Choose your plan

In order to invite true depth and intimacy in, we must remain in humility of how we are showing up, knowing race is always present.​

“Whiteness is one of the biggest and most long-running scams ever perpetrated.”

— Quinn Norton

An online affinity space for white folks - A practice and call for white folks.

For those who have been raced and self identify as white, Presence is a space to reflect on how race is at play in your life and relationship with self and others. Whiteness and white body supremacy have inevitably played a part in our ability (or inability) to be connected, embodied and fully, authentically ourselves (and allow others to be and do the same).  In order to invite true depth and intimacy in, we must remain in humility of how we are showing up, knowing race is always present. Always. 

So, if race is always present, we are being asked to reckon with HOW that plays out.  If you know how it shows up, then you can start to unlearn, relearn and choose differently.  To choose presence and live in accountability, humility, curiosity.  Instead of constriction, headlessness, denial, and conceit. Therefore, it is personal and starts within us (before anything else) and our everyday choices in how we show up. How we live out our outdated, toxic conditioning of superiority is on us.  On us, to move uniquely (out of solidarity with whiteness, i.e. silence) and model what it is to be in a healthy relationship with self and others when it comes to the truth around race. To find purpose and taproot into the ripple effect of our words, behaviors, values. 

Unlike a dandelion - we (white folks) have been disconnected and disembodied from our past trauma—both trauma that took place generations ago and trauma that continues to take place today.

The dandelion flower head can change into a white, globular seed head overnight.  Each seed has a tiny parachute that allows it to spread far and wide in the wind.  The entire plant has medicinal properties.  Dandelions are often mistakenly identified as weeds, aggressively removed, but are hard to uproot; the top is pulled but the long taproot remains.  

- adrienne maree brown, Emergent Strategy

So how do we practice? We practice together. In a white affinity space. Where white folks come together in truth telling about race. Where we build community and ask, what might it look like for you to be a present and embodied white ancestor?  What might it mean, in terms of risk, cost and commitment...To work with, heal and “grow up” our frozen, constricted nervous systems, so used to staying silent and keeping the status quo.

Presence - the state or fact of existing, occurring, or being present in a place or thing. 

How do we choose presence and embodied existence in these white bodies? We lean into and start the long, lifetime work of building community and creating a new culture and way of being that Resmaa Menakem is calling, Somatic Abolitionism. We need to come together as white people to unlearn, decondition, then metabolize. And this is a space to do that. A place to hold space for energy, somatics, mindfulness to metabolize and practice unlearning and move through and give up the imagination of race that is still very much stuck in our bodies.  Which will only take time. And folks rooted like a dandelion taproot.  Not going anywhere.  Committed to generational work.

We don’t practice to feel good, we practice to feel more -adrienne maree brown

With my organizational transformational change lens, I know deeply there is a long game. A long game of emergence. 

“Emergence is the way complex systems and patterns arise out of a multiplicity of relatively simple interactions...(it) emphasizes critical connections over critical mass, building authentic relationships, listening with all the senses of the body and the mind.” -adrienne maree brown

I am holding this question below, today and more than ever committed to being here for the collective change that is necessarily in the white community.

 “How do we turn our collective full bodied intelligence towards collaboration,

if that is the way we will survive?” -adrienne maree brown

This has been the vision and the ask for awhile, and is a piece to the puzzle of true integration towards liberation

“I tell sincere white people, 'Work in conjunction with us- each of us working among our own kind.' Let sincere white individuals find all other white people they can who feel as they do- and let them form their own all-white groups, to work trying to convert other white people who are thinking and acting so racist. Let sincere whites go and teach non-violence to white people!

We will completely respect our white co-workers. They will deserve every credit. We will give them every credit. We will meanwhile be working among our own kind, in our own black communities- showing and teaching black men in ways that only other black men can- that the black man has got to help himself. Working separately, the sincere white people and sincere black people actually will be working together.

In our mutual sincerity we might be able to show a road to the salvation of America's very soul.”

― Malcolm X

The Process

Process & Philosophy - My process and movement into somatic abolitionism has been layered in what I see now as 3 essential pillars.  They have helped me to deepen my own healing and understanding and how I coach, consult and hold other white people in doing this work.

LOVE - Love is in this present moment. Where am I now? Who am I? And what communication and conflict transformation skills do I need to develop

BUBBLES - Is in the bubbling awareness and knowledge. What are you doing here? What don’t I know? Where have I been? And where do I need to be more honest about truth and history.  Of the United states. Of my family and lineage. Of my own experience in this world.

HEAL - or self healing, (is) within your body. Your being. Your self. Where do I want to be? What do you want? And what is ready to be let go and named? What is familiar and how will I be and do differently

“When we heal our own trauma, individually and collectively, we don’t just heal our bodies. By refusing to pass on the trauma we inherited, we help heal the world...Changing the world begins with your body...This means metabolizing the trauma in our bodies.”

— Resmaa Menakem, My Grandmother’s Hands