Please note that applications are now closed and all places have been allocated.
This year-long online experiential, closed group will build resilience and robustness 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.
This group will run on a monthly basis on Zoom from October 2021 to July 2022 and will be split into a BIPOC and white group to allow for more in-depth and focused reflections. This group is limited to 6-8 people for each break-out group.
BIPOC Therapists
Our break-out space will build safety to attend to the collective racial trauma wounds in a gentle, paced way. The space will enable us to start to process the embodied experiences of living while being part of the Global Majority to rediscover and build upon internal and community resources. Using chapters from My Grandmother’s Hands we will journey together to start challenging internalised racism as well as discard historical, distorted narratives and to reclaim our own collective power and healing. The BIPOC group will be facilitated by Anthea Benjamin.
White Therapists
This break-out space 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.
The white group will be facilitated by Sage M Stephanou.