Prentis Hemphill: Recovering Our Ability to Feel (TRAUMA)
Prentis Hemphill is a therapist, embodiment facilitator, and author of the just-released, What it Takes to Heal: How Transforming Ourselves Can Change the World. In today’s conversation—the final in a four-part series—we explore a path to putting ourselves, and the collective, back together, and how this begins with a visioning…but a visioning born from getting back in touch with how we actually feel. I loved their book—just by reading along with Prentis’s own path to re-embodiment, I found myself finding similar sensations in my chest, back and heart. In today’s conversation, we talk about somatics, yes, but also about conflict—and what it looks like to become more adept with our emotions in hard times. This is one of my favorite conversations I’ve had to date on Pulling the Thread—I hope you enjoy it too.
MORE FROM PRENTIS HEMPHILL:
What it Takes to Heal: How Transforming Ourselves Can Change the World
Prentis’s Website
Follow Prentis on Instagram
RELATED EPISODES:
PART 1: James Gordon, M.D., “A Toolkit for Working with Trauma”
PART 2: Peter Levine, Ph.D, “Where Trauma Lives in the Body”
PART 3: Resmaa Menakem, “Finding Fear in the Body”
Thomas Hubl: “Feeling into the Collective Presence”
Gabor Maté, M.D.: “When Stress Becomes Illness”
Galit Atlas, PhD: “Understanding Emotional Inheritance”
Thomas Hubl: “Processing Our Collective Past”
Richard Schwartz, PhD: “Recovering Every Part of Ourselves”
TRANSCRIPT:
(Edited slightly for clarity.)
ELISE LOEHNEN: So I loved your book. I really think it is excellent. And I know it's not written in this way, but I had some really powerful somatic experiences as I was reading the book. And as someone who I think, like most people, is somewhat disembodied I really want to spend a, a, a fair amount of time on the embodiment work because it's so potent. So thank you for that.
PRENTIS HEMPHILL: Thank you.
ELISE: I wanted to track you down first. I'm like, I need to be on a table with her.
PRENTIS: I also just really appreciate you sharing how visceral it was for you. That was an intention I was holding when I was writing it, that it could be felt and that it would elicit something in people.
ELISE: Yeah.
PRENTIS: It feels affirming to hear that.
ELISE: yeah, mission accomplished. Like as you were talking about moving into your own body and feeling your chest and needing to be held so that you could actually release. I was like, Oh my God, I feel this actually happening in my body right now and how tight it is and how much I brace and I'm a chronic hyperventilator and I was thinking this week, and ironically, my dad is a pulmonologist, which will surprise exactly no one, that his daughter doesn't know how to breathe. But someone just emailed me this week, and I wrote a book, and I talked a little bit about this. And I knew that a lot of people who were reading the book would say, Oh, my God, that's what that is, because it's not really diagnosed. I was thinking about it, too, how everyone I've heard from would call themselves a female or gendered female and I was like, oh, that's interesting and I asked my dad I was like in your practice, Do you think that this primarily happens with people who are women? And he was said yeah, actually there were a few men But like primarily women. Anyway, so it was interesting.
PRENTIS: Really interesting.
ELISE: Yeah This bracing. So I love the structure of your book, this idea of vision and healing and feeling in the body. Because to me, at least as I read it, it felt like a process that could be applied on every level. And is this the metastructure of your work? Or is this where you arrive when you work with people or groups? Is this where you start?
PRENTIS: It's an interesting question, especially the structure of the book, there was a little bit of reworking of chapter structure, you know, I think is probably standard when you're writing and you're like, Oh, okay, this actually probably goes here, more so, but overall, yeah, it does follow a certain structure or a certain theory about transformation that comes out of some semantics work that I've studied, particularly with, you know, generative semantics and Strozzi Institute. And part of that theory says, and I'm going to oversimplify because in the book, I didn't follow it exactly, so I kind of used elements of it to guide the book, but that where we begin in a way transformation, I think that's maybe how that chapter starts is first through the work of kind of conjuring what it is that we are trying to become or transform into. And I think it's the longer I've done somatics work, the more I've kind of realized that that conjuring is almost responding to who you already are, deep, deep in there, who you already are, who you long to be. But it's important to name it to articulate that vision. This is how I want to feel in my life. This is how I want to feel in my relationships. This is how I think the world should feel. Articulating that both responds to the inner feeling and it gives us a guide as we move through the work of transformation and healing. So the book begins there because that's sort of the foundational work. And then I would say there's one point in the book, you know, there are a few chapters that in there too that just kind of set the stage for what I mean around embodiment, what I mean about being involved in the world. But there's a chapter that's things fall apart. It's sort of about conflict and the necessity at times for the way things have been to fall apart. And that's also a kind of part of the arc of this theory of change is that when we start to do the work of healing and transformation, there comes a point where it kind of feels like things fall apart. And that's actually necessary. It's like fertile ground. So yeah, it loosely follows a kind of path of we vision something, we heal, we kind of come apart. And then new things can settle in relationship and love. And that's really what transformation is about.
ELISE: I think it's so powerful to how you establish the book as so many of us think that change happens by sort of essentially starting to do something instead of saying, This is really beautiful, you write, "I've often found that the visions people articulate for themselves, those that they are most afraid to admit are their yearnings for connection and their longings to lead and coordinate something that will have a big impact on the world. I've never encountered anyone's most vulnerable visions to be about isolation or money." it's beautiful, but this idea, cause I think we skipped this stage and I think it's so important that you say it, which is: what are we for? What are we trying to do? What's the hope and the dream that we can all work toward? And it's easy to skip it or to assume that we're all attached to the same vision. But I think if we could take a minute to assert it for our lives or for the collective, it goes a long way. And I think our most transformative leaders do that well.
PRENTIS: I think one of the the kind of hidden gem in that too, is that when we can articulate a vision, we can also be satisfied, you know, eventually we can experience satisfaction when we aren't articulating what it is that we're moving towards, or we're kind of adopting visions that are, you know, offered to us or sold to us. I know that I sometimes end up feeling like, why am I never actually satisfied when that thing is here? Or when I have the thing? I think when we're answering our deepest longings, that also gives us the opportunity to experience satisfaction.
ELISE: And why do you think it's so hard to get to that deeper vision? Cause I think most of us probably, I do something similar, not in the same line of work, but just in talking to primarily groups about sort of, what do you want? And it's very hard, and in a more, I would say, vision like way, not like, I want a burrito for lunch, but why do you think it's so hard for us to actually connect to that? And why is it so full of shame?
PRENTIS: I think my guess, maybe it's a guess, maybe it's an informed opinion, but I think partly what happens is, Especially when we're young, our desires can get so entangled with other people's needs or that experience of safety in our families or belonging in our families, it can become so entangled with that, that we can lose access to our own longings, because they're not convenient or They intersect with what someone else wants, or they make other people feel unsteady. So I think we can, in a way, strategically lose contact with our centers and with our longings so that we maintain relationship with the people that we desperately need to, caregivers or community or whomever else. I think there's just a, an overlay. I think there ends up being things that get piled on top of our longings and piled on top of our centers that are really about staying safe, really about belonging, and I think when we can get to the point where we're saying, Oh, what I really want is to belong somewhere, or what I really want is to feel safe somewhere, we can start to trim away the stuff that's in the way that's all these competing visions and other people's desires and needs they get piled on top of Us.
ELISE: Yeah. And ultimately the book is about trauma, right? Or trauma responses or whatever feels patterned into us is maybe a line of first defense. And you write about how trauma is arresting and lives in the fascia. And it's not only physical patterns. Can you talk a little bit about, because I think most people are familiar with the way that physical patterning can shape your body, the way you might walk or your gait or the way you would swing a racket, right?
PRENTIS: Mm hmm.
ELISE: that muscle memory, maybe it seems obvious, but it somehow felt not obvious the way that you explained it, how deeply our emotional patterns, how they land in exactly the same way, including our perceptions of ourselves.
PRENTIS: Yeah, thanks for starting it that way and talking about almost the athleticism of it. Because I think that is a way that a lot of people can understand how your body can be shaped by repetition, shaped by doing something over and over again. It becomes easier and easier for your body to do it and your body becomes almost shaped around that activity if you do it long enough. In somatics, we often say we're always practicing something, so you may not be aware of it, but you're always practicing. You may be practicing how to hide a little bit when you're in a conversation with somebody. You may be practicing how to take up a lot of space, and that's something if you're doing it well, you probably practiced it for a long time. You probably got really good at it. Whether or not it's a practice that you want to be doing, whether or not it's a practice that leads to fulfilling relationships or you living in your purpose or making the change that you want to in your life is a different question. But whatever it is that you do well right now, you probably do it well because you practiced it. You may have an inclination towards it, but you probably also got really good at it. And so our behaviors and our patterns, like any sport we might play, It's something we practice and refine the way a baseball pitcher might, you know, tilt their elbow in a particular way and keep practicing that till they can pitch perfectly. You might do the same thing around yeah, self protection. You might feel the urge to be vulnerable and contract yourself, contract your chest, or tighten your jaw. Get really good at it till you can't even recognize that you're doing it anymore. It doesn't require you to think about doing it anymore because you've practiced it so well. So we do that. And it creates certain emotional landscapes in our own bodies, the things that we practice over time. And it creates certain things in our relationships. And a lot of times we lose our awareness, again, to the fact that we are choosing those embodiments, and yet they still keep impacting our lives and how they feel to us.
ELISE: yeah. And it was interesting, this is sort of the culminating episode of a series, and Resmaa is in the series, I know you write about Resmaa, and he was working with me and was like, that smile, like, And you write about this too, right? And he was taking me through a process and just like the smiling, the laughing. We all have these responses to fear or moments of anxiety or you write about how you learned, I think everyone listening can relate to this, "I learned to quiet my body's response, a wince, the desire to pull away. I could numb my own indicators that I'd had enough that we have these sort of easy responses to discomfort boundary transgressions. I know you went viral initially for your, a beautiful sentence about boundaries. But I think when you start to pay attention, you start to see all of the ways that we express our discomfort.
PRENTIS: And I think the other thing I want to say is that it's okay to, you know, I think there's another point in the book where I talk about smiling to exit an encounter with someone on the street. I want to have that at my disposal. I want to be able to choose to laugh or smile or do something that allows me to slip out undetected. I want those options. The challenge around all these things that we're talking about is that when they become habitual. So when I am met with an opportunity to actually have a genuine, authentic connection with someone, and I'm unable to because I have this laugh that creates distance between me and someone else. That obscures how I actually feel. And I don't actually know a way to do it differently. That I can't find my way from behind that protection. That's when it becomes a challenge because then it's no longer responsive to real time input. It's that we're bringing something from the past that has felt self protective, and we're using it and applying it to most scenarios where it may not even be dangerous, it may just be close, it may just be intimate, but we've forgotten how to allow the kind of vulnerability and intimacy that could happen to happen. So I think that's really the challenge, not exactly what we do, but when we lose the ability to be responsive in real time, that's when it's a challenge.
ELISE: I want to talk about The section on conflict, because I found myself underlining whole pages. And I think it's such an essential learning for all of us, like, in such a weirdly conflict laden, but conflict averse culture, where none of us have the skills, and yet we're sort of flying at each other, projecting onto each other, making each other wrong and bad, and in a way that is Antithetical to I think the vision of what this world could be like. But before we get to that, I want to talk about the embodiment. This is I think maybe your first somatic experience, you write, "Everywhere I carried my attention I could feel the quivering of a muscle that wanted permission to let go, Or another that resisted, tightening even more under my curiosity. I tried to breathe through my pores, as instructed, and suddenly understood how far inside myself I had retreated. I couldn't feel my skin at all, my whole body was bracing." Ooh, I relate. Yeah, I relate. I did MDMA therapeutically now many years ago, but I was with the therapist and I was just like, Oh my God, I'm in my body. I don't think I've been ever been in my body. I mean, this felt like the deepest and most profound revelation. I was like, Oh my God, Oh my God, I'm in my body. But as you were writing, In that section, I could feel, as I was doing the process with you, all my own bracing and how do you get people to start? Is it with someone like you? How can people start to even understand how disembodied they are?
PRENTIS: It's probably a question with many answers, yes, think it is helpful to work with someone who is a little further along the path than you because I think for people who have numbed in any variety of ways or have spent a lot of time numbing parts of themselves, to start to feel again can be terrifying. It might be overwhelming, when you start to feel your body, it may feel like, oh my gosh, this is an overwhelming experience. There's so many sensations happening and that might initially be really scary. So I think having someone with you that is helping you kind of navigate that terrain of yourself, but also reminding you, like, this is okay. This is okay to kind of soften these edges. I think can be really important. So yeah, I think there's all sorts of resources online and we do trainings and events and offer those for people working with a practitioner. I've been a somatic body worker for a while now, years. I think working with someone in that way, somatic coach or somatic body worker can be a more intimate space to explore.
But I often find that working with people, usually the people have had an experience like what you're talking about of having done something where that something got awakened and they're like, I had this experience once and I didn't know what to do with it. I didn't know where to put it. Maybe I was scared to do it again but I think sometimes, you know, people are carrying these experiences of their bodies sort of like foregrounding and saying, there are things to be felt here and people being like, oh gosh, how do I put that away? Embodiment is the thing, it's so close, it's nowhere. It's already here but just giving yourself permission to sink in, whatever will make you feel safe to do that, is the way.
ELISE: Yeah. And, It's interesting, I was just thinking of like John Sarno, people have probably heard about, and his work on, I think it's primarily lower back pain and anger, and I think alot of men in particular find a lot of relief, just even in understanding that that's what it is. For me, I think that maybe it's grief. I'm not sure what is in me. Do you feel like there's core emotional sediment at its root that's primarily in people? Is it fear or is it sort of a toxic stew? Or maybe we won't call it toxic, but like, what do you think is most present?
PRENTIS: Yeah fear is definitely up there. Even if there's more, there's always fear, because that's how, in a way, it gets locked in, is fear. Fear kind of encases whatever else might be there. Because when it tries to be felt, or when you try to look at it, what snaps it back into place is fear, or you mentioned shame earlier, which can be a kind of fear, a fear of expulsion, or fear of inherent kind of worthlessness or badness. So fear, I find, is always there, but I really think it can be many things. I mean, usually it's the harder things that people feel under resourced to feel and so they kind of stay with us. We haven't had the space or the witness to actually move through something, so those are the things that end up getting lodged. Or as you kind of talked about with, with men, lower back pain, there's a whole socialization piece of who can feel what and who can't feel something else. So there may be. Some things that are more thematic along gender, along race but it's like, what are the hard things and what are the things that people have not been allowed to feel for whatever reason. Those are the things, I mean, grief is ever present, grief, rage yeah, those are often there. Grief, rage, always fear. And then, you know, I've worked with people too that have almost suppressed their joy.
ELISE: Mm.
PRENTIS: And so I've definitely worked with people that have had just like laughing fits once they actually open up. There's like a world of joy in them. And I actually find that really working with many, many people, once we work through some of the harder things, there often can be an access to a deeper kind of joy. But yeah, I've definitely worked with people where it's like, Oh, I'm laughing for the next hour. And I didn't know that was in me, you know.
ELISE: I've been with a friend who had that experience, just like the joy bubble or joy pocket burst, which is also infectious. I mean, isn't the theory that you can't selectively repress your emotions, so once you start stuffing, you're stuffing in some sense, you're subduing your ability to feel everything?
PRENTIS: Yeah, that's right. That's right. I think some things you can fight with everything you can to push them down, to not show them. But yeah, you have to be policing your emotional life in order to make sure you're suppressing that one. So yeah, that's absolutely true.
ELISE: Yeah, before we get into conflict and in some ways this is maybe the perfect bridge you had written. Maybe it was on Instagram "boundaries are the distance at which I can love you and me simultaneously," which is so beautiful and such like a perfect articulation, I think, of boundaries. And I know boundaries is a hot topic and as you point out, contentious, potentially or people have different views. But can you talk a little bit about that and why you think it deserves its place or so essential beyond deserving a place to how we relate to one another?
PRENTIS: Yeah, I think boundaries for me have been an entry point into actually being in relationship with people, as opposed to kind of having the relationships that I want, that I'm controlling, or the relationships that someone else wants from me in a way, that boundaries are that, that's the place where we can negotiate. This works for me. This does not work for me. This is how to shape this thing. This is not how I want this shaped and the negotiation. And so when I offered that quote, I mean, it was not something I anticipated at all. You know, sometimes you like create a meme and you're like, I want to share this with the world. This was not that. The boundaries quote was not that it was like, I think at the time I had very few social media followers. I was just talking to my friends about my relationship with my father and my experience there. And then the thing started traveling around the world and resonating with people. And I'm so glad that it did. And it was certainly not my intention. I was really describing something that I learned of like, if I allow love to be at the center of my relationship with myself, if I allow love to be at the center of my relationship, specifically in this case with my father, what will our relationship look like? how will it feel? How will we speak to each other? What's the frequency? And not in a kind of like, our relationship has to be close in this and that. How do I be in this relationship in a way that maintains my own integrity and attends to his integrity?
ELISE: Yeah.
PRENTIS: Choose a relationship that can do that. It was really about choicefulness and relationship for me, boundaries and that they continue to be a teacher for me. You know, when you say something that you're still learning from, I get a lot of people like reaching out to me about boundaries and I'm like, you know what, I said that, it was kind of like a prescient moment cause I said it before I really knew it, you know, and it keeps teaching me.
ELISE: Well, and it's interesting you mentioned the word relationship a few times, too, you had an amazing line, I don't know, I can't find it, I didn't highlight it, but about, we think of it as sort of like we're relating to another object, but really it's this field of relating and that boundary, it's like you're tending to the field and that that's slightly different than self protection, purely, it is like in this meeting place where you're attending.
PRENTIS: that's right.
ELISE: so let's talk about conflict. Oh, it's so good. You're write: "I sometimes think about conflict like this. At the very center is a gem, or like in a video game, a set of wings or special shoes that make it easier to get where we have to go next. A prize that can only be retrieved by doing the very thing we feel least compelled to do. The thing that may not even occur to us as a viable option when we are in the eye of the storm."
PRENTIS: Yeah.
ELISE: oh god, it's so hard.
PRENTIS: It's so hard. It's so hard because it's like a tiny death. And I was trying to think of a less morbid way of saying it, but I think that is what is so hard about it. Because a lot of us are having conflict as though we're fighting for our lives with each other and whether that's like hiding or shutting down or fighting, it's kicking up all of that survival stuff in us and in order for it to actually be transformed something in us has to surrender and that doesn't mean acquiesce, it just means we have to drop underneath the survival piece and listen for understanding, listen for the message, listen for the current. And that's a really tricky move. You know, you have to practice a lot of trust falls in order to reach for that move in conflict. But it's the only way and it's how we retrieve the meaning, how we retrieve that nugget is through the surrender. And I think many of us know this. It's like you'll have a conflict with somebody and then you'll keep having similar conflicts over time with other people. And like, so you could say, tell a story of like, why are all people like this? I've heard people say this, and I've probably said it myself. Why are all people this way? That I keep having this conflict with them. It must be some sort of issue with all other people outside of myself. As opposed to there's a conflict here that is recurring in my life because there's a lesson that I have so far been unwilling to learn. And the whole book is about how learning is not just the acquiring information. That learning is an embodied transformation. So I haven't learned it, meaning I haven't changed. I haven't allowed it to really permeate me and change me. And so I will continue to have this conflict until I can be changed.
ELISE: Oh, it's so important. It's so important too, because as we think about how having access to keyboards, you know, just the way that we're ricocheting around primarily online, right? Like there's not as much happening and it's a very different experience in the digital space, but people are not equipped to have hard feelings and know how to process them and by hard, I mean difficult feelings, right? And so the instinct is to project, you write so beautifully: "when we're in those heightened states of reactivity, we often need the world to become black and white binary, good and bad, so that we can move and defend decisively, so that we can state our position clearly, draw our lines in the sand. But nuance lives in feeling, it lives in the body." And, can you take us through that a little bit in terms of everything that's lost, not only in of increasing the distance between us, but what it looks like to sort of show what this is what it could actually look like to have healthy conflict where we evolve our thinking or our understanding and deepen our experience of each other. How does that start to happen? Can you talk a bit about that? Can you just fix it all?
PRENTIS: I definitely can't fix it all, but, I mean, because it's still something I'm observing in myself. I also do facilitate a lot of organizational conflicts and conflicts sometimes between people. I think it requires, well, one, I will just say we are all really set up not to have generative conflicts with each other, especially not in an online space. There's nothing that really has to bind us. We can ignore our connectivity. We can ignore the fact that we're related to each other. And it is designed that way. It's designed to feel as though you are an individual having an an argument with someone who doesn't even seem real. You don't even know this person, you know, has a family or has people who love them. They're disembodied in that way. And so conflict, the way that we have it now, is really objectified. And so for us to have conflict in more generative ways, I think we have to be having conflict in more generative ways in our lives, in our 3D lived realities. We have to be practicing where it is safest for us to do so. These moves of surrender, of listening, of suspending our desire to castigate or separate or other, we have to suspend those where we feel the safest until it becomes something that is more embodied in us. We have to practice it. And you know, when I facilitate, I'm really a kind of stand in nervous system for people that can be, you know, I make sure that my breathing is flowing. I make sure that I feel, in my body, connected to the ground and to the earth, and that provides a resource for people in the room to take a breath that they might not have otherwise taken. And even that opens up a lot of possibilities of just self reflection. So, I think we need to be practicing it.
We also just need to be in a lot more self reflection about what our habits and our patterns are. So that we can start to see ourselves in those moments, like, Oh, I'm doing that thing because I'm scared of this. Oh, okay. Got it. But the less we're actually in regular practice with ourselves, the more mysterious we are to ourselves. I also just, you know, I want to say that point, thanks for reading that piece about conflict. It's knowing that it makes the world binary because when you are running from a lion that is trying to attack you, you don't want to sit there and calculate how fast is this lion moving? Like, are they coming to get me or are they coming to get somebody else? You want to run. You want to run quickly. And that's a lot of what's at play with us when we get kicked up in conflict of like, I've got to be right. My survival depends on my rightness in this moment. And so having practices or agreements in these relationships where you are your closest relationships of like, I can see that you are responding from that place. Or I can feel myself starting to get into that place of there's only right or wrong here. Being able to support each other along the way is really important. Sometimes you are more right and sometimes you are more wrong, but it is not always the most useful frame to view every human interaction. Most of the time it will be helpful to where we're going to understand what is motivating me and what is motivating you.
ELISE: And it's, as we know, from social science and what, and just personal relationships, it doesn't change people. It doesn't move people. No one in a conflict is like, Oh, you're right. They might feel that after, particularly if you can do it in a place of just like calmness. You write " What if instead of innocent and guilty we could see ourselves as both harmed and harming more or less honest, More or less able to be conscious when triggered, more or less manipulative, more or less caught in patterns, more or less willing to take responsibility for our own change. Could we then tend to the pain that is created in our breakdowns instead of imagining that our denial and accusations will produce care and repair? Can we encourage all of us to learn inside of conflict? and transform because of its occurrence." I think that's so profound because, I mean, I tend to think of myself as like a highly honest person and I prize that quality in myself, Prentice. And then it's like, I do this in part just from I've been spending a lot of time, my life, talking to people like you and reading books like yours to say, like, let's just sit with the fact that that is not always true and that you just told a white lie. You just texted someone that you're feeling a little under the weather. You feel fine. Like, you just don't want to leave your house. Right? And it stokes anxiety in me to have to pick apart my own identity where I get very binary. And I wrote a whole book about women and goodness and I suffer greatly from defending my goodness and trying to get that out of my body as not a whole way to live. I'm perfectly bad, too. But it goes right to the somatics for me where, you know, it goes right to the anxiety that I think comes up for us. When I think about oh, not everyone likes me, or not everyone thinks that I'm as like, nice and kind as I think that I am.
PRENTIS: yeah.
ELISE: Or all these weird, kind of strange social values. But even that is enough to get me running.
PRENTIS: yeah. I love this conversation in particular. I wanna talk a little bit about historical context here, 'cause I think about our society and how power gets structured and power along racial lines, power along gendered lines, there's power in all these ways. And what gets kind of folded into how we create hierarchies of power is this concept of goodness too, of an inherent rightness, I would say more than goodness, a kind of rightness. And for a long time, you know, I wanted to prove that I could be right too. I could be good too. And then there got to be a point where I was like, I actually think that whole premise is the issue, that I'm a full human being. And I think I put something there in the book too, around like racial hierarchies being in part of mythology around who's more closely connected to God or you know, being divine and who's, in a way, more connected to the earth or dirt in a kind of negative connotation. And not only as I got older, I was like, Oh, I want to be connected to the earth, but also, these are mythologies that make it, the way they land in our bodies are that we can't tolerate our complexity. We can't tolerate that sometimes we have motivations that we wouldn't like to tell people that we have or yeah, that we that we act out of turn or we tell white lies, like you said. And the more we hide these from ourselves, the more, in a way, monstrous things we can do to each other. And I'm really longing for a set of relationships in a world that is inhabited by humans that are fallible and beautiful and can meet each other from that place.
ELISE: And whole. Yeah, you have that beautiful line from Audre Lorde's essay, Poetry is Not a Luxury, "the white fathers told us, I think therefore I am. The black mother within each of us, the poet whispers in our dreams, I feel, therefore I can be free." And you write a bit about Descartes, this whole disconnection from the body, and it runs along gendered lines, as you said, racial lines with a sort of patriarchal white man closest to God and closest to the intellectual powers of the mind. It's so, so deep at us in a way that I think is hard. It's really hard, I think these things run in us as scripts, it's like a collective script and you identify it because it's part of culture until you recognize like, wait, where is my body? And why am I dislocated from my body? And why am I trying to control my body or corral my body or distance myself from my body? It's all so deep.
As you sort of think about this moment, and you write at the end about fear, and how fear stokes cruelty, I think we all recognize that around us, how would you therapize our culture? And what can you offer for for anyone who is listening, who wants to stay in contact with the world and yet is like completely overloaded. How do we stay present and how do you work with that with clients and you write about your own experience too, right? Being in BLM, having a heart attack, literally. How do you balance between engagement and Self preservation?
PRENTIS: You know, I've been doing a lot of work lately with groups, just given everything that is happening right now in the world, and we've been doing a lot of processes around collective grief, around witnessing, feeling, collective grief, and right action. That's kind of the range we've been exploring, and I think one of the challenges of this time is that there's so many crises. And so many of these crises are a result of denied feeling, over time. Denied feeling, denied processing, denied growing up, in a way. Like, as a society, there's been so many moments where we could have grown up and we didn't. And that is almost what we've brought into the center of the culture, is to deny feeling, deny bodies, and deny changing, really. And because of denial, crises mount because it's unattended to challenges in the world. Crises that haven't been deeply addressed. And I think there's a lot that is happening right now. And I think that part of how I tend to it, and moving through with my own community is making room to feel together.
ELISE: Mm hmm.
PRENTIS: even embodiment work. You know, a lot of times people almost treat it like a body hack. Like, how do I get calm real fast when I'm not calm so I can get back to work or something? And I think the potential is, it has to be much deeper, more revolutionary than that. And I think feeling together is a part of it. Grieving together is a part of it. Celebrating together is a part of it. I know when I scroll through my phone and I see a million horrific things, I don't actually feel as though I'm honoring what I'm seeing if I don't take the time to feel and notice that I feel different than when I picked up my phone. How do I feel different? Well, suddenly there's a sob that is lodged in my chest. And I could go about my day pretending as though there weren't something lodged in me. I could spend time with my partner, spend time with my kid, but I am experiencing, I'm witnessing things. And I have to give room and honor to what I've witnessed and the suffering that people are experiencing by feeling. And so much of what we are experiencing right now is not to be felt individually. And to imagine that you can feel things individually at this scale is to set yourself up and to also be stuck in that paradigm of individual healing all the time. If I could just get better, then it'll be okay.
I think we need each other. I say this all the time, there are some things that are too big to feel in one body. You need a collective body to move them through. And I think that's what we need. We need to come together in spaces to heal, not just to consume together or to watch a movie together, but to feel together and to have human emotion in real life, in public and act from the place of a feeling body, to choose action from a feeling body and not just a reactive or a numb body, but a body that feels, a body that can connect. What kind of actions do you take in the world from that kind of body? I think it's different.
ELISE: Mm. That's beautiful. I think, too, you mentioned, as you're doing conflict work that you are using your body as a resource or your calm nervous system as a resource for who's present, and I think about it as sort of like, a washing machine, that's not a nice way, probably, to describe my body, but like, the more that I can process my own stuff, the greater capacity I have to help other people process their stuff. And I think when you think about that, extending into groups and into communities of like, What does real emotional hygiene, what does really feeling, what does this look like? And then how does that extend so that settled nervous systems And processed that are processed and have this bigger and bigger capacity for this, I think can start to bring some of the collective temperature down or at least model, like I can stay present. I'm going to stay present with you, even if you're flying off the handle and have no capacity for this. And I know that's been my practice of particularly for things that aren't directly affecting me, I do not want to add, I do not want to dial this temperature up nobody needs me sort of projecting my own pain but how can I process it and then maybe take on, not take on other people's, but in a way, yeah, like, how do I do this? And I'm with you, I think there's nothing more powerful than a group. I don't know whether it's spiritual, for me it feels spiritual, certainly energetic, I mean you're just building a much bigger field.
PRENTIS: That's right. Absolutely. And I think to your point around kind of taking that on in our own bodies, I think there are people that do not have the luxury of feeling in the way that I'm feeling with folks in my community, that do not have the luxury because they are in acute danger, you know, lately we've been exploring like if I am to be a real witness.
If I am to take right action, then I have to know that from this place where I'm positioned, part of my almost responsibility to others is to make that space, is to move through, is to get clear. Because other people cannot, do not have that luxury. And so partly it feels like a responsibility to the whole to do the work that I can when I have the space to do it, who knows what's in store for any of us, and when things will be acute for any of us, and so you know, I want people to be able to bear witness to all of us when there are moments of any sort of oppression or violence or pain that people are experiencing.
ELISE: Yeah. I think it's one of the most powerful ways to serve and you don't necessarily get credit or get attention or affirmation for it, but I think it's something that we can all do that's very powerful. Prentice, thank you for your book. It's such a gift.
