This is the application to apply for the 2022 Spring course/somatic practice group beginning Monday, May 16th and ending on June 27th (no class on May 30th) from 4-5:30 PM PST, to be held online. Please apply by Friday, May 6th.
This six week course will build your capacity, embodiment and understanding of yourself, specifically as it relates to conflict, for the sake of supporting your healing and your work inside of racial, social, and environmental justice movements. We support politicized healing and we believe movement work includes all work, including care work, creative work, and support work. This group is for you if you care about working towards liberation and feel stuck inside your current embodiment.
This group is open to all. We are committed to uplifting politicized somatics inside of all communities working towards liberation and holding generative and accountable multiracial spaces. Queer, trans, black, indigenous, people of color are encouraged to apply (QTBIPOC).
We hold that shame is fundamentally a wise and protective response to oppression: the unequal organization of trauma in our society. This course will dignify what has been taking care of you all along, and open up a range of new, embodied choices though somatic practice. We will practice listening to the body and encouraging opening towards a new shape that is sustained by action. We promise that you will leave this period of practice with a clearer sense of your own commitments, and how to support yourself in your own healing and life choices towards making good on your longings.
Working at the level of the tissues, we will explore:
- what is my contribution in this moment and how does my body support that contribution?
- how has shame taken care of for me and my people?
- what messages have I internalized from broader systems and how have they impacted what is and isn't possible for me?
- how is it that I respond in relationship to pressure?
- what does dignity feel like and what does it make possible?
- what does it feel like to know my body as a source of agency rather than a problem to be fixed?
This course is led by B Stepp (they/them) and Ream (they/them). Our work is based in our organizing experience inside of movements for racial and economic justice, labor movements, and our training within Generative Somatics.
The cost for this course is $300-$700 sliding scale. 25% of funds will be sent to support black somatics/organizing. (Black Organizing for Leadership and Dignity)
Deadlines: Please submit this application by Friday May 6th.
We will notify you of your acceptance status by Monday, May 9th.
For any questions email:
ream.somatics@gmail.comB Stepp (they/them). B is a black, mixed, non-binary somatics practitioner, facilitator, and organizer. They live on unceded Duwamish and Coast Salish land (Seattle). They became politicized in the wake of 911 and began organizing inside of the anti-war and student movements that followed. In most recent years, B has been an active tenant organizer, building power in their own building, and city-wide, and organizing for healing and transformative justice inside of the movement for black lives, including inside of the Capitol Hill Autonomous Zone that was established in the wake of the George Floyd Rebellion. B has been practicing with Generative Somatics since 2010.
Amanda Ream (they/them). Ream is a white queer organizer and somatics practitioner on unceded Ohlone Land (San Francisco), organizing for economic and racial justice and immigrants’ rights, working for over 25 years in the labor movement and currently as the Strategic Campaigns Director for the United Domestic Workers’ Union. Ream began practice with Generative Somatics in 2011 and co-leads the “Somatics for White Racial Justice Organizers” community.
