SOMATIC, PSYCHO-POLITICAL EDUCATION

 

The Center for the Practice of Somatic Extimacy specializes in the integration of political theory and somatic education as everyday praxis, in the service of collaborative disruption of the violent mundanity of raced existence.  It advocates mind-bending co-thinking and deepened, sensory awareness as equally essential for transformative, political engagement.

 

Somatic extimacy is a trauma-informed, political praxis that is theoretical, existential, and experiential.  The focus is the uncontainable work of race and its gender-specifying forms, where the violence inherent to raced existence is understood to supersede every social encounter and thus threaten every liberatory project grounded in everyday, social relationships.  As such, we cannot take the mundanity of race for granted or assume that transformative political action equates to knowing how to ‘co-be’ or ‘co-practice’, interactively, under violent conditions that remain unresolved. Inspired by black feminist inquiries, as well as James Baldwin’s interactive presencing of liberal hypocrisy in raced encounters, somatic extimacy is a learned praxis that challenges what is routinely unpresenced in interaction as transformative social care and political material.

 

 

OFFERINGS

Yearlong Extimacy Process Intensives – Offered Yearly

Customized, Long-term Intensives for Established Groups & Communities

Somatic & Psycho-political Inquiry Support for Educators, Communities & Political Change Agents

 

 

FACILITATOR / CREATOR

Kesha Fikes, Ph.D., (she/her)

Independent Scholar

Psycho-Political Educator

Somatic Experiencing® Practitioner

kefikes (at) gmail (dot) com

650-933-8227

Location: Unceded Ohlone Lands / Northern California

 

 

Thank you for reminding me that our real purpose of ‘making’ is to encourage possibilities for presencing in and through experimentation. That study is wake work toward incompletion, so we may tightly interconnect the tender synapses of our callused souls. That abolition starts with the self, so we may lose our individuated selves in favor of a blurred, irreducible sociality of the senses.

 

— Zun Lee