Ally, Blend and Build:

Deepening Our Collective Soma

In the midst of the upcoming election season in the U.S., I’ve found myself asking: how can we resource ourselves and each other in preparation for a chaotic season ahead? What can we practice, daily, to ground ourselves and communities?

 With thoughtful feedback from The Politics of Trauma online course community, we’ve developed Level II of the Politics of Trauma, Ally, Blend, and Build: Deepening Our Collective Soma as a way to reconnect and regenerate this summer over the course of six live sessions.

Together we’ll deepen in somatic opening to help unlock survival strategies and conditioned tendencies, and allow for more openness, commitment, strategic action and love. We’ll explore collective practices - discovering which practices best serve a group’s shared vision, understanding their pressures, conditioned tendencies and needs.

Somatic Opening and Collective Practices are two distinct yet interdependent parts of embodied transformation in service of social and climate justice.

Somatic opening and blending are
at the heart of somatic transformation.

These processes are what allow the soma to transform deeply embodied patterns. Often these patterns are what have helped us survive and adapt, but aren’t working anymore for our lives, leadership, or loves. Somatic opening allows us to shape shift and develop new choices and ways of being. It’s kind of magic. And, we can learn to do it with each other and ourselves.

We learned the foundations of Somatic Opening during the Politics of Trauma course.

Here we’ll deepen our capacity to:

  • Reveal the embodied patterns held in the mind/body as tightness, slackness, numbness, over-containment and more. Through recognizing these in ourselves, and others, we can support embodied transformation and open radically new choices.

  • Recognize the Conditioned Tendencies in groups and collectives. Learn to work with these through practice and collective opening.

  • Allow withheld emotions and impulses for protection to move through the soma in ways that serve transformation - your own and others’.

  • Deepen our ability to ally and be allied with through words, touch and somatic processes.

Collective practice connects us.

It helps us learn new moves, skills, and ways of being together. We come together to make bigger things happen - community organizing, social justice campaigns, climate justice alliances. What are we practicing together? What purposeful practices do we need to be successful at our shared vision? What collective practices help us to navigate very difficult conditions together? Our aim is to keep lifting each other up, to continue to learn, and to enact powerful and life-affirming change. Collective practice can serve this.

Through deepening in Collective Practices we’ll learn to:

  • Discern which practices are relevant for which collective somas.

  • Design collective practices based on shared vision, conditions, collective default patterns, and the embodied skills that will serve the group.

  • Deepen our collective capacity for joy and contradictions, navigating conflict and nourishing connection.

We are delighted to offer Coaching Circles, 3, 90-minute sessions, facilitated by an amazing and seasoned, politicized somatic coach, if desired. To assure that only folks jointly committed to the Coaching Circles are in them, we are offering them as an add-on to the program. Coaching Circles can support your deepening, build community and help to integrate your learning and practice.

Staci Haines, Brandon Sturdivant, Erika Lyla and other guest teachers will rotate holding practice space monthly.

Staci Haines

Erika Lyla

Brandon Sturdivant

About the Somatic Facilitators/ Teachers

Staci K. Haines

Staci has been experimenting at the intersections of personal and social transformation for the last 30 years through the work of somatics, trauma healing, embodied leadership, and transformative justice. Staci is the author of "The Politics of Trauma: Somatics, Healing and Social Justice" (North Atlantic Books 2019) and "Healing Sex: A Mind Body Approach to Healing Sexual Trauma" (Cleis 1999, 2007).

Staci is a leader in the field of Somatics, focusing on how it can bring transformative capacity to social and climate justice movements, and help to heal the impacts of trauma and oppression. She leads online and in-person programs and partners with social justice organizations, recently teaming up with Healing Justice London, Equality Lab, and Crenshaw Dairy Mart. She is the co-founder and prior executive director of generative somatics, a senior teacher at Strozzi Institute, and a core contributor to the Strozzi methodology. In 1999 Staci founded generationFIVE, a non-profit whose mission is to end the sexual abuse of children within five generations using transformative justice approaches.

Erika Lyla

Erika Lyla is a somatics coach + bodyworker + trainer + therapist + facilitator + activist + mother. Erika works with people to reveal their power, potential, and purpose. She guides with love and laughter towards life grounded in authenticity and shaped by dreams. She practices in unceded Ohlone land known as Oakland, CA and leads programs through generative somatics and Strozzi Institute. Erika is also a member of The Embodiment Institute’s Black Practitioner Cohort, an international group of Black transformational leaders.

Erika has been facilitating collective and personal transformation processes for over 15 years and holds a Master’s Degree in Social Welfare from UC Berkeley. She specializes in working with people facing psychiatric crises, survivors of sexual violence, and individuals healing from complex trauma. Prior to expanding her private practice, Erika supported individuals in navigating the medical industrial complex as a social worker, and also worked as a youth organizer and with school age children as an after school teacher and program director.

Brandon Sturdivant

Brandon Sturdivant helped build the capacity of East Bay organizations through co-founding the Justice Reinvestment Coalition, which secured half of state realignment funds in support of reducing probation terms and policies that expand opportunities for employment and access for community services for formerly incarcerated people. As co-founders of Mass Liberation Project, an abolitionist organization that works to train, coach, and develop black organizers who are directly impacted by incarceration, Brandon along with Alex Muhammad helped to seed the creation of four new femme-led abolitionist organizations: Mass Lib Arizona, Michigan Liberation, Mass Lib Nevada, and Life After Release (DMV).

In addition, working on the principle that transforming systems requires transforming ourselves, Mass Liberation Project has instituted “Return & Reclaim,” taking black formerly incarcerated organizers to Ghana to reclaim their ancestral heritage as an act of generational resistance. Lastly, Brandon has been studying and teaching somatics for 7 years through generative somatics, Black Organizing for Leadership and Dignity (BOLD), Strozzi Institute, and in programs and courses with Staci Haines.

We will gather on Thursdays,  twice per month, for 6 Sessions, 90-minutes each. 

9 -10:30am PT/ 12-1:30pm ET/ 6-7:30pm CET (Central European time).

All sessions will be recorded and available to participants.

May 

Session 1: Thursday, May 9th 

Session 2: Thursday, May 23rd 

June 

Session 3: Thursday, June 6th

Session 4: Thursday, June 20th

July

Session 5: Tuesday July 2nd- please note that our usual Thursday is a holiday in the US- so we’ll gather on Tuesday this week.  

Session 6: Thursday, July 18th

Pre-requisites 

This program is available for graduates of The Politics of Trauma online program and for those who have at least 8 days of politicized somatics training in person or 60+ online hours of somatics integrating social and climate justice.

Registration is Now Closed

FAQ

  • Yes, this is a more advanced program. This program is available for graduates of The Politics of Trauma online program and for those who have at least 8 days of politicized somatics training in person or 60+ online hours of somatics integrating social and climate justice.

  • All program content will be presented through Thinkific. This includes: welcome and pre-work, accessing live sessions, recording of live sessions, practice videos, written materials and resources, etc. Live sessions and coaching circles will be held over Zoom.

  • Yes, all live sessions will be recorded and available within approximately 48 hours on the online learning platform.

  • During the course, content will be released weekly and then will be available to you on the online learning platform indefinitely. You will be able to go through the recordings of live sessions at your own pace and review the contents at any time.

  • We are exploring being able to have the program accessible in Spanish as well as English. We’ll let you know as soon as we do!

  • Yes, transcripts of pre-recorded sessions and recordings of live sessions will be provided.

  • We offer a full, no-questions asked refund until May 31, 2024. After this time, partial refunds are offered proportionally to how much of the course has elapsed.

  • Yes, we offer a 15% discount for groups of 20 or more. Contact support@stacihaines.com for more information.

  • Yes, you can apply for a scholarship here.