Kelsey Blackwell Spoke at the 2022 YWCA Racial Justice Summit: Decolonizing the Body (Part 2 of 2)
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.”
Blackwell became reconnected with her body through dance and taught herself other ways to heal herself, coming to realize that what she was doing was somatic coaching and became certified in it through the Strozzi Institute.
The importance of what Blackwell teaches is that the mind and body need to be in unity and work together. But because of the internalization of oppression, a disconnect happens to the detriment of the individual.
“An internal conflict leaves us feeling at odds within ourselves and also disempowered because we can tell in a non-verbal way when there is something off in someone we are communicating with,” Blackwell said. “It’s saying one thing, but it’s like, ‘For whatever reason, I don’t believe you.’ There is something off that’s communicated when we are divided within ourselves. There is something that even without us saying it others pick up on. I have clients who might want to feel more confident. They feel like every time they have something to say, it’s not heard or they say something and then no one says anything and then someone will repeat what they just said and everyone says, ‘Oh, that’s a great idea.’ And they are like, ‘Wait, what about what I just said.’ They’ll try all of these different things. They might try getting therapy or working with a coach or maybe even doing more things like saying affirmations. They do all of these things and some of it helps. But the change is often not long lasting because they have forgotten their body. So what we would do is we would notice, ‘Ah, how are you feeling when you are in the meeting with these people? Before you say anything, what’s happening in your body?’ You might notice, ‘My jaw is clenched. My throat is tight. My belly is clenched.’ There is a physical locking down of the body. Often this is a shape that is taken for protection. And that locking down of the body is also conveys a sense of, ‘I’m not here. Look at me. I’m going to be tucked away over here.’ It’s this way of protecting oneself. When you speak from that place, you are saying one thing, but your body is communicating loads of other information. It is saying, ‘I’m afraid. I don’t want your attention on me because I’m afraid there is going to be an impact that I don’t want.’ Oftentimes that is a shape that we learn to take because of our history.”
When the body and mind are united, it causes us to enter into an almost revolutionary view of ourselves for the body — and the mind — is no longer following the almost pre-programmed ways of interacting with and acting within the world. It is becoming decolonized.
“The body speaks the language of sensation,” Blackwell said. “And when we are in the practice of connecting with ourselves on the level of sensation, that means that we are in the practice of moving from our linear, conceptual goal-oriented, need-to-arrive orientation, which is the orientation of the colonial project and hence capitalism. We’re moving out of that old way of organizing our thinking and when we move into sensation, we’re moving into non-linear. We’re moving into a different relationship with time. We’re moving into emergence, what is happening in the present moment. We’re moving into intuition. We’re moving into a more generative relationship with rather than a relationship over, a relationship with the body as opposed to a relationship over the body. And the relationship over is often the relationship that we are the most familiar with having with our bodies.”
And so, according to Blackwell, we enter a new path of existing, a path that we sometimes leave for the comfort of that which we have been on for most of our lives.
“This is a profound shift,” Blackwell emphasized. “And it is also a shift that doesn’t happen overnight because the tread of walking down the path of a relationship over with your body is one that we have been taught to walk. It has been expected that we walk it. It’s reflected everywhere. It’s what we think we’re supposed to do with our body. It’s how we think we’re supposed to be with our body. We’ve been walking down that path a really long time. It’s a really well-worn groove. And moving into a relationship with it is like getting off the trail. And suddenly you are in the lead. And it’s kind of like, ‘Wait a minute, where are we going? What am I supposed to do?’ And the well-worn trail, even though it’s not something that has been comfortable to walk, it’s familiar. And so we can look over at that trail and think, ‘I kind of want to go back over there. Even though it’s uncomfortable and painful, a least I know it.’ What this journey means is that there are going to be times when we find ourselves back on that well-worn trail. But we keep stepping off over and over again. And the more we do it, the more we see that there is so much that we can discover there when you get to be the one driving what this relationship looks like. It is so much richer.”
And it is the lure of this new way of feeling ourselves and approaching the world around us that will keep us coming back.
“When you get off that trail, there is a softness there that starts to show up in your relationships, your environment and your relationship to yourself,” Blackwell said about the usual trail of mind-body separation. “After we experience that, it becomes something that we don’t want to give up. That call of that other way in being in relationship with ourselves is much less powerful. It doesn’t mean that it isn’t going to show up sometimes so that we are going to find ourselves back there. Again the world that we are living in, the waters that we are swimming in are pushing us there. When we find ourselves back there, it’s okay. But then we notice and we’re like, ‘Oh I’m back in this place of self-aggression. I’m back in this place of really trying to contort my body to fit some narrow expectation. Who am I serving right now? What am I serving? And is it aligned with who I want to be serving and what I want to be serving?’ And when we ask that question and we dig deep enough, we see that what we are serving is the status quo. We’re serving the very thing that we hope to dismantle.’ And it’s not like we are self-flagellating here because I do think that until we live in a world in which we are living in a more equitable, more self-reflective, more conscious world, until we live there, inevitably at times, we create the patterns that we are wanting to dismantle. But what saves us is that even that recreation of the patterns, we hold ourselves with a lot of kindness, a lot of care and that is a completely different way of relating to ourselves.”
Blackwell runs one-on-one consultations as well as groups through her website in a series called Decolonizing the Body. She looks upon herself as a guide and it is up to the individual to decide to walk down that trail and what that trail looks like. It is an empowering exercise, which means Blackwell. Unlike that traditional world, will not be making decisions for you.
“I hold myself as a guide to supporting people as they are stepping off of that trail,” Blackwell said. “I’m not sure where you are going to go, but I support the choices you make and I support what you are noticing and what excites you or what you are curious about. And I will protect that space for you to be in that discovery. That’s the role that I hold for myself. What that means is that I am walking alongside the people I work with. And it is a balance of how much do I point out about the terrain and how much do I let you discover it. It’s like we need a little bit of both. Initially I do much less pointing out. I’m much more like, ‘Here we are in this new world. Let’s do these things and let’s see what you notice in your body.’ A lot of our time together is that. These things that I shared with you, I don’t know that I share in the context of the work. Most of the time, we are doing practices in our bodies and seeing what they unfold, what they show. In that sense, there is emergence in the work. I’m not holding a goal about where we are going to get. It’s more based on where we are now and what is the most honest, truest way to honor what is emerging in this moment in service to your wholeness and your wisdom. I balance that. If people ask questions, we get into it. But I definitely don’t go in with a lot of conceptual teaching. It’s much more embodied, which some people love and some people are like, ‘Wait a minute, aren’t you going to tell me what my body wisdom is? No I’m not. I’m just going to tell you that you have it. And I am going to support you in connecting with it.”
Decolonizing the Body isn’t necessarily a trail well worn, but it is a trail with great enlightenment.
For more information, visit www.kelseyblackwell.com.