Overall, I am asking whether there exists freedom (not necessarily as a common-sensically positive category, but as a way to think what it makes possible) in this pain that most definitely cannot be reduced to mere recognition based on the alleviation of injury or redressed by the laws of the liberal state, and if said freedom might lead to other forms of emancipation, which can be imagined but not (yet) described.
Alexander Weheliye
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Somatic, Psycho-poltical Inquiry Support/Facilitation/Consulting
for Political Activists & Engaged, Political Communities
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Please call for rates. Sliding scale options, when available.
What to expect in a consult/session:
Consults and sessions combine tools from my somatic extimacy approach to holding space in the therapeutic field. It is informed by my previous professional background in social and linguistic anthropology, as well as trauma-informed, somatic training in Kathy’s Kain’s Touch Therapy praxis, and sensorial attunement practices from the Danis Bois Method and Somatic Experiencing® (SE™). This cumulative approach offers a framework for sensing into where a person or group feels unmet, overwhelmed, or numbed, be it at the level of one’s narrative descriptions of self, community, and/or the world, or via the ways in which one’s body has adapted to stress and injustices in the environment, past or present. Consults and sessions are held with deep relational listening; there are pauses at intervals to choicefully track unfamiliar, unmet, or in/subconscient emotional and physical states that inhibit spacious, experiential awareness of one’s or a community’s immediate reality, needs, and potentiality. The intention is to facilitate conscientious, emotional resilience so that one’s physiology and soma can support nuanced capacity for expressing embodied agency, relationally, from one moment to the next.
My somatic extimacy approach engages the whole person, meaning equal attention is given to individual/familial experiences and the broader historical-political worlds in which individual/familial/communal experiences are lived existentially, interpersonally, collectively, and intergenerationally. ‘Historical-political worlds’ refers to unpresenced and unrepaired historic-political events and the current, lived experiences of their aftermaths: imperial conquest; violent land dispossession; slavery/enslavement; colonialism; genocide; forced and voluntary migrations and refugee phenomena; indenturement; enforcements of cis-heteropatriarchy and binary gender normatively; cultural, institutional, and national practices of racism/racialization and ethnicization; practices of ability normatively; loss of citizenship and community from geo-political border shifting; war and environmental crises; and more. The intention is to not separate, dehistoricize, or hierarchize individual/familial/communal experiences from unrepaired political events and thus the material and psychic terrains in which current life is lived and situated; rather, the aim is to understand how they equally impact contemporary experiences of daily existence.