Diverse Bodies, Diverse Practices: Toward an Inclusive Somatics
undoing my own poisonous feelings around fatness, I also need to undo toxic internalizations of all of the systemic oppression that is compounded into our culture’s body ideals. I need to be actively working to dismantle all of the systems of oppression that are wrapped up in how I have learned to relate to my body. In this writing, I am not
... See moreDon Hanlon Johnson • Diverse Bodies, Diverse Practices: Toward an Inclusive Somatics
my Reiki training, I learned that it’s important to know that when you “remove” something negative for the enhancement of healing, a space is left open. Balance is created by filling the space back up, whether it’s by replacing it with positive thoughts or healthier choices; otherwise that hole can attract other negative energies.
Don Hanlon Johnson • Diverse Bodies, Diverse Practices: Toward an Inclusive Somatics
Reich argues that it is not possible to break this oppressed-oppressor cycle without getting at “the social incapacity for freedom rooted in the human organism.” Our repetitive good-willed efforts to create a just social order keep foundering on the shoals of closed-off bodies, with dulled senses and weakened capacities. 6.
Don Hanlon Johnson • Diverse Bodies, Diverse Practices: Toward an Inclusive Somatics
Nearly fifty years ago, a handful of us joined in using the Greek-rooted term somatics as an umbrella designed to coax together a fragmented community of innovative and revolutionary teachers who had managed to craft methods of sensory awareness, touch, breathing, sounding, and moving to address the healing of old and widespread traumas, and to
... See moreDon Hanlon Johnson • Diverse Bodies, Diverse Practices: Toward an Inclusive Somatics
am holding the tension of centering my own white, wealthy body in this writing, while knowing my body should never be at the center of the collective liberation I put my reflection in service of. I am
Don Hanlon Johnson • Diverse Bodies, Diverse Practices: Toward an Inclusive Somatics
Marx made him aware of how the conditions shaping mass populations of factory workers and soldiers robbed their bodies of an internal sense of agency molding them for submission to national and industrial goals formed by others. Like Gandhi,
Don Hanlon Johnson • Diverse Bodies, Diverse Practices: Toward an Inclusive Somatics
even though they intellectually recognized the equality of men and women, that recognition was not embodied in their patriarchal stances. In addition, they held unquestioned assumptions about sexuality—ideally penis in vagina with simultaneous orgasms—which
Don Hanlon Johnson • Diverse Bodies, Diverse Practices: Toward an Inclusive Somatics
monographs are confined mainly to what Le Guin (1986) refers to as “the father tongue,” a high-minded mode of expression that embraces objectivity. Spoken from above, the father tongue runs the risk of distancing the writer from the reader, creating a gap between self and other. What is
Don Hanlon Johnson • Diverse Bodies, Diverse Practices: Toward an Inclusive Somatics
A secondary motivation in Gandhi’s somatic thinking was to discipline the hard edges of emotional reactions that fragment the revolutionary community and keep it from harmonious and effective action, activities which he thought of as purging the body of the effects of colonization.