Strengthen Your Capacity for Calm and Clarity Through Embodied Practices

May 31 • 10:00am – 12:00pm (EST)

Strengthen Your Capacity for Calm and Clarity Through EMBODIED PRACTICES

In times of stress and overwhelm—especially during a charged election season—embodied practices help us return to presence, deepen self-awareness, and act with choice, agency, and integrity.

In this powerful, experiential session, you’ll:

• Explore how health and wholeness are always available in the present moment
• Practice proactive self-care rather than reacting from burnout
• Normalize the personal stress we carry within a larger social-political context
• Learn to recognize when you’re stuck and how to ask for support
• Discover the role of both self- and community-compassion

Antiracism embodied practices are body-centered approaches that help individuals recognize, process, and unlearn the ways racism lives not only in systems and structures, but also in our nervous systems, behaviors, and relational habits. These practices support healing, awareness, and action by engaging the body—not just the intellect—in the work of antiracism.

Here are some examples and principles of antiracism embodied practices:

1. Grounding and Centering: Practices like deep breathing, meditation, or physical grounding (e.g., feeling your feet on the floor) help individuals stay present when discussing or confronting racism, rather than dissociating or becoming defensive. These tools build capacity to remain in uncomfortable but necessary conversations.
2. Somatic Awareness: Noticing where and how racism or fear shows up in the body (tight chest, clenched jaw, frozen posture). This awareness helps people recognize implicit bias or trauma responses in real-time.
3. Interruption of Stress/Defense Patterns: Learning to interrupt “fight, flight, freeze, fawn” responses in conversations about race. This helps prevent shutdown or reactive behaviors like defensiveness, guilt, or silence.
4. Cultivating Resilience Through Movement: Practices like shaking, stretching, or mindful walking help release stored tension or trauma, particularly for BIPOC individuals carrying generational or lived racial trauma.
5. Boundaries and Centering Agency: Supporting BIPOC individuals in reclaiming body sovereignty, voice, and choice in racially charged environments. Helping white individuals notice and refrain from performative allyship or taking up space unconsciously.
6. Relational Embodiment: Practicing active listening, eye contact, and posture awareness in interracial interactions. Supporting co-regulation: being present in a way that helps others feel safe and seen.
7. Ritual and Collective Healing:  Using breath, chant, prayer, or ritual to honor grief, rage, and resilience around racial harm. Practiced in community to foster belonging and shared healing.

These practices are often inspired by or integrated into the work of somatic abolitionism, trauma-informed healing, yoga, dance, and indigenous wisdom traditions.