Series Description
“Healing from white-body supremacy begins with the body -- your body” (Resmaa Menakem, My Grandmother’s Hands). In this six-week series, white-identifying folks will gather weekly for 90-minutes to collectively process what it means to be white in America and practice dismantling white supremacism from the inside out. With the many painful, uncomfortable, and heart-opening social justice events that are unfolding in our country right now, Pause is hearing a loud and clear a call to step up. This series is one of the first steps towards that effort.
Echoing the recommendation made by many BIPOC race thinkers, white folks need a space to specifically center race and support each other through the often discomforting and confusing process of racial awakening. Ruth King, mindfulness teacher and race coach, writes, “We all need a place where we can be safe, curious, and unedited so that we can discover the ignorance and innocence of our racial conditioning and racial character as a collective… White people need to see race and understand themselves as racial beings with roots and a collective history of power and privilege.”
This processing group will approach this work from a somatic and relational framework, for which mindfulness is a powerful partner (you are welcome even if meditation is new for you). Following Menakem and others, we see racialization as being held within and by the body--both individual and cultural bodies--and so it is through the body by which we may liberate ourselves from clinging to the structures of privilege, white supremacy and our unconscious replication of oppressive dynamics. The systemic is somatic.
We will use body-centered and experiential practices to uncover how white supremacy lives within us and in our cultural & interpersonal spaces, and how we can, together, through internal resource building, mindfulness, and deep relationality, work to dismantle it. Themes will include white socialization, common white patterns, intergenerational trauma and the nervous system, shame versus remorse, the narrative of ‘goodness’, obedience, belonging, relational & liberatory culture building, and embodiment.
This Space Will Be For
-
Processing the embodiment of race and what it means to be racialized as white, including the long legacy of violence and trauma in white-on-white relations.
-
Cultivating internal resource, resilience and secure attachment to something deeper than whiteness, in order to diminish reactive patterns that cause harm to ourselves, to our communities, and especially to BIPOC.
-
Cultivating ways of relating to ourselves and each other that help undo internalized whiteness, including relating across difference in ways that are sustainable and humanizing.
-
Disrupting our tendency to replicate supremacist patterns (power-over, punishment, perfection, contempt, binary-thinking, paternalism and more) in our allyship.
-
Alleviating the burden on BIPOC to help us unlearn our racism.
-
Developing lifelong connections to each other and practices that will support us to stay in this work, in community, in solidarity, and with care.
If we are to survive as a country, it is inside our bodies where this conflict needs to be resolved; the vital force [behind] white supremacy is in our nervous systems.
– RESMAA MENAKEN
Who Can Attend This Series?
This series is open to anyone who identifies as white, including mixed-heritage folks who are white passing or white-identifying.
There will be a 12-person cap on participants in order to help develop a container of intimacy and trust. Attending all sessions is strongly encouraged.
All levels of meditation practice are welcome, beginners included!
We have to let ourselves be willing to be heart broken if we want to be free.
– REV ANGEL KYODO WILLIAMS
Series Cost
The actual cost is $150 for the series, with an option to pay $200 to support those in need of financial assistance. No one will be turned away for lack of funds.
If you need assistance please click here to work out a scholarship or payment plan.
Recordings will not be provided, and full attendance is strongly encouraged. Each week includes an optional thirty-minute after-care/support session with facilitators as desired. Upon registration each participant will receive a resource list, which is not required but could be helpful to prepare / reference throughout the series.
All proceeds, including facilitator compensation, will be donated to North by Northeast Community Health Center, the only medical clinic in Oregon devoted to African American/Black health.
The Facilitators
Danielle Davis is a resident Pause Meditation instructor, and is currently pursuing a Master’s degree in Transpersonal Counseling Psychology in concurrence with a comprehensive training in the Hakomi methodology of somatic psychotherapy. She has been doing anti-racism work on both the internal and community levels for several years, learning from mentors and trainings by Reverend angel Kyodo Williams, Holistic Resistance, Resolutions Pacific Northwest, Kheoshi Williams, Tada Hozumi, White Awake, and Equity by Design. She has been practicing the Soto Zen tradition of meditation since 2014 and spent a year in intensive residential training at Green Gulch Farm Zen Center and Great Vow Monastery. Danielle is very excited by how the realms of somatic psychology, mindfulness, and anti-racism/dismantling work inform and support each other.
