If you're reading this you probably attended the Wednesday evening, June 8, 2022, Sounding Into Our Bodies gathering for Missoula, MT area folks who have read and continue to practice the ideas in Resmaa Menakem's book, My Grandmother's Hands: Racialized Trauma & the Pathway to Mending Our Hearts and Bodies (MGH).
I'm so delighted to be in community with you in this work!
Here's a list of songs and prompts and questions from our time together:
Songs
- Welcome to the table/zoom call (C. Borchardt) - What needs to be welcome here?
- Thy Light is in All Forms (words: Hazrat Inayat Khan/Music: Yakzan Valdez)
- Slow the Roll (clb - contact us for a scratch recording)
- In My Body (Joan Macmillian)
- Get Into Your Body (Lea Morris) - sung after we adjourned...
I mentioned catching a song inspired by a quote from Atlas of the Heart by Brene Brown, but we didn't actually sing it. You can listen to it here.
Prompts & Questions
- Introduction prompt: Tell us about a spark lit in you from reading MGH and how you're tending that ember. What role does community play (or could!) in that process?
- Follow Up Questions: We ran out of time after the last activity to reflect and notice, so we invite you to do that here.
- What did you notice? Where did your body start? And then end?
- What shifted as we sang "in my body ..." then "in our town," "... nation," "... world," and finally "in my heart"?
- What did you notice in breathing and singing back to back with 1-2 others? How was that different from the humming and toning we did earlier in the evening? And from mirroring "Thy Light Is In All Forms"?
Feel free to answer the Follow Up Questions in the shared Google Doc sent to you via email. Or add a comment to the blog post if you don't mind sharing it publicly.
Movement Resources
A question was raised about communal movement activities with varying degrees of autonomy and structure and their purpose/effect. Here's a list of different modes/formats that were named with links to learn more about them.
- Dances of Universal Peace - Thy Light is In All Forms is from this pluralistic practice of prayer and joy expressed in song and group circle movement.
- Interplay - "an active, creative way to unlock the wisdom of the body"
- Feldenkrais Method - Awareness through Movement is the name of the group class in this "movement education" method. The link takes you to the Feldenkrais Project which offers a rotating 50 free lessons.
- Don't You Feel It Too? - the practice of moving your brave, honest, ridiculous, and loving self with 3 prompts: 1) Listen with Love, 2) Move Honestly, Fearlessly, 3) Feel What You Feel.
Invitation
On pg. 305 of MGH, Resmaa names Five Opportunities for Healing and Making Room for Growth. I offer one-to-one support sessions on this topic through the lens of professional certificates I have earned in spiritual direction/accompaniment and vocal coaching. If this interests you, please reach out to schedule a short session to see if it is a good fit. Sliding scale rates are available.
Final Thoughts
To paraphrase Resmaa (pg. 147-148), let's offer folks better ways to belong and better things to belong to. Let's belong to a culture. Let's build our capacity for genuine belonging. May the singing and movement experience you participated in offer insight to your unlearning from white supremacy journey and resources to increase and deepen your capacity for creating a belonging culture.
Conie B. (she/they)
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