Thanks for your take on this Al.
Somatic therapies are still very debated. Some studies show them to be effective, but many argue it's still too soon to be sure.
I'm sure some somatic therapists would say that there isn't enough funding in this alternative field to get more studies done. They run more on anecdotal subjective feelings and healings anyways haha
. Personally, I don't doubt the efficacy of somatic therapies for helping people become more embodied. I think the greater issue is that almost all somatic therapies today have appropriated from Asian traditions of meditation (Buddhism, Hindu tantra, Taoism, etc) and movement (Aikido, Qi-Gong, etc) and then re-brand it all into a secular "somatics" wrapped up in science-speak of "nervous system regulation". There's plenty of somatic therapists that also call themselves "shamans" (see the Amy Nicholson "Somatic Psychotherapist & Shamanic Healer" thread here) or compare their practice to "shamanism" (see Peter Levine).
What we know as "somatics" today was largely developed at the new-age mecca Esalen Institute in the '60s where there was a cultural appropriation stew of Asian traditions and misrepresented Native spirituality. When people bring this issue up to somatic folks, there are some practitioners who try to white wash their history and say it all really came from the European physical culture movement. When they do this white washing they don't seem to mention the fact that the European physical culture movement had links to fascism. Today's alternative therapeutic obsession with the body in trauma healing is eerily reminiscent of the Nazi obsession with the body. The greater toxic wellness culture may be hell bent on creating their own hash-tag Healed Ubermensch for instagram likes in a long fascist tradition. (For more please read this article:
https://matthewremski.medium.com/hello-yoganon-nazis-loved-yoga-f8f4bc50147e)
A brief quote from that:
Nazis elaborated and left behind tense obsessions about healthy bodies and homelands that have loomed in the background of New Age and wellness cultures for going on a century now. Here’s a shortlist:
The body can be purified through discipline and focus, as well as dietary and devotional communion with the organic earth.
The body can become a vessel for mystical experiences provoked by meditation, ritual, or psychedelics.
Personal mystical insight gained from astrology, exercise, breathing, meditation, or herbs can produce and nourish a resurrected golden age of supermen and superwomen.
Supermen and superwomen can have super babies — naturally born, of course—for the glorious homeland, if they devote themselves to the organic holism that will nourish their special hetero juices.
Personal mystical insight is like an energy vortex that both shapes and is shaped by the communion with the natural world.
In the shadow of these values lies anxieties that connect fascist psychology and New Age spirituality:
The uncultivated body fills up with bio-moral corruption.
Without holistic discipline, the body will be poisoned by science and modernity, and lose its connection to its ancestral ways of being.
The corrupted body will fail to protect the sacred earth. This will open society up to degenerate, but more vital forces.
Those degenerate forces — racially impure and sexually deviant—have always been waiting at the gates. The time to strengthen and purify is always now.
~~~
What McZeal seems to be doing is offering what is likely a mostly or all white clientele an Avoid Responsibility for Racism Card. Take my course/workshop/healing and you can be sure you're no longer racist or have a colonial mindset. If it were truly decolonial it'd be for survivors of colonial trauma, vets, boarding schools, inner city barrios and ghettos, rezzes.
Spot on. Since most of these alternative therapies aren't covered by insurance it's largely a privileged white audience. Not to say that there aren't more BIPOC that are joining the somatic movement, but by and large this is a predominantly white community. That's why some somatic teachers now can get away with calling their work "decolonization" as metaphor for embodiment.
I confronted a white lady holding dance meditation classes and calling it decolonization. It's a complete affront to native decolonial work. Frankly just more appropriation using decolonization as metaphor as a move to innocence. I think non-natives actually do know deep down what decolonization actually entails with giving land back, but that's just too beyond the pale - so let's dance around and dream journal and say we're decolonizing.
She's faculty at Goddard College.
Anyone in academia knows it's rare to be hired by a place you studied at, and they wouldn't post a "degree" from a degree mill or even make it past the first round of hiring. Goddard sure isn't a conventional college.
Goddard college does plastic shamanism:
https://www.goddard.edu/publication/exploring-shamanism-using-ancient-rites-to-discover-the-unlimited-healing-power-of-cosmos-and-consciousness/McZeal's alma mater, Pacifica Graduate Institute, had a plastic shaman on their faculty for years:
https://www.linkedin.com/in/kathryn-lafevers-evans-three-eagles-ab696634/ https://www.threeeagles.net/Through the 1960s, enrollment swelled to over 1,500 as the American counterculture, back-to-the-land movements made Goddard’s educational philosophy and location attractive to a new generation disillusioned with traditional structures and lifestyles....
Lifestyle "activism" is what it's all about in the new-age "Human Potential" movement. These new-age institutes and colleges are essentially just copies of the Esalen Institute. The place that actually started the whole idea of a somatic anti-racism group with their "encounter group" work. In the 1960s Esalen invited both black and white radical activists for these anti-racism mind-body (read: somatic) encounter groups. Least to say, it was a complete failure and the Black radicals all left, saying that these "mind-body liberation" groups were actually a subtle attempt to co-opt their movement by trying to transform them into "liberated individuals". Esalen was taking away the power in their collective identity as Black by individualizing the issues.
This hyper-individualism has been the entire point of the Human Potential movement started at Esalen. A place that's notorious for taking in the dejected white new-left folks in the '60s after they felt like failures in protesting (ie Kent State) so they could internalize the revolution inside of themselves and feel good. The revolution of the self in perpetuity. Socialism inside of each "liberated" body all for a small fee (aka capitalism). Liberate yourself and the world is simultaneously liberated, so to speak. *cough* bullshit *cough* A great example is, Jerry Rubin, a leader of the political Yippie party, who then became captain New-Age in the internal liberation Human Potential movement. These are the progenitors of the current so-called "liberation somatics" movement. Some more conspiracy minded people would probably also point to the CIA involvement with the New-Age human potential movement and say that it was an intentional diversion and co-optation of political movements at the time.
This is her research.
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https://www.researchgate.net/project/Decolonizing-the-Psyche-Decolonial-Somatic-Approaches-Series
Decolonizing the Psyche: Decolonial Somatic Approaches Series
Amber Mczeal
Goal: DTP is an experiential process that centers the cultivation of critical consciousness–C3–coupled with embodiment practices to foster transformation. These practices are intended to disrupt patterns of coloniality embedded in the psyche and body.
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Potentially this has noble aims, but how her work arrives there is anybody's guess. And how could a degree mill and working at an expensive almost all white hippie college with lots of accounts of a racist atmosphere lead to that goal?
~
Now something like this that she's been part of is far better. It does surprise me the others, far better trained and from far better schools, worked with her.
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https://rejoice.ucsf.edu/en/our-people
Our research team shares a vision of eliminating racial health inequities in the hospital setting.
I think Tuck & Yang's
Decolonization is Not a Metaphor has the best response to this:
Moves to innocence IV: Free your mind and the rest will follow
Fanon told us in 1963 that decolonizing the mind is the first step, not the only step toward
overthrowing colonial regimes. Yet we wonder whether another settler move to innocence is to
focus on decolonizing the mind, or the cultivation of critical consciousness, as if it were the sole
activity of decolonization; to allow conscientization to stand in for the more uncomfortable task
of relinquishing stolen land. We agree that curricula, literature, and pedagogy can be crafted to
aid people in learning to see settler colonialism, to articulate critiques of settler epistemology,
and set aside settler histories and values in search of ethics that reject domination and
exploitation; this is not unimportant work. However, the front-loading of critical consciousness
building can waylay decolonization, even though the experience of teaching and learning to be
critical of settler colonialism can be so powerful it can feel like it is indeed making change.
Until stolen land is relinquished, critical consciousness does not translate into action that disrupts
settler colonialism. So, we respectfully disagree with George Clinton and Funkadelic (1970) and
En Vogue (1992) when they assert that if you “free your mind, the rest (your ass) will follow.”
Paulo Freire, eminent education philosopher, popular educator, and liberation theologian,
wrote his celebrated book, Pedagogy of the Oppressed, in no small part as a response to Fanon’s
Wretched of the Earth. Its influence upon critical pedagogy and on the practices of educators
committed to social justice cannot be overstated. Therefore, it is important to point out
significant differences between Freire and Fanon, especially with regard to de/colonization.
Freire situates the work of liberation in the minds of the oppressed, an abstract category of
dehumanized worker vis-a-vis a similarly abstract category of oppressor. This is a sharp right
turn away from Fanon’s work, which always positioned the work of liberation in the
particularities of colonization, in the specific structural and interpersonal categories of Native
and settler. Under Freire’s paradigm, it is unclear who the oppressed are, even more ambiguous
who the oppressors are, and it is inferred throughout that an innocent third category of
enlightened human exists: “those who suffer with [the oppressed] and fight at their side” (Freire,
2000, p. 42). These words, taken from the opening dedication of Pedagogy of the Oppressed,
invoke the same settler fantasy of mutuality based on sympathy and suffering.
Fanon positions decolonization as chaotic, an unclean break from a colonial condition
that is already over determined by the violence of the colonizer and unresolved in its possible
futures. By contrast, Freire positions liberation as redemption, a freeing of both oppressor and
oppressed through their humanity. Humans become ‘subjects’ who then proceed to work on the
‘objects’ of the world (animals, earth, water), and indeed read the word (critical consciousness)
in order to write the world (exploit nature). For Freire, there are no Natives, no Settlers, and
indeed no history, and the future is simply a rupture from the timeless present. Settler
colonialism is absent from his discussion, implying either that it is an unimportant analytic or
that it is an already completed project of the past (a past oppression perhaps). Freire’s theories of
liberation resoundingly echo the allegory of Plato’s Cave, a continental philosophy of mental
emancipation, whereby the thinking man individualistically emerges from the dark cave of
ignorance into the light of critical consciousness.
By contrast, black feminist thought roots freedom in the darkness of the cave, in that well
of feeling and wisdom from which all knowledge is recreated.
These places of possibility within ourselves are dark because they are ancient and
hidden; they have survived and grown strong through darkness. Within these deep
places, each one of us holds an incredible reserve of creativity and power, of
unexamined and unrecorded emotion and feeling. The woman's place of power
within each of us is neither white nor surface; it is dark, it is ancient, and it is deep.
(Lorde, 1984, pp. 36-37)
Audre Lorde’s words provide a sharp contrast to Plato’s sight-centric image of liberation: “The
white fathers told us, I think therefore I am; and the black mothers in each of us - the poet -
whispers in our dreams, I feel therefore I can be free” (p. 38). For Lorde, writing is not action
upon the world. Rather, poetry is giving a name to the nameless, “first made into language, then
into idea, then into more tangible action” (p. 37). Importantly, freedom is a possibility that is not
just mentally generated; it is particular and felt.
Freire’s philosophies have encouraged educators to use “colonization” as a metaphor for
oppression. In such a paradigm, “internal colonization” reduces to “mental colonization”,
logically leading to the solution of decolonizing one’s mind and the rest will follow. Such
philosophy conveniently sidesteps the most unsettling of questions:
Decolonization is not a metaphor
The essential thing is to see clearly, to think clearly - that is, dangerously and to
answer clearly the innocent first question: what, fundamentally, is colonization?
(Cesaire, 2000, p. 32)
Because colonialism is comprised of global and historical relations, Cesaire’s question must be
considered globally and historically. However, it cannot be reduced to a global answer, nor a
historical answer. To do so is to use colonization metaphorically. “What is colonization?” must
be answered specifically, with attention to the colonial apparatus that is assembled to order the
relationships between particular peoples, lands, the ‘natural world’, and ‘civilization’.
Colonialism is marked by its specializations. In North America and other settings, settler
sovereignty imposes sexuality, legality, raciality, language, religion and property in specific
ways. Decolonization likewise must be thought through in these particularities.
To agree on what [decolonization] is not: neither evangelization, nor a
philanthropic enterprise, nor a desire to push back the frontiers of ignorance,
disease, and tyranny... (Cesaire, 2000, p. 32)
We deliberately extend Cesaire’s words above to assert what decolonization is not. It is not
converting Indigenous politics to a Western doctrine of liberation; it is not a philanthropic
process of ‘helping’ the at-risk and alleviating suffering; it is not a generic term for struggle
against oppressive conditions and outcomes. The broad umbrella of social justice may have room
underneath for all of these efforts. By contrast, decolonization specifically requires the
repatriation of Indigenous land and life. Decolonization is not a metonym for social justice.
We don’t intend to discourage those who have dedicated careers and lives to teaching
themselves and others to be critically conscious of racism, sexism, homophobia, classism,
xenophobia, and settler colonialism. We are asking them/you to consider how the pursuit of
critical consciousness, the pursuit of social justice through a critical enlightenment, can also be
settler moves to innocence - diversions, distractions, which relieve the settler of feelings of guilt
or responsibility, and conceal the need to give up land or power or privilege.
Anna Jacobs’ 2009 Master’s thesis explores the possibilities for what she calls white
harm reduction models. Harm reduction models attempt to reduce the harm or risk of specific
practices. Jacobs identifies white supremacy as a public health issue that is at the root of most
other public health issues. The goal of white harm reduction models, Jacobs says, is to reduce the
harm that white supremacy has had on white people, and the deep harm it has caused non-white
people over generations. Learning from Jacobs’ analysis, we understand the curricular pedagogical project of critical consciousness as settler harm reduction, crucial in the
resuscitation of practices and intellectual life outside of settler ontologies. (Settler) harm
reduction is intended only as a stopgap. As the environmental crisis escalates and peoples around
the globe are exposed to greater concentrations of violence and poverty, the need for settler harm
reduction is acute, profoundly so. At the same time we remember that, by definition, settler harm
reduction, like conscientization, is not the same as decolonization and does not inherently offer
any pathways that lead to decolonization.
