Rae Johnson: On Embodied Activism

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Dr. Amber McZeal: Good evening, Rae.

Dr. Rae Johnson: Hi, Amber. It's such a pleasure to be with you.

Dr. Amber McZeal: It's such an honor and a delight to be with you as well. You've been a pillar of support and have helped cultivate a depth of insight in my own personal journey. And I want to thank you right now in this moment for that. It feels like a full circle moment to be able to have this dialogue and this conversation with you.

Dr. Rae Johnson: Yeah. Thank you. Thank you for that. Because, you know, we do go back. We do go back a number of years. And I agree. I'm so delighted that you've finished your own Ph.D. and that you're now Dr. Amber McZeal. I'm so pleased with the work that you're doing in the world. So I've been looking forward to this conversation for a while.

Dr. Amber McZeal: Thank you for saying that. And there will be some opportunities to share a bit more about that interpersonal journey that we've walked together, which reflects a lot of the work that you've put forward in this book, Embodied Activism. I'm familiar with your previous work, Embodied Social Justice, which had a specific audience for professionals, for social workers, for educators and the lot. And your newest offering, Embodied Activism, holds a completely different tone. One of the things of many that I appreciated reading the text was the practice orientation of this offering. Not simply a theoretical outlining of concepts or other thing, but really getting into the meat of practice. On a personal note, it signaled personal experiences around my organizing in the post-Katrina environment. As I read through the pages, it just reminded me of the activism. And I first wanted to start with, because we'll unpack that a bit more in a moment, but the why. Why did you write this book and for whom?

Dr. Rae Johnson: Yeah, well, you're spot on in articulating that in my first book, I was really writing for a professional audience, for people who are working with people, because I thought that the research that I'd done on the intersection between embodiment and social justice, and in particular, the somatic effects of oppression would be useful to them, would help support and facilitate working with people who had had a history of experiences of oppression and were currently in oppressive social systems that were affecting how well they were doing and what they were struggling with. And when I first did that piece of research, there wasn't really any empirical evidence supporting the notion that to me was self-evident, which is that oppression is traumatic. And that when we were working with people from marginalized communities, when we were ourselves, a member of a marginalized community, and the topic was something potentially activating that we needed to recognize how our bodies were implicated in what had happened to us and what was continuing to happen to us. So that was my first goal was to say, I've done some research, I really want my findings to be out there in the hands of people who are doing work on the ground, direct service, human service workers. And I wanted to make it accessible, but I also, as I said, I had this professional audience in mind. But I always had in the back of my mind, even as I was writing that book, I thought if I ever write another book, I want it to be just for everyday people, just for everyday folks who were living in systems that I think many of us recognize are increasingly divisive and polarized and charged around all kinds of issues. And I thought, you know, I've learned something from the work that I've done over the years, from the people that I've worked with, and from the research that I've done. And I want to communicate it in a way that's practical and accessible and hopefully relevant. And because of my thematic orientation, I wanted it to be experiential. So in Embodied Social Justice, I did a series of what I call body stories, which I hoped would give a flavor of what does this look like in real people in their in their real lives. But for this book, for embodied activism, I actually kept including those body stories, and added a bunch of experiential exercises that the reader can do themselves to really practice some of the ideas that I'm putting forward. So I want it to be much more personally engaging in a way that my first book just wasn't because it wasn't it wasn't my intention.

Dr. Amber McZeal: Wow.

Dr. Rae Johnson: Yeah.

Dr. Amber McZeal: That's startling to hear that there was such a deficit in the body of research on oppression being traumatic. That is remarkable. Amazing.

Dr. Rae Johnson: Yeah. And, you know, I'm pretty good at doing a review of the literature. Right.

Dr. Amber McZeal: Right. Yeah, you taught you taught me the literature.

Dr. Rae Johnson: So, um, I was pretty confident that there wasn't anything out there. And I had to in my own. In my own dissertation, I had to say, here's this idea that makes sense, and I have anecdotal evidence for, but all I have is theory, and I don't have any research to point to. Now that of course, has changed a lot since then. And now, pretty much anybody that I encounter who's working in social justice space as a recognition, not only of the potential for a traumatic imprint and impact, but also some some fairly, you know, skillful awareness of how to work with that and how to respond to it and how to make room for that. In terms of how we are with one another. I think that's the idea of oppression being traumatic is now pretty commonplace in the in the spaces that I hang out in anyway.

Dr. Amber McZeal: Yeah, yeah. There's a one of the things that you just mentioned about the radical polarization. And a part of what's at the heart of this book, as you stated, making it accessible and making it for everyday people. Making it for a broad range of folks who for whom perhaps the activism space was not their first home, or their first site of identity and identification. And I was it was refreshing to hear you articulate that. To weave in, I mean, along with it being backed by the practices and the experiential components. But what it signaled why it brought up my Katrina experience is reading the text gave me language. You know, I've consistently been trying to find and excavate the language of why I stepped away from organizing in those spaces. What is the dominant culture of social justice work that makes it unsustainable? Or perhaps pushes us into sacrificing parts of ourselves or participating in creating more or contributing to the polarization. And so there, it felt to me as I read on and read on, like there was an intersection of the traumatology piece that you brought in, and trauma within oppressive experiences, and how that can come to dominate become the dominant culture of social justice spaces, which can frankly, sadly, serve to alienate folks sometimes, or make them feel like they're not welcome in those spaces. And it feels like your book offers an alternative.

Dr. Rae Johnson: That's my hope. One of the one of the things that I really wanted to do was open up the notion of what an activist is, or what an activist could be. So that folks who, as you point out, might have felt not welcome, or, or had the feeling that in order to participate in movements or community organizing, needed to take up a particular attitude that just didn't feel right for them, in terms of, you know, being combative, or having to work in large groups, and being goal oriented and sacrificing for a cause. I mean, all of those, those tropes about activism, I think, many of us recognize that we've got this stereotype of what an activist is what an activist looks like. And please let me be very clear. I really value the work that happens in community organizing, I think it's, I think it's essential. I think there is absolutely a space for boycotts and protests and marches and other kinds and legislative lobbying, all the kinds of things that people I think tend to think of when, when activism comes out. But I wanted to broaden it, I wanted to expand it. And I wanted, if I could, to create a description of activism that would include anyone who wanted to make a positive impact in the world. From there, from the context of their own lives. And part of the reason that I wanted to do that is, I wanted to spread the work of making the world a better place across more hands and more bodies. Because I think one of the things that can happen to activists is that they burn out because there aren't enough of us. Right? There are too few hands doing work that's too heavy and too big. So my idea was, if we increase the number of people who are doing small things in small ways in their own communities, in their own homes, in their own lives, that we could ease some of the burden. But also, I was really, and I still am really intrigued about this notion of sustainability. I think many of us, particularly those of us with what I might describe as progressive politics were startled by the change that happened in the United States during the 2016 election. We're just like, what just happened? And how could the world change so radically, so quickly? And as I thought about that, one of the answers that I came to was, although there was change at institutional levels, at the level of legislation and who was governing, that there was underlying racism, sexism, homophobia, and ableism still deeply entrenched and unaddressed at the micro sociological level. And that's why such a radical change was possible in such a short period of time, is that the changes that we were seeing at the macro level weren't actually happening at a grassroots ground up level. There were large pockets of society who hadn't really changed how they felt in their bodies, in their hearts, hadn't really changed how they were treating one another, or how they felt or thought about one another. They were just being constrained by a different set of laws. And I don't think that's enough.

Dr. Amber McZeal: Powerful statement, yeah, I'm so glad that you articulated this in this way, because what it feels like, and you are quite vocal in the book, honoring and acknowledging the road before us, the many liberation theorists, teachers, scholars, sacred practitioners, activists, et cetera. And there has been a felt sense from the personal experiences, wake of Katrina to the collective that you just described that we're in a different historical moment.

We're in a different cultural paradigm, if you will. And we have new frontiers to contend with, and we need new tools, practices, perspectives, and most importantly, strategies, which we'll get into in a bit with the strategies that you've laid out in the book. But on this concept of micro social, from the micro to the macro, I want to dig into that a bit in this current socio-political climate. I can't express how timely it is your book is here as we approach an election year in 2024. As we're watching Trump and Mr. T and his folks be indicted and get booked, and for Those who are watching and following the news, the tensions are high, the polarization is increasing, especially if we are consuming that kind of media and the global happenings with voting, with policies and politics in focus. I wanted to pause on just a piece of the text that highlights some features of dominant social justice culture and activism. You talk about that part of the challenge that we face stems from how many of us have been taught to understand social change. For example, that it mostly occurs at the level of laws, institutions, and is largely undertaken by politicians, lobbyists, expert activists. Like you said, it's not enough to legislate a thing away. And we may mainly be directing our efforts at changing the opinions, beliefs, and attitudes of others. And what you suggest, what you assert in the text is a different approach to social change. One that focuses on how politics are embedded in our everyday experiences and enacted in our relationship with others. This signaled a radical reconnection for me, one that in imagery and somatically made the vastness of systems change microscopic and still real. And in the spirit of sustainability, almost manageable.

Dr. Rae Johnson: Yeah.

Dr. Amber McZeal: Can we talk a little bit about that conceptual shift?

Dr. Rae Johnson: Sure. Absolutely. Because I agree. I think for me, that was my first sort of, aha, I need to talk about this. First, I need to think through it I need to feel my way through it. I need to get it sort of in my own bones in a way. And then I needed to understand how the intuition that I had about this way of being in the world, this way of approaching deep, profound social change is different from the way I'm seeing it being done out in the world. And for me, it boils down to the use of power. That when injustice occurs, one way of understanding that, whether it's occurring through unjust laws or unfair business practices or day-to-day discrimination, that we can understand all of those activities as a misuse of power. But I don't know that many of us are used to thinking about the fact that that use and misuse of power happens to us in the context of our families, that it happens in the context of our intimate relationships and our friendships. It happens in the context of our interaction with the clerk in the grocery store, that it happens in the dentist's office, that there are all of these small, subtle, but cumulatively significant moments in our lives where either power has been used on us in ways that make us feel diminished, ashamed, angry, frustrated, less than, or power has been used to support us, to help us feel connected and validated and lifted up. And for me, it's that, it's understanding that basic unit of relational interaction that sets the ground for the systems that we have built from it. Augusto Boal, who developed a beautiful strategy of activism called Theater of the Oppressed, once said something, and I'm going to probably paraphrase it badly, but basically what he said is that all of our social institutions, all of our injustices, oppressions, discriminations are visible in our smallest everyday interactions with one another. It's all there. And so for me, if all of the ways in which we're socialized to use or misuse power wind up in our everyday interactions, then our everyday interactions become a platform. They become a place where we can generate change. And for me, that does a couple of things. One is it means that I can engage in activism every single day in ways that I can actually manage, you know, that I can go, hmm, I feel like that this interaction's not going so well and I want to recognize my part in that and how might I shift it? So it's empowering. It gives people who I think, unfortunately, many of us are feeling a lack of agency, a lessening degree of agency and powerlessness over our own lives and the systems that we live in. And this for me gives us a place to say, but I can change this. And when that transformation happens, when that shift in the power dynamics happens, I think there are a couple of things that occur. One is I feel differently in my body. So here's, we haven't been talking about the body very much, so here's where it comes in for me, is that when I embody power differently or when I respond to power differently from my and in my body, what happens when I shift that power dynamic even a little bit is I breathe a little differently. My shoulders sit a little differently. My gaze is a little different. Maybe it's softer, maybe it's sharper. I don't know, but something changes. And then because I'm in my own skin differently, every other person that I interact with that day sees that shift and feels it on a body level without a word being spoken. They go, hmm, there's someone who's holding themselves in a way where this feels, you know, where there's a sense of self-dignity and respect and compassion and calm or a sense of humor. I mean, all of those things that are the raw ingredients of the lives that we want to be living, the interactions that we want to be having and the world that we want to live in. I just, I don't think you can legislate patience. I don't think you can mandate the capacity to exhale and really connect with somebody. So for me, that's the bottom of embodied activism is the willingness and the capacity to inhabit ourselves a little differently and to hold power and to respond to power a little differently because we've done some work on ourselves in terms of our capacity and our alignment. And I think that's what's going to build a different world.

Dr. Amber McZeal: Wow. And this, you, thank you for that invitation to bring embody. It was right on the tip of the tongue. But what you described, you've termed cultivating somatic bandwidth through the practices that you offer. And the cultivation of that somatic bandwidth helps to undo or reverse that sense of saturated, like feeling saturated with defeat or inefficacy. Like I can change nothing, I can do nothing because I'm flooded with the analysis of all of these structures and systems. And the pivot that you're presenting, which is, I agree. I think it is the frontier of our liberation efforts and work. The pivot is to start at the almost the level of psyche intersecting someone. Your soul and frequency through micro gestures can ripple out a change through the world. Yeah.

Dr. Rae Johnson: Yeah. I mean, we've all had the experience of coming across someone who by their very bearing, just the way they walked into a room. They go, wow, this person's got integrity. I think I can trust this person. This person feels authentic to me. They feel present and responsive and respectful. And they're not saying anything. They're not saying all the wonderful politically correct verbiage. They're just holding themselves in a way that you can tell. And we're wired, I mean, profoundly wired to respond in our own bodies to other people's bodies. So let me give you just a quick example from the research. It's pretty consistent in the realm of nonverbal communication that upwards of 70% of the meaning of our interactions with one another is actually conveyed nonverbally, not through the words we speak. We are, whether we're aware of it or not, tracking one another's bodies. We're reading them closely. We're watching for these micro movements, the slight shift, the slight turn away, the slight shrug, the slight grimace. And all of those things are signaling. I mean, the examples I just gave you were signaling, you're not okay, or I don't think you're okay, or I'm not happy with you. But conversely, we can also create micro connections by being in our bodies in a way where people go, yeah, okay, just by the way you're holding yourself. I get the feeling that you're going to listen to me, that you're really taking me in, and that you're paying attention and that you're not hiding behind a wall of nice words.

Dr. Amber McZeal: That's good. That's very good. You outline this in the book, the history of disembodiment and that Cartesian split, the referencing of the mind and rationality and the reducing of the body and value to something akin with nature. And how interesting to witness in what you just said, hiding behind a wall of nice words is, I mean, you and I talked about this, part of the master's tools as well, that hyper-rationality, I don't have to feel this anywhere below the neck, but I compare it the same narrative that I see somewhere, and that should keep, quote unquote, safe, but not necessarily.

Dr. Rae Johnson: Yeah.

Dr. Amber McZeal: Yeah.

Dr. Rae Johnson: Yeah. I mean, we've all seen it. We've all seen situations where someone has engaged in behaviors that have harmed others, and we've seen them publicly apologize and watched as we felt nothing in response to that beautifully crafted, probably by somebody else, beautifully crafted series of words of apology and regret and remorse. You can tell. Yeah. The only way you can tell is by paying attention to how your body responds to what's happening in their body. And we do it naturally. We do it automatically. And because we're socialized to ignore that whole channel of interpersonal communication, we can easily tend to discount it or minimize it. We walk away with a feeling, but we don't know quite why. And it's easy to be gaslit or second guess ourselves because we're not taught and we're not supported to actually listen to how our bodies are responding in an interaction with someone else or listening to someone else. But once we do, once we make that turn toward our own bodies and begin to listen, begin to understand our own history, the history of our own bodies and what's happened to us on a body level, begin to cultivate the senses that we have to the degree that we have and really tune in, however that is, and go, hmm, that's actually important information. I need to listen to that. I need to listen to that. And I need to not only listen to that, but I need to include that in how I'm thinking and feeling about what's going on here. And it can make all the difference.

Dr. Amber McZeal: It's a subtle gesture that you are presenting here, but it has profound impact. Moving the body away from being relegated to the margins, the marginalization of body, the marginalization of feeling. And I want to take this opportunity here to dive deeper into body through our shared experience, rather. And the way, until I read this recent text, unbeknownst to me, you introduced me to this concept of micro activism as an alternative. And I didn't know, it really, it was a realization in preparing to come here and have this conversation with you of like, wow, Rae's been doing this for a hot minute. So I just wanted to put that on front street. But with this notion of socialize to override and bulldoze through the information and knowledge coming from the body, I engaged one of the embodied practice exercises that you outlined. One related to first disembodied politics and then depoliticized embodiment. And I'll just briefly share the story here. The experience of going through the exercise with disembodied politics, clearly for me, that was, wow, my Katrina experience. The flooding of adrenaline and the heat of marching and the urgency of survival that has in the practice of overriding those signals or dismissing them. It gave me language for that, but then the depoliticized embodiment, it immediately signaled our shared experience receiving the microaggressive racialized letter in somatics program. And I'm remembering, recalling the memory of that one day after I received the letter and a series of racial microaggressions that I didn't always have language for. And I walked into the dining hall and you said, “How are you doing?” And I said, with the full heart, heat chest out, “I'm ready to fight. I'm ready to this. I'm ready to that.” Unclear of what or whom I was fighting. And you said one thing that really in hindsight reflection on it created a downward spiral in my own somatic experience. And what was, yeah, fight until you don't have to. And in preparing for this beautiful conversation with you in this full circle moment, it was an awareness that hit me. You presented the invitation to move into a realm of micro activism, perhaps as opposed to the warrior stance of I'm going to fight something I actually can't even see. That's relatively.

Dr. Rae Johnson: Yeah.

Dr. Amber McZeal: Right. So I share that and inviting you here to speak more about this idea of micro activism.

Dr. Rae Johnson: Yeah. What you describe that that impulse to muscle through, to put on the armor yet again, not through our own choice, but as a reaction to the circumstances that we're thrust into. What a toll that takes on the body. What a toll it takes on us. And I was just I was aware in that moment. I thought, yeah, Amber. And I guess what I was thinking in part was, aren't you tired?

Dr. Amber McZeal: Yeah.

Dr. Rae Johnson: Right. Aren't you tired? And recognizing that and being curious about it and thinking to myself, there are people in this program and I counted myself as one of them. Who are willing to do some of the fighting that you don't have to stay and do it by yourself. Right. So it for me, that's part of how listening to our bodies and asking the question. What am I really up for? Like what? What do I what do I actually want to do? What does my body say yes to? What is the way of letting ourselves off the hook when, you know, when we're faced with an injustice and, you know, and we're we're in a position where we kind of need to do the right thing? I'm not suggesting that, you know, if our body says no or a little bit scary, we just go, oh, OK, well, my body said, no, I'm not going to do anything and not at all. But there's a deeper level where particularly. When the fights at your front door most days. Right. Whether you want it or not. That taking the time to go, you know what, I don't think I can do all of this or I don't think just doing exactly what has landed in my lap, responding to all of that fully is actually good for me.

Dr. Amber McZeal: Yeah.

Dr. Rae Johnson: Right. On a deeper level. And so for me, I guess I guess I mean, and I wasn't I didn't really plan what I was going to say to you. I just wanted to check in with you. But when you responded the way you did, I thought, oh. Well, like I said, aren't you tired? And and I wanted to I wanted you to know that if you were tired. That you didn't that I didn't have any expectation that you put on the armor. And that I was willing to do some work on your behalf. And because it wasn't just on your behalf. This is our work.

Dr. Amber McZeal: Exactly, Right.

Dr. Rae Johnson: Right. What happened in that program was everyone's responsibility. And so I needed to take up some of that and I wanted to take up some of that. Yeah. So and. You know, it was it was about the the use of power and the misuse of power and how it happens in an, you know, in these small ways, in small situations where only, you know, a couple of dozen people are involved, but it's still important.

Dr. Amber McZeal: Yeah.

Dr. Rae Johnson: It's still important to say, no, this wasn't OK. And we need to do something. And here's what we wanted. Here's what we need to do. And we all need to pitch in. We all have a responsibility. Because it's our it's it's it's our world. This is our community.

Dr. Amber McZeal: Yeah.

Dr. Rae Johnson: Yeah. So. Well..

Dr. Amber McZeal: I can't thank you enough for following your intuition and the discernment of what emerged in my body. Yeah. I mean, to this point in 2023, finding the language of the pivot that you invited allowed for a series of micro activist experiences to unfold that. And a yes, instead of a yes, exhausted, you know, swinging of swords.

Dr. Rae Johnson: Yeah. Yeah, it really did. It really did set you on a different, much different trajectory, didn't it?

Dr. Amber McZeal: Yes, it did.

Dr. Rae Johnson: Yeah. Yeah, yeah. And it turned out well.

Dr. Amber McZeal: You know, can't complain. It's it's it's suited suited us very well. So a deep bow of gratitude for that and for that moment of exchange that now with this new offering embodied activism is given a ground, a theoretical ground, the conceptual ground and a practice praxis ground to take out into the world. I wanted to spend a couple of moments talking about the five elements of the strategy in cultivating body to activism that you've outlined with the highest council. So yeah. Can you take a moment to share that with us?

Dr. Rae Johnson: Absolutely. I mean, these are I mean, I present them in a particular order in the book. But from my perspective, these are things that you can pick up and look at and taste and try on and explore in any order. Because I think for most of us, we will have already done a little bit of work in some of these areas. But in other areas, it's like, oh, I hadn't thought about that at all. Right. Oh, that's a piece. That's a piece of this. This, engaging with ourselves so that when we're in interactions with others, where there's a power dynamic, we can come to it differently. So one of the strategies is just and I think I mentioned this before, just to become more familiar and and befriend our own history, our own embodied stories of what's happened to us and the the microaggressions that we've experienced, the embodied privileges that we that we hold and the stories that when we ask ourselves, hmm, if I were going to mean most of us are pretty good at telling the story of our lives, but we don't really include our bodies in that very much from for many of us. And so asking ourselves the question, if I were going to write the story of my life, but from the story of my body, what would I say? What would I want to share? What's important? What's been important for me? And so just getting to know our bodies in a, in perhaps a deeper way, in part, because most of us were socialized into systems and cultures where we were encouraged to really ignore our bodies. Right. So this is a reclaiming. This is a reclaiming of our own lived experience in and through our bodies. And then from there, once we've kind of got a sense of, oh, this is what no, this is what my body's been through. This is, this is how I related to it. Taking some time to really cultivate our sensuality. And to cultivate our senses. That you mentioned a bit ago, this idea of really being able to claim and work with our emotions. And I'm going to make the argument that that emotions are not cognitive events. They're actually a category of bodily sensation. Our emotions are in our bodies. And some sensations in our bodies, we've learned to categorize and call them an emotion. But really, when you think about anger, it's a flushing of blood into the face. And it's an automatic clenching of the fists and energy going down through the arms. It's different for everyone, but I'm just giving you some examples so you know what I mean when I say emotions are bodily events. So this is about getting in tune with what's happening in my body. Not just in terms of how might I make more space for different kinds of sensations, emotions, intuition, impulses, and really get familiar with them. But also, when I'm in an interaction with someone else, and these sensations come up, I actually have some idea of what to do with them. I've got some space for them so that I'm not just either stomping on them and shutting them down because it's going to take over. Or letting them explode into and letting those sensations and impulses and emotions that we don't even really, haven't really even identified, take over and drive the situation, drive our interaction. So cultivating our senses is about getting more literate, getting more familiar, getting more articulate about what's happening on our bodies. Because in those, particularly in those charged situations where there's something wonky, not so good happening in the power dynamic between two people or in a group, our bodies are just, they're giving us all kinds, they are really responding. I mean, that's part of what they're wired to do is respond to situations where there's a threat. So if we're not aware and can't really manage that because we haven't learned how to befriend our own bodies, the situation and the interaction isn't going to go as well as it might because we've got fewer choices about how to respond. So there's that. And then I've talked about this before, really coming to a place where we're able to pay more attention to and give more weight to the nonverbal communication, the little dance that's happening between us all the time. How we navigate interpersonal space. Do I feel crowded in? Do I feel abandoned by how far someone is away from me? You know, as I said, the shrug of a shoulder, the look of an eye, all of these things, all of the dimensions of nonverbal communication, touch and eye contact, posture and gesture and facial expressions, they're communicating volumes about how we feel and think about one another. And if we don't realize what we're saying and what we're reading, we're not as informed as we need to be about what that interaction really contains. So learning about that, actually coming to pay more attention to that. Another big piece for me is body image. So much of oppressive strategies centers on how bodies look and move and what bodies are okay or not okay based on how they look or move. And so many of us, I think maybe even most of us, walk around carrying this burden of shame around our bodies. That's such a waste. It's such a waste of our precious energy and attention and time and good feeling because it erodes the good feeling that we're trying to cultivate about ourselves and other people. So coming to terms with, and in the book, there are a number of strategies and some stories about how you might begin to get curious about your own body image and the body norms that you grew up with and maybe have unconsciously adopted and what you might do to change that. So those are some strategies that I think help folks kind of get their feet, get their grounding around, oh, okay, yeah, now I've got a sense of kind of how I am in my body and how I might align in my body with my values and my principles, what that might look like and feel like. But all of those things are really in service of then what do I bring to my interactions with other people? Because activism is about relationship. It's not something that is done in a vacuum. It's not something that individuals do. It's something that happens in the spaces between people, in the interaction. And so I talk about something that I call cultivating an intercorporeal ethos. And I know that that's a mouthful, but really what I mean by that is how do we interact with one another on a body level that acknowledges that simply put, my body is sacred, so is yours and our bodies are connected in ways that we can only begin to imagine. And that I need to honor your body as I do my own and care about whether your body's in pain or distress. And I need to be able to take that into me. And when I can, what happens is we begin to come to one another's defense. We begin to look out for one another. We begin to care about one another and our wellbeing in a really visceral way. And I think that's the foundation of the world that we want to live in, is a place where people genuinely, not theoretically, but genuinely in our bodies care about one another and care what happens to one another. So yeah, those are the strategies.

Dr. Amber McZeal: I love it. I love it. And that's the most resonant piece for me as you were talking and laying them out, is the restoration of sacredness to Soma, to the body. And we had a chat about this before, but the way that you're doing it that doesn't have a stench of dogma embedded in it or a thread of self-righteousness, or a pull in the self-righteous direction. It's just coming back to cultivate the sacredness of body. And here are some perspectives and approaches to the restoration of that, which has been eroded in the engine of empire, in the engines of colonization and racialization. And I'll say personally, that was my lore. That was my pull into the realm of somatics was finding, crafting, curating the antidote to the racialization project, to the removal of the sacred from body form, Soma life. So just, yeah, I think you're onto something is the point. You're onto something. And the other piece that was really resonant for me reading it, moving through to practicing the strategies, which for me, I know you said they're non-sequential, but they do have a flow. They do have a flow with the self, with the body story, getting the historical critical consciousness, but body at the center of them. And the piece around within cultivating sensuality, sensual or somatic literacy, the piece around percepticide and how engaging in a practice, a reclamation of our sensuality, cultivation of it helps to undo percepticide and being given language that this is a psychic function. This is a psychic, psychological mechanism of oppressive forces that require us to practice and participate in denial. We deny our body senses. We deny the information coming up, the palpitations in the heart that suddenly it has started to race when you enter a particular space. Yeah. So I just wanted to echo that back. The undoing of denial is so important.

Dr. Rae Johnson: Yeah. Let me just say a little bit of that, because I want to acknowledge that I borrowed that term percepticide from Diana Taylor, who used it to describe the kinds of atrocities that would be deliberately perpetrated in public spaces to force people to look away. So there was this sense of sources, forces of oppression, engaging in practices that required a looking away and a turning away from the horror of what was happening And so I borrowed that term to make a connection to this sense that in a way, I believe it serves oppressive social systems to have us look away and turn away from our own bodies. That we stop being, it's the killing of the senses. We can't, we don't feel because we've been taught that our bodies aren't important or they're not to be trusted. And so our senses are dismissed and dulled and repressed when in fact our senses are what lets us know what's happening in the world and what's happening to us and how we're responding to it. There are signals to what's really going on. And it's, I think, absolutely essential that we include our perceptiveness and our sensations in how we engage in changing the world.

Dr. Amber McZeal: Thank you so much. The site of somatic literacy as the senses. I mean, that's the way that lands. Rae, it has been such an honor to rehearse the world with you over these last few years. And I look forward to continuing that rehearsal and playing out. So I want to say thank you, Dr. Rae, for this conversation.

Dr. Rae Johnson: Thank you, Amber. It's, it's been so much fun. You know, we haven't had as many opportunities to just talk about this stuff. It feels like a real luxury. And so I'm so glad that we, we did it. We took us two tries, but I'm glad we finally got here to this moment, to this day. And like you, I'm looking forward to more.

Dr. Amber McZeal: So with that, I'll say thanks for everyone who joined in and good night.

Dr. Rae Johnson: Thank you. Good night, everyone.

Thank you for listening to the CIIS Public Programs Podcast. Our talks and conversations are presented live in San Francisco, California. We recognize that our university’s building in San Francisco occupies traditional, unceded Ramaytush Ohlone lands. If you are interested in learning more about native lands, languages, and territories, the website native-land.ca is a helpful resource for you to learn about and acknowledge the Indigenous land where you live. Podcast production is supervised by Kirstin Van Cleef at CIIS. Audio production is supervised by Lyle Barrere at Desired Effect. The CIIS Public Programs team includes Izzy Angus, Kyle DeMedio, Alex Elliott, Emlyn Guiney, Patty Pforte, Nikki Roda, and Pele Shalev. CIIS Public Programs commits to use our in-person and online platforms to uplift the stories and teachings of Black, Indigenous, and other people of color; those in the LGBTQIA+ community; and all those whose lives emerge from the intersections of multiple identities.