Towards Somatic Abolition: An embodied space to understand, process & settle racial trauma

This year-long closed group is split into a BIPOC and white group to build resilience by entering into discomfort with a conscious commitment to change. We will be using Resmaa Menakem's book 'My Grandmother's Hands' as the framework for sessions to support working towards a somatic abolitionist therapeutic practice.

The white break-out group will challenge individuals and the group as a whole to notice, step into, stay with, unpack, and make sense of our discomfort and somatic responses connected to a violent legacy of colonialism, while owning and addressing our current enmeshment with white supremacy. This group acknowledges our historical individual and collective racism, as well as the current harm and violence we perpetrate within a capitalist and white supremacist society. 

This space will use My Grandmother’s Hands as a framework to help us engage on a deeper and embodied level with anti-racism and will explicitly stay with the themes and interconnected nature of complicity, white power on an individual and systemic level, defences steeped in trauma, shame and white body supremacy, the harm of capitalism, developing stamina, widening our windows of tolerance and white consumption. This space will invite you to engage with vulnerability and will challenge you to take risks; therefore this space is not suitable for beginners or for individuals seeking to intellectualise or co-opt this space or peoples labour within the group.

Towards Somatic Abolition was originally co-developed and facilitated by Anthea Benjamin and Sage M Stephanou for the Radical Therapist Network.