Kelsey Blackwell Spoke at the 2022 YWCA Racial Justice Summit: Decolonizing the Body
Kelsey Blackwell practices somantic coaching in the San Francisco area and online.
By Jonathan Gramling
When we come into this world, for the most part, our mind and body act as one as we seek to survive and develop as human beings. But sometimes trauma can separate mind and body much like a finger getting severed from the hand. And it is only be recognizing thee has been a severance and then action to reunite them that the healing can take place.
For Kelsey Blackwell, one of the featured speakers at the YWCA Racial Justice Summit this past fall, that trauma happened early in life.
“I grew up in a predominantly white, conservative community just outside Salt Lake City in Utah,” Blackwell said. “Being a Black woman and not being part of the predominant faith, I really felt like I was on the outside of that community. I didn’t feel like I fit in, But I internalized my inability to do so believing there was something faulty with myself. If I could just dress the right way, like the right music, say the right thing then I would belong. This led me to adopt a lot of patterns that I think are common for folks who are suffering from internalized oppression. Some of the patterns were learning how to be agreeable, to be nice, to not need too much, not take up too much space and not challenge authority, all of these things to keep myself small. I didn’t know I was doing this. But these were the adaptations that I took on in order to survive inside of an environment that was really not supportive for my wellbeing.”
While she may have had commonalities with her classmates and others in the community, race often times entered the picture.
“I remember that when the racist comments would happen, I would be kind of shocked by it because I didn’t necessarily think about being Black every day,” Blackwell said. “I just was in my body looking out. And then when one of those incidents would happen, it would be, ‘That’s right, I’m different. You see me as different.’ That was kind of like the tone. And you know, I knew that was wrong. But I think this is what is so powerful about mind-body work is that even though a mind may know that someone is acting from a place of ignorance or they are actively discriminating against you, knowing that doesn’t diminish its impact. And the body really makes that clear. My mind can say, ‘Oh that doesn’t matter. They don’t know what they are talking about.’ But then in my body, with practice, I can see, ‘Oh wow, I really tried to erase myself. I got smaller when they said that. I notice there is a lump in my throat now and I am feeling anxious.’”
Blackwell found an activity, something that she loved, that kept her in the game, so to speak.
“I really felt the most at home or myself when I was dancing,” Blackwell said. “So I danced all through school. There was a freedom that I could experience when I was moving my body that really just saved me in so many ways, from falling into total depression. Having dance and being able to express myself that way was very supportive for getting through school, getting through that environment. But I never really considered dancing as a career path. After school, I stopped dancing and I went to work as a magazine editor. I have a background in journalism as well.”
While Blackwell left Utah as an adult and now lives in the San Francisco Bay area, she didn’t leave behind the impact that the oppressive environment had on her mind and body.
“Many of those adaptations that I had taken on growing up persisted even as I entered my career and left Utah,” Blackwell said. “Many of those ways in which I had learned to try to be liked or try to fit in remained with me and made me feel like I wasn’t as confident as I wanted to be, that I wasn’t as effective conveying my ideas if I wanted to be in different settings. Again, I would internalize there being something wrong with myself, not realizing that those were adaptations that I had taken on to survive.”
Blackwell started to dance again and it opened up a world of self-awareness to her.
“So the more that I started to connect to my body, the more I felt like I was contacting a part of myself that had been diminished,” Blackwell said. “And I got really curious about that and started to — with intention — engage in embodiment practices that helped me feel like I was connecting with more of myself. And through that I could see that my body had taken on these practices. And with that awareness, I could step into new ways of being that aligned with who I really was and what I really wanted and what my values really were. That would be something that I didn’t have to fix myself. I didn’t have to stop thinking certain things. But I could actually in my body hold myself in a certain way or take care of myself in a certain way and honor certain feelings that were coming up, honor certain sensations that were coming up in my body. All of that actually gave me more connection to myself. And that deeper connection started to show up in my relationships and also in the work I was doing in a very positive way.”
And as people noticed, a new career was born.
“I had friends who saw the changes in how I was showing up in our relationships and they wanted to know what I was doing,” Blackwell said. “They asked if I would work with them as a coach. I didn’t really know a lot about coaching at that time, but I said ‘Sure.’ I started working with some different women who were friends of mine and then that grew into the coaching work that I now do with women of color. I formalized my study by actually learning about somatic coaching. I had no idea that was an actual thing, working with the body in that way, and that it had a name, somatics. When I discovered that, it was like, ‘Wow!’ A whole new world opened up that I had no awareness of.”