal Healing Meets Collective Change with Prentis Hemphill (295)

The ability to incorporate multiple perspectives and angles. To position ourselves in relationships with each other, there's something so that you can see that I cannot see. You can say, "Prentice, there's something that you can see that I cannot see." And that we negotiate our realities and our understandings through that, and that is power with. I still have my sense of agency and choice, and I'm open to being moved and modified by things that I don't yet understand. That power with, we are unskilful because we don't have the models, we don't have the spaces to practice that and what it really means. And I think it's a developmental miss that we are not really valuing that stage of the process of becoming an adult. And we're saying power is who has the biggest muscles, we're not realizing that that kind of power, still is power, but that kind of power ultimately destroys everything. Welcome to Therapist Uncensored, building on decades of professional experience this podcast tackles neurobiology, modern attachment, and more, in an honest way that's helpful in healing humans. Your session begins now with Dr. Anne Kelly and Sue Marriott. Hey you guys, why we know relationships are wonderful, they are also really hard. Many of us believe that they shouldn't be, that if we have good connection and good communication, things will just go smoothly, but it's really that belief that can make us feel stubborn and even more hopeless. So relationships take work, it does for Sue and I, we can make it look easy, it's not. And one of the ways is because many of us, we differ, we differ in what activates us, what makes us feel threat, the expectation, and it's these differences that are held in our body, not our thoughts. And they influence how we talk, how we love, how we fight. So holding that belief, if he or she or they could just understand me, if they love me, they do something different, is not really true. And we're talking about relationships with your partner, your teenager, your mother-in-law. So soon I've created an online course that can help you understand yourself and those you love in a different way. This is not just for therapist, it's for everyone. Although the good news is if you're therapist, you can get CEs along the way and all of you can use the visuals and the worksheets individually or you can even use them in your own private practice. So while the course is based on our book, Secure Relating, holding your own in insecure world, it is definitely not a replication of the book. We talked directly to you. You learn how to understand where deeply your attachment, those you love, the neuroscience behind it. And how to build secure types of connections right now in your everyday relationships. Rather than changing one another, you'll can shift together in very important ways. It's very powerful. We're getting great reviews. Check it out. It's at therapistuncensored.com/bas. Therapistuncensored.com/bas. The BAS stands for Beyond Attachment Styles, the science of growing, secure adult relationships. And by the way, the cost of the course is about the amount of one individual therapy session and yet you get hours and hours and hours of what we think is extremely valuable information. So check it out. [Music] Oh boy. This is a great conversation. This is not a how-to. This is an invitation into more full being. It's not poetic, but those are the words that come to mind after sitting with them. Princess Hempell is a therapist, a somatic practitioner, a political organizer, an author of the National Best Seller, what it takes to heal. They are also founder and director of the Embodiment Institute, which is an incredible organization with lots of resources that support the conversation that we were having. They're also a former healing justice director at the Black Lives Matter Global Network and host of the podcast, Finding Our Way. Their work brings together somatic embodiment, trauma, social justice, and it all asks what true healing really requires. I want to add that I don't know, there's not very many people in the world who are just being together, feels therapeutic, but that was my experience sitting with Princess. I want to grab a cup of coffee, show up with us. Pay attention at the very end of the episode. There's an invitation to create a reading pod around the book, what it takes to heal. I'm going to be leading at least one of those. I encourage you to join us so that we can learn together and be together as we struggle through this hard work and these hard times. Okay, it's my pleasure to bring you my conversation with Princess Hempell. Hey, everybody, it is my honor and pleasure to introduce Princess Hempell. I feel like I'm a student sitting at the feet of an expert that I just want to learn everything you have to share and it is my privilege to bridge all of my audience to your work. Would you want to just start out by kind of describing yourself and let's give them some context? Sure, and thanks for having me here. Let's see, I'm Princess Hempell. I have been many things, but the things that I'm sort of weaving together and braiding together in my life are the being an organizer and being a therapist and I guess also a somatic practitioner more specifically. And my work has really been about understanding how individual and collective transformation must go together in a way and how they go together. So it's really the focus of what I do. I am a writer. I wrote a book called What It Takes to Heal. And I'm also a podcast host. We have that in common. I have a podcast called Becoming the People and I'm a partner and a parent and those are really my primary identities day to day. Your book is a national bestseller. It needs to be on everybody's library and that's certainly one thing. Now you don't practice individual anymore, is that right? I don't practice individual anymore. I mostly teach groups, a lot of my work these days is with groups, working with groups, I work with orgs, I work with groups. That domain of the group space and the relational space is really, really juicy for me. So I don't do individual work anymore though. I was just talking to my former supervisor and I was like, I want to go back to it. A little bit I missed that world. So I have a little bit of FOMO for the folks that are listening that are still doing that. Well, I'm curious actually about you transitioning away from it because I definitely can feel the tension as well. I have a practice, especially a group practice, but I'm just drawn more and more to larger impacts or doing things differently. So yeah, what was your process? It sort of happened to me. I started my career as a young person doing organizing work and doing kind of work around social change. I was looking at issues of mass incarceration in particular. And that was where I thought my life would go. It's kind of in that direction looking at social issues, looking at systems, understanding that I originally studied history back in the day. So that was kind of where I was going. But I always had this like inkling that something, there was something in that world that we weren't giving attention to. And it was like what people were actually holding was showing up so much in the work that we did and how we did the work. I just got more and more interested in that. And actually I was living in the Bay Area at that time and found a somatic school that was a politicized somatics and that's why I started studying. And I got drawn into it and I was like I think I actually want to be a therapist. I think that's the path I want to go down. But it was, I was already thinking about the world and systems when I found that path. So it influenced how I went through that work. And actually what shifted for me was basically 2014 or so, the world kind of erupted the first time around Black Lives Matter. And I was involved in that kind of first wave, deeply, closely involved in the kind of inter-core. And I was being called on to do work with groups around the country that were responding to the moment, both the kind of grief that people were experiencing at the loss of their loved ones and then the organizing and the interpersonal dynamics. And I was kind of one of the only people that was in that orbit that had both the analysis and some level of skill. I just kind of stepped away from it because what I was trying to do on that kind of therapy path, what couldn't hold what I was being tasked with. So I started to create my own path in a different way. You were a founder in that movement, I believe, is that right? I was a part of the, how do I say I was in the first chapter in Los Angeles. I did the Healing Justice work is what we called it and then I was one of the first staff people at the organization. My friends were the folks that founded it, the actual founders and then there's like a layer of us that kind of the supportive folks underneath. And yeah, I was there until 2018 and then started doing more of the embodiment work that I do kind of full time. You know, I was actually just set a training, the American groups like the therapy training this past week. And there was this active conversation about how do you and a group. toggle between the interpersonal and systems lens. So I was really encouraged and happy that that's even a conversation at this point. Because historically, that's, we're just not trained as therapists, we're not trained to look with this other lens. And as a matter of fact, some of our work has been trying to even update the idea of attachment and, you know, relational neuroscience to include the culture and context and history that also impacts felt safety and felt threat. Is there any particular place you want to go from there and definitely I want to get into your book? Yeah, I mean, I think this kind of leads us into the book, but I think these questions that I think therapy is more open to in this moment around how the interpersonal and social show up and how, you know, in my work, it actually, all of that arrives in our bodies that there's experiences of trauma, there's collective trauma so we can understand that to some degree. And then in the work that I do, there's also the kind of conditioning of the world that we live in that starts to tell us who we are, how we should be, and this question of safety, create safety in some places, take sway safety in other places, through different kinds of social mechanisms, and can create traumas. I, one of the definitions that I have offered in the book, is that to me, oppression is actually trauma. It's the distribution of trauma into certain places, into certain bodies, certain regions of the world, certain zip codes. That is what oppression is when we, as a society, make choices that actually neglect the well-being of certain communities and create these narratives and therefore behaviors that continue to separate people or create difference and meaning around who we are to each other that shapes our whole reality and our whole life. So I think it's so important for psychotherapy to be grappling with some of these questions because we end up missing a whole realm of conditioning that I think shows up in the room all the time and some, and impacts each of us in significant ways. It certainly does. And, you know, the theory itself, like an attachment, right, it comes back from, you know, from the '50s and everybody was embedded and the power structures that they were and so we can see what we can see and we project that. And so it's difficult to, you know, how do you update that and how do you incorporate that? And that's been the essence of your work. Yeah, and trying to update things, I mean, I move with a lot of appreciation for all the discoveries that have been made and I also, I will say, find that it can be really hard. The systems have a hard time updating. They have a hard time incorporating new information. And especially if we look at the context and we, I think we can say, that who we understand as a culture, our experts, our know, or our normal, or our fully human, all these kind of ideas we have swimming around, it makes it harder and harder for us to listen to voices that are different or seem unfamiliar. Speaking of ways we may not immediately understand and we might assign our unfamiliarity, we might assign to that less value. And so trying to move into the field and say, "Hey, there's things that you haven't considered, there's things that you don't understand, there's other contexts, there's other experiences, it can be a really challenging thing to do." Well, and I even think that difference can evoke threat, right, if we're not ready for it. So it's almost by design that it gets pushed out. It's what that I might say. So what then should we do as a field? Where are you pressing? What are you suggesting? It's a good question because it's only in the last couple years that I feel like I've almost come back to the field of psychotherapy. I've been working in, I've seen different areas. I've been less invested in a way in kind of shifting psychotherapy, but it's felt more open in the last period. I think there are doors that exist. I think the doorways of understanding collective trauma that has been there for a while. There have been people that have been talking about developmental trauma, talking about collective trauma. Those are paths that I kind of come in through and say, "And there's more." And us, and even when I wrote my book, I remember I was saying to my editor, "I don't want to write at a safe clinical distance." I actually want to write differently than a lot of the books that I've read that kind of position the expert here and then everyone else, and the issues and the things that they're struggling with over here as kind of specimens. I actually want to put myself in there because I think that's a lot of what we are misunderstanding is our own shaping, our own deep conditioning into the systems that we live in. And as therapists, as any kind of practitioner, I want us to put ourselves in there and understand that we are forwarding certain ways of being. There are certain things that we are embodied in that we are bringing forward and we need to understand what those are because they impact the relational space, they impact, I mean, our whole world view is shaped by what we've been taught and what we know in this field. So I don't allow myself to sit at a kind of safe distance where I don't investigate myself and what it is that I embody and believe. And so, you know, that's one of the things that I work with a lot of therapists around is like, "Who are you?" And how did you come to be? What's threatening to you? What's safe to you? These are important questions, especially if you're working with people you know day in and day out and sometimes working across difference. You will, I mean, all that content is there. All that stuff is there all the time. It is there all the time and again, we're conditioned to, especially if they're dressed to, you know, it's not the direct line of inquiry. Some of us get in this field so that we're not looking at ourselves. Exactly. Always say it's a great place to hide. That's a great defense. It really is. And in a lot of my groups, I have therapists and it's so great to have, I always mix non-therapists and therapists together so that they can be like, "Stop it! You're doing that thing!" Just kind of digging down a little bit as I think about some of the weight, like if you're asking, you know, "What does it feel like?" And that I think one of the things that gets in the way, particularly for white-bodied therapists, is this sort of urgency to get it right, this shame for not knowing, then that causes us to be too afraid to ask or to make mistakes. Which I now have come to understand is a version of white fragility that I hadn't understood before. You know, what's your kind of observation of that kind of thing? Oh wow. Yeah. I mean, this is uncensored. I really want to know, you know, anything that you want to say is welcome. I mean, if we can kind of pull back into theory a little bit, all of these, I mean, racial identities on some level, they have real material consequence and all of that. It's real and I feel really black as a black person. And they are absolutely constructs. And I don't say that just in kind of like, "Oh, it's not real. It's a construct." What I mean is like, if something is constructed, if it is built, and if it is reified and transforms in a change, what it is built, it's sort of a thing you opt into or you're trained into. It's changed over time. The way whiteness appears now is going to be different than whiteness of 150 years. ago, it's kind of parameters change. But as an almost standalone concept, it has bounds. It has logics embedded in it. There's things that whiteness does and does not do. And one of the things, especially whiteness in this era, I think, and I think for lots of reasons, really this, I think whiteness of a kind of post-desegregation time, post-civil rights movement whiteness. But there's a through line from previous generations of whiteness. But whiteness, in a way, has to be right. That is what its function is. Is that this is a class of people that are, I talk about this a lot of my work, but the perception that especially from the outside is these are the right people. These are the normal people. These are the real human people. And that's what whiteness has to kind of hold. Now inside of whiteness there's people. There's people. There's just people. There's just people like there's people everywhere. But in order to maintain a sense of who you are inside of that context and through that conditioning, you have to be right. You have to find rightness and goodness. You have to be good in there. And what that can mean when you are an actual human being with a bunch of different motivations and a lot of things working unconsciously is that if you do something that is either out of alignment with who you are or is maybe motivated by something that you don't want to know about, you're going to have to figure out how to incorporate that and get back to good. Or else you won't know who you are. And that's a terrifying prospect if I don't know who I am. So either I'm going to have to be under accountable for the thing. I'm going to have to like shame. It's going to have to take me back under there. There's all these things that will come to rescue you from the knowledge that you're fallible in a particular way, or that you can be ignorant, or that you can be motivated by things that are distasteful. There are all kinds of mechanisms that kind of then become embedded in whiteness that rescue you from that reality. And I think goodness, badness, innocence, guilt, these aren't words that can be, you can't just drop that on a person, they have to live inside of that for their whole lives. Like, a whole race of people aren't guilty, or bad, or good, or innocent. We are complex beings, all of us, but when we have to live into these assignments, then we have to take on all these other psychological gymnastics in order to stay inside of that concept, inside of that bubble. So I think the goodness, shame, fragility, all of that stuff is really coming up because people are trying, they're starting to see the edges of what the thing is. And we haven't yet broken through where people know how to like, actually get on the other side of it. But we see this goodness, I've got to be good, this shame, this fragility, all this emerging is people are trying to take different kinds of risks as James Baldwin would say, like, people who insist that they are white. That are trying to also be human, you'll find all these things on the edges, on the margins of that experience. But in a sense in guilt, I really, you know, as a society, I wish I could really interrupt those ideas. I think they're really, really damaging, actually. I'm struck as you're talking by your tenderness about this, like it feels, again, safety, right? It's safe to keep going. And as a white person approaching, you know what I mean? It's like, ah, like there really is that. And so I was really struck by the, just as feeling of tenderness, which is, I think, intentional, I imagine. It's intentional. And I think it's also, is it intentional? Yeah. But I think it's actually where I'm positioned in myself. And when I talk about James Baldwin or someone like Tony Morris, and those are the people that have taught me actually a lot about how to understand the myths that we tell and the impact that it has on human beings, but also how to understand who I am in that. And, you know, actually for me, I have an understanding of my deep humanity. And that offers me a kind of generosity, I guess, of like, it's not a permissiveness. You know, I wouldn't say that's exactly it, but it feels, I feel generous, because I understand that we are all in a way trapped inside of myths that we don't even see, or trying not to find our way out of them. But yeah, I understand that. Yeah, it feels like it's an authenticity. It's just where you are. And I was thinking when I said intentional of like how that it can serve us not to make somebody defensive or not to stir that stuff up. And when we're talking about goodness, and again, it's just one of my learnings has been being able to work with perfectionism, embracing imperfectionism as a way of dismantling patriarchy. That's right, all of it. Yeah. All of it, all of it embracing, I almost push us further. It's like embracing your multiplicity, the multiple, like the motivations, all the unconscious, like embracing all of that, and not grasping or scrambling to become good. I think, you know, when you're working with anybody, I know when I've worked with people, it's like, I can hold them in this wide open space. Which is really humbling to me, to see a person and their twists and turns and unconscious. And I love to see it. And it teaches me about what human beings are and how to hold a human being who is their own process in a certain kind of regard. And I don't have to hold them in like, you're a good person. I mean, I trust in people's kind of inherent goodness. It's not that I don't believe that we are good, but I believe that we are people. And we also are trying to get our needs met and we're doing the best that we can. And I suspend that a little bit. I suspend assigning that kind of value to a person. I just want to know you. I just want to know who you are. And good, bad, ugly, who are you? Who are you? As practitioners of therapists, are you the kind of space where someone can be who they are? You know, and really be. Yeah, and it's funny. It's almost like to be that kind of person to invite all the multiplicities requires us to be messy and all of these undoings. But in talking about humanity and goodness and not goodness, I'm also thinking about just our political climate right now. And the horrors that are happening. And it's like just pick which one, which atrocity. But, you know, I'd love for you to just speak to this moment in time. It's hard to bring words to what is happening with what velocity. And I also know it's like as therapists, therapists turning the corner of kind of looking at the collective, looking at the context, looking at history. And then it also being inside of this moment where there's just a convergence of almost everything at once happening. It can feel overwhelming. Certainly, I feel overwhelmed each day, you know, by what is happening in the scale. I think what helps me understand it. I hate it. And I think what helps me understand it is a lot of what we've been discussing. And I think we're seeing that, well, there's so many levels. But where the delusion of superiority, where it will take you, where it will go, what its in-game is, kind of that deep separation, how far it will take us. And to what kind of violence it will have us create to maintain those myths, whether they're racialized myths or, you know, cultural gender-based myths, all these myths that we're living in are coming to a head, a really, really destructive head. And every day, I'm like, gosh, I really hope that we can learn these lessons, you know, before it's too late. But it's already too late for so many people. It's too late for somebody right now. For us to be learning the things that we need to do, it's already too late. And at the same time, there's still space and time. And so I'm longing for us to really, really, really, really myself, implicate myself in this. Wean ourselves from these myths that position us in places that we think are slightly safer. Then where someone else is positioned, we position ourselves through this myth-making. And to positions that we think will save our lives. But in the end, it is the myth that will tear us all apart, that will take us all down. So yeah, that's what I see. I don't know exactly what to do. I don't know exactly what the offeramp is. I don't know exactly what the thing is, but it feels like the next best step is this work of actually becoming human beings with each other that can reveal our vulnerabilities or as my friend Oscar always talks about me. He says, "I can always see your wound ability, but I also see how strong you are at the same time." It's like that. Let's meet there. I know that whatever must happen in this moment will actually emerge from there. It will not emerge from us and our conditioning and the myths we have in our back pocket and our disembodiment. None of the answers will emerge from that. That keeps creating the world as it is. I think what we need exists in this other realm and this other way of being. And I want as many of us to get there as possible. I am so powerful. No, this is so powerful. But I'm also imagining listeners. And so when you said, you were locating it within yourself that you're struggling with this. So would you mind like being even more specific? When you say myth, what do you mean? What do you struggle? What method do you struggling with? Just as an example. That's a great one. That's a great way in. So for example, growing up in this country, you learn this is the best country in the world. And all those other people in other countries, they're like, all right, but this is the place to be. The people here are better. I had it in Texas. I'm from Texas too. Oh, there we go. I'm from Texas too. Oh, but I'm not. I'm not. We're both sitting in North Carolina right now too. - Oh really? Both North Carolina and Estelle. - Oh yeah, on the other side. Wow, yeah, Texans to North Carolina. I mean, Texas you had extra dough. Not only are you in the best country, you're in the best state that should be its own country. It's extra, extra, extra. I saw someone post something yesterday that basically replaced the word, you know, 'cause there were attacks on Lebanon yesterday and someone replaced the word Lebanon with London. And they were like, what was your reaction when you thought that this was happening in London? As an idea, that kind of like, who do I actually value above someone else? And we may think, oh, I'm a great person. That's again, when you, when we're like, I'm a good person, it can obscure to you where you are on, where things are incongruent. And so let's drop that for a minute and just say I'm a person. That is learn some things, learn some things that are great, learn some things that are not so great, I wanna know what those are. I wanna understand who I am. I don't need to be good, I just wanna be known. So that's what I mean, that myth, that American myth of our specialness, I think the project of the United States is a very interesting one. And one that hasn't really happened like this. That doesn't make the people inside of us special, doesn't make us particularly good, it doesn't make us better than anybody else, that's a myth I had to come down from. I had to wean myself off of that myth. And first I had to see it. And a lot of us were living inside a myth that we take as the truth, we function inside of them without being aware of what they are. So a myth, another one I'll say, when I first started running 'cause I run, I hated it and I really was bad at it. And I told myself, 'cause I'd seen it on this commercial, I was like, run like a guy. That's what I said, it's just a little trick. And I ran further than I never run before. Because I had this myth. - I'm just totally relating, I literally-- - You know what I'm saying? - Right, my partner and I sometimes say to me, like what would a dude say? - Exactly. - I wanna do it, I need you to be a little more with do mind. Just say it, you know? - Exactly. - Yeah, yeah, that's so true. - So we have that in us of like, oh, this is what a guy can do, this is what a girl can do. That's a myth that we live inside of and not only is it kind of just like something we talk about, but it's something that actually impacts how we live and how we live in our own bodies. Miss around, I mean, I have so many, but I remember being a kid and I was doing a spelling bee. And this is sort of a tragic story. And I knew I was gonna win the spelling bee. But I couldn't imagine 'cause the school that I went to was pretty segregated. I didn't have an image, a model in my mind for someone like me winning the spelling bee. So I lost it on purpose. Because I didn't have a model in my mind. And what I thought about myself and my own intelligence was that I could not be a person that could win the spelling bee. That is a myth. And we exist on all sides of these myths, superiority and superiority, but they're just made up, but they keep our current reality in check. And each of us, everybody listening to this, has their own. Get to know yourself. What are the myths you're holding? What do you think, who do you think you are in relationship to me or relationship to Sue, or relationship to anybody else that you'll see on your journey to work today? Who are you in relationship to them? Get to know the myths that have become embedded in your own tissues and your own body and your own behaviors. I think it's so important. - It brings to mind this example of someone describing the Big Dipper that once you, somebody points out the Big Dipper, when you look, you can't not see it. It's the Big Dipper. But in reality, it's just a collection of stars. And so that we're projecting this image onto. So I have sort of in my own mind thought, but is that a big different meaning? Like, is that one of those projections of just this assumption that we're all seeing the same thing and we're not actually? So I want to also just touch on power. And I had heard your interview where you were talking about child sexual abuse. And with today's, again, one of the atrocities that I think are all related, whether it be the big guns, the horrific, horrific stories of these survivors being repressed and threatened and just the gaslight. Gaslighting is such a, I don't even know the right word. It's such a, it's not even, it's a hundredth of a, whatever of what the, right? Like, I don't, there's no, I can't, I wish I had language of this flipping, you know what I mean, where this something happens and it makes you, you're the crazy one or that's not true or how could you think, how could you think that about that person? What's wrong with you? So that dance and you had talked about power in particular just the thing that drew it all together was power, particularly around child sexual abuse. I think power is this really under explored phenomenon in human relationships. I don't think we pay close enough attention to power. And I think when we do see it, some of us think, oh, that's bad. Or we think, oh, that's for somebody else to do or our relationship to power isn't as, I think clean and clear and all of that, even though we'll say empowered, but it's like, what is power? And I think in part on the individual and the body level on the one human being level, I feel my most powerful when I feel like I am, I'm sort of saying it from a somatic perspective, I think I can probably say that here. When most of me is doing the same thing at the same time, I feel my most powerful. So when I'm doing something and there's not a part of me that's also pulling me back into some other story or hiding here, it's like, I've recruited actually most of me to do this thing. I feel in my power and effective. I feel like what I'm intending is being expressed through my actions and there's a congruence there. I feel powerful or I can feel my power. There's a definition, I think it's Martin Luther King, it's like power is the relative ability to achieve purpose in the world. Like I can do more or less what I intend, what I'm trying to do. And that can and necessarily includes other people on different scales. Our community has the power to shape what kind of food we have here. What we eat, what happens to the water in our community, et cetera. We have the power to make those decisions. I think for a lot of reasons, most people these days feel disempowered. We have been over generations kind of coerced out of the places where we have in the past been able to express power or feel power. Even the way we consume media in a way has its own disempower and kind of mechanisms. So I think a lot of people do not feel powerful in trauma. I think there's this correlation between power, agency, obviously that choicefulness. And I think child sexual abuse is largely about the exertion of power, either trying to reify an idea of the kind of power someone feels like they should have in the world. Maybe their own deep sense of powerlessness, truly are feeling like I should have this amount of power, but I don't feel like I have power. It's about power over someone who has very little defense. And power over, I mean, I think we're seeing that both on the CSA and the child sexual abuse level, but it's sort of in this moment, it's becoming the rule of the time that you exert power over. And that force gets some things done. It has terrible repercussions. It has terrible blowback. It's just physics at this point, thinking about what power over does. And it reveals an unskilfulness in power with, power through negotiation, power that can compromise, adapt, incorporate, listen. And that kind of power, democratic power in that way, that kind of power is not just nice to do because we're good people, but the ability to incorporate multiple perspectives and angles to position ourselves in relationship to each other to go, there's something too that you can see that I cannot see. And we're saying power is who has the biggest muscles? We're not realizing that that kind of power, it still is power, but that kind of power ultimately destroys everything. It has to, destroys everything, but the biggest and the baddest. And yeah, I think there's a different way, but I don't think as a society, we're really developed into it at this point. And you touched on this earlier about when you have people not interested in this cooperative shared experience that are hanging onto their own power and when there's nothing to stop them, that's the danger that we're in. And then you see it with the baddest, And then you see it with the files and then you see it with the cover up and same thing. Yeah Same thing same thing same thing if you understand that to be power There's no one that's safe in that kind of assessment There's no one that's safe and in fact, I mean, I think with the files. It's like ritualizing that kind of abuse is It's almost an embodiment practice like what do we choose to embody we choose to embody a kind of callous power over of the most vulnerable So that what we do in the world financially inform policy more it will be much easier when we've ritualized this kind of abuse It's a practice that then extrapolates onto a larger scale onto a system scale and I think it's all part of the same Kind of theory I think a lot of people have about what power is and the truth is in a way We've had that misunderstanding too. I think there's a lot of us that are awakening to what's happening But a lot of people are in the positions of power they are because we had the same misunderstanding of what power was and what it looked like and We craved the certainty of certain kind of strong leaders and we pushed those things forward because we were afraid and didn't know or felt disempowered over overwhelmed and We gave certain things away to people that Their model of power was ultimately a destructive one so my hope is that we learn in this moment What's the model of power that we choose and how do we Engage with that in our own lives and not just give it over not just give it over to somebody else to do but we engage in it all of us You know, I think that's the way I Really feels a little full circle because I think about we're afraid So we want the biggest daddy right like my daddy can beat up your daddy whatever exactly and then I'm gonna either have to reckon with the shame I feel You know what I mean like the it's a crisis and The way that the power is maintained is if I just feel ashamed or if I look away You know what I mean then I'm supporting that that power over still so that we all Have to do the reckoning that you're advocating for Around that this personal work to reclaim the power that we gave away by grabbing on to the what we were projecting in a mat You know that the the big dipper of this person you can say We are in the it's the projections are wild out here right now we're stuck and oh yeah So what do you do to take care of yourself just to and I want to get back to your resources that you offer which are incredible and You know let's bring this around to like let's take care of our listener. This has been hard and yeah What do you do to take care of yourself? I find tremendous joy and being connected to people that is where I get my hope these days is being open to Connection and meeting people and learning things So I actually feel a tremendous amount of joy in my friendships and my relationships with people to take care of myself I What do I do my run I meditate I do a lot of weird and bodyman practices wacky shaking and I dance a lot I Cry I scream I do all of that I really it's like how do I be in this body the full range of things that I feel That's how I take care of myself is that I do all those things that my body asked me to do But including love including friendship including dance including good food including sleep and All my somatic practices I read a lot. That's honestly really it. I live as fully as I can It's beautiful and and and and doing that you're also providing a lot of resources To folks so your website alone there are like you said embodiment practices Yeah, do you want to tell us a little bit about that? Yeah, yeah, my work with the embodiment institute is really bringing embodiment Practices to especially people that are leaders in their own community leaders and work that is You know social change oriented But also people that are teachers and medical professionals we offer trainings and tools and resources for people that are trying to be as congruent as embodied as present as they can be even in such difficult times and We have a course coming up. I think by the time this airs our application will be closed But we have a place here in North Carolina where we convene we have a retreat center We train there we do community gatherings there we grow food together there and That's where I am a lot So if you're interested in my work or want to practice with me the embodiment institute is The way to do that and we offer some simple practices some simple center and grounding Introductory practices just getting more present with ourselves that can be really helpful when we're You know how those moments of dysregulation every day how do we? Just become more present to what is and what we have in our capacity and our our resources and our body so there's that and And that's in person In person we do some online practices we have had an online community that we're actually We're shifting our model so that there's more in person we want to gather together as much and there will be Eventually I do kind of touring around I'll come to your city sometimes and do a big event so you should just Kind of stay tuned on our our newsletter to see if I'm coming to your to your town is Austin in your future Austin I was shining to go see it Austin last year, so I think it is in my I can probably help you. I would love that. Let's let's work it out in tabloxis my family's there. Let's make it happen And then also tell us again about your book and and ways to reach you if people are interested Yeah, I wrote a book on what it takes to heal and I it's a book about individual and collective Transformation and why they both go together We can't just change the world without looking at ourselves and we can't just look at ourselves endlessly without actually engaging in the world So I wrote the book about that and a little bit about my life and the work that I've done the folks that I've worked with I recommend it It's I poured my heart into that book and I I hope that it you know reaches many many people I have a podcast called becoming the people where I talk to a lot of geniuses really and open-hearted leaders That are considering this question about of how we become the people that can actually meet this moment in time so that's where I hang out and I would love to see any and all of you there Well, not only do I recommend the book I'm thinking that if you're listening and you're still with us Sometimes we do these things called reading pods where we get together in small groups and read and I would like to personally do it a reading pod on what it takes to heal so if you're interested in reading it right now This would be a great time to connect with both of us in a way by joining a reading pod through therapist and censored You can find out more at therapists and censored.com. There's events and all kinds of things You can also contact us if you just go info at therapists and censored and ask about it But we'll do something we do like six-state sessions. It's just a reading we just read it together and That's I think the best way one that's building community, but it's also a way to really really embody and get into the work and not just Be half have sleep or something and and you know getting through a book. It's like really yeah, yeah Eating eating the book that's right If you send me the date for the last one I'd love to drop in every time someone reaches out with a book club. I I try to surprise them wonderful Come so I'd be happy to do that too. That's great. All right. So those will be listening. I want to hear from you If you have appreciated this content, which how could you not? please do share it widely and the best thing you can do for the podcast again This is a free resource is to leave us a rating and review on your podcast player We forget to ask about that, but it actually makes a really big difference and to be sure and hit subscribe So that these episodes get to you you may somebody who may have sent you this episode So go ahead and subscribe to the podcast in that way you'll continue to get this kind of incredible content Okay, anything else that you want to say to the listeners with the mic anything we missed anything you just want to leave us with No, just thank you so much Sue for the conversation and I know that all of the stuff can feel really heavy But I think the solutions are actually as simple as can be and they're in us and between us and Yeah, I have faith in us to figure it out one of the things I'm gonna hold on to from this I really it's already inside of me is this idea of empowerment about most of you Being you know, I was talking about integration I took it you know these things, but it's like oh no, no, this is way better So I've got that one now Thank you for listening and we will see you around the bend Therapist uncensored is Ann Kelly and Sue Marriott this podcast is edited by Jack Anderson