Transcript

Ani
Hi and welcome to the Somatic Coaching Academy podcast. Good morning, Brian.

Brian
Good morning, Ani.

Ani
How are you?

Brian
I’m doing well. I’m really looking forward to our podcast today.

Ani
I am too. This is episode 92 and we are doing a review of Resmaa Menakem’s book, My Grandmother’s Hands. What a fantastic book.

Brian
Yeah, as we do our book review slash book report, before we start, I just want to kind of reflect for a moment, Ani, and just kind of laugh. The first time that we did one of these book report reviews, I’m laughing that as we were preparing for it, we had a little miscommunication.

Ani
We did.

Brian
And now you thought we were doing a book review.

Ani
Yeah.

Brian
And I thought we were doing a book report.

Ani
And we didn’t look up the word apparently.

Brian
But you know, I think it’s really funny. For those of you who follow The Colby, you know, you are a two-fact finder and I’m a seven-fact finder. So it makes sense that you would do a book review and I would do a book report.

Ani
Yeah. Bottom line, this is a great book.

Brian
You should read it. So we’ve gotten that. So hopefully, we’ve gotten on the same page.

And this is an amazing, amazing book. And we’re going to do it in more of a review format rather than a report format. But there might be a little reporting about the reviewing.

So it’s not a pure review, but there’s just so much depth in this book.

Ani
The subheading for the book, My Grandmother’s Hands, is racialized trauma and the pathway to mending our hearts and bodies, by the way, just to give some context. And the author, oh, darn it, I meant to bring my glasses. Now I’ve got to hold this really far away.

The author is a social worker and has studied a lot, did a lot of somatic study. And I just want to read a little bit of it so you can understand where he’s coming from. He served as the Director of Counseling Services of the Tubman Family Alliance as Behavioral Health Director for African-American Family Services in Minneapolis, a domestic violence counselor, certified military and family consultant for the U.S. Armed Forces, a trauma consultant for the Minneapolis Public Schools as a cultural somatics consultant, a community care counselor. And Resmaa has studied and trained at the Peter Levine School, Peter Levine Somatic Experiencing Trauma Institute, as well as with David, I might not be saying his last name right, Shinnark. He’s the author of The Passionate Marriage, which is a fantastic book, and Bessel van der Kolk as well. So this does come from more of a therapeutic lens, and it is specific to racialized trauma.

And not every book report we’re going to do is about trauma because not all somatics is about trauma. And this book is an awesome book about trauma.

Brian
Yeah, it is. And just to kind of say too, neither Ani or I are experts in racialized trauma.

Ani
Not even close.

Brian
Not even close. What we’re really experts in is somatic coaching, somatic physiology, sensation-based model. And there is a reference to some of those somatic tools and practices and things in the book, and some of the physiology as well, which I thought was wonderfully done and written really well and make it easily understandable.

Ani
You mean the physiology?

Brian
The physiology piece in the book, yeah.

Ani
Okay. So I think this is one of the best books that I’ve read with practical somatic practices in it, Brian. So I’m not surprised to hear you talk about the physiology.

And of course, I would recognize the practice part.

Brian
Yeah, the practices too, right? I think there was great- Good. Yeah, there was great data, great practices- Great storytelling.

In-depth historical information.

Ani
Fantastic historical information.

Brian
About racialized trauma.

Ani
Yeah.

Brian
And one of the things that the author, Resmaa Menekum, points out right in the beginning is as a white-bodied person, and I really like the way how he writes about this in terms of bodies, right? Black bodies and white bodies and police bodies.

Ani
And police bodies.

Brian
Police bodies. But as a white-bodied person, how some of these ideas and thoughts might feel confronting to a white body. Now, I read this book first time several years ago.

Ani
Yeah, me too.

Brian
And I just reread it again to prep for our report. And I think I read it probably once in between. As well.

And I can say for sure that the first time I read this book, I did feel confronted in my body by the concepts that were being shared. And I opened up to them and I really leaned into them and I practiced. And I felt different this time reading the book also.

So I thought that that was kind of interesting along those lines. But the historical information and the body practices, the data, the physiology, I think was really written in an easily understandable way and a really compelling way. Like you say, really compelling storytelling.

Ani
Compelling storytelling. I’m a fan of a really wonderful thread that goes through a book with storytelling. And the way that Resmaa talks about his grandmother is so powerful.

And as a white-bodied person, getting that kind of peek in, I think, into the black body experience, like through the storytelling, was really amazing. And again, like you said, the way that he kind of breaks the book up into who he’s talking to, when he’s talking to you, but you get to hear his perspective on everybody’s perspective, which I think widens my perspective.

Brian
Yeah. And I like how each chapter had, again, the data, the physiology, the historical storytelling, and there are body practices included in every chapter. And the idea is to pause and do the body practice that goes along with the chapter and then come back and read the rest of the chapter or the next chapter later on.

But to give yourself time to really process what’s going on with that body practice. So in that way, the book isn’t like a speed read through. It’s really more of a transformational journey and a therapeutic journey, even as you go through the book.

And so as I took the time to digest that process of going through, again, it creates some real change in your system.

Ani
Yeah, I’d agree with you. Actually, one of his points was about moving too fast and slowing down and how important that is. And so I agree with you, slowing down to read this book and actually doing the practices and spending the time, because he tells you in a lot of the practices to take time and do it like that.

Did you want to make sure that we went from front to back? Because I have an idea, but I don’t want to pop it in the middle. No, go ahead.

Brian
Okay.

Ani
So one of my, like I said, I think the practices were really powerful. And the first time I read the book, I was especially excited about the practices that he did for the vagus nerve, which he calls the soul nerve. I thought that was neat how he takes that kind of artistic license with the vagus nerve.

And some of the vagus nerve practices are fantastic. And I think my big, not my biggest, for sure, one of my biggest takeaways from the book was the vagus nerve practices, because he brought in some that I hadn’t tried before that I will still pull out of my back pocket today. And they’re really good.

I think there’s a lot of kind of heady information about the vagus nerve and for him to make, well, he actually makes a lot of things really practical in this book, which I appreciate. He certainly made the vagus nerve stuff really practical.

Brian
Yeah. One of the vagus nerve practices that I forget about, but I really like to do is humming. Me too.

That’s so fun. Yeah. And so I’ve actually been humming a little more.

And I think you actually caught me a couple of days ago humming. And I was humming and you’re like, did I ask you to stop? Would you please stop?

And I was like, so I went and hummed somewhere else.

Ani
I’m not surprised.

Brian
But yeah. So I was actually doing my morning, hmm, you know, kind of thing. And you were like, would you just stop that?

I was humming. I was doing my humming practice.

Ani
That’s funny. Well, you could have told me that. I thought you were just being bothersome.

Brian
I just went somewhere else and hummed on my own with my own vagus nerve. Was socially disconnected. Shut down my vagus nerve.

Thank you very much. And no, whoops. So next time, maybe we’ll, maybe we’ll hum together and annoy our kids.

Ani
Our favorite things. That’s actually another great thing. I think that he does in the book is he talks about, and it’s, you know, towards the back, gee, I’m really glad I asked you about front to back now about mending the collective body.

And again, I think he talks about some things in some ways that people just don’t. And this idea about mending the collective body is so important in collective practices that, that people can do together. And one of the takeaways for me with the collective practices, Brian was this idea about holding space for people.

I mean, we, we support and do our best due diligence with a trauma-informed framework here at the Somatic Coaching Academy, and whether it’s us or our students, or certainly a lot of our private clients hold space for people, you know, together. I thought he, he really talked about that really well. I actually pulled out a little bit from the book there that if you don’t mind, I’ll, I’ll read.

Sure. Go ahead. Okay.

He says, culture is how our bodies retain and reenact history through the food we eat or refuse to eat, the stories we tell, the things that hold meaning for us, the images that move us, what we are able and unable to sense or feel or process, the way we see the world and a thousand other aspects of life. So he’s talking about this idea of culture, and he goes on to say, many well-being social activists overlook the essential, this essential fact that culture changes over the course of history, and they focus relentlessly on strategy. He says, but strategy means nothing to our bodies and our lizard brains.

When strategy competes with culture, culture wins every single time. More than anything, culture creates a sense of belonging and belonging makes our bodies feel safe. This is why culture matters to us so deeply.

We humans want to belong. We experience belonging or the lack of it in our bodies. We experience it deeply when we belong.

We feel that our life has some value in meeting, but we can never belong to a strategy. We can never belong to a movement either, though we can be part of it. We can only belong to a culture.

Wow.

Brian
Yeah.

Ani
Yeah. And that, that I thought that again, was such a fantastic part of the book to bring us together into culture. And he does talk a lot about America, although he talks in the afterward about how this, this book isn’t just about America.

But this idea of culture, you know, as an, as an entrepreneur, I think about creating culture in, in our community. And then we work with leaders who are talking about creating culture. And we are always talking about the culture that we live in and stuff, the culture of our families even.

Right. So this idea about culture and belonging and the felt quality of that, I thought was really, really cool.

Brian
Yeah. Very cool. Very cool.

One of the most compelling ideas from the book that actually really stuck out to me several years ago when I read it and then has stuck with me, and then I’ve revisited a few times is the idea around, around body armoring. And because I’m always looking for these somatic cues in myself. And as I work with people, helping people identify somatic cues within themselves as well.

And the way that Resmaa talks about it is they, these, the body armoring, the body armoring, right? It’s an act of self-protection. So we know when, when we body armor, which means that we get some muscle, a muscle contraction in our body, typically in the front of our body somewhere in our core.

That’s a self-protective response. And as we go through the day, one of the body, one of the exercises he actually gives us is to, as you go through your day, pay attention as you look at other people and you look at other people’s skin color, how it impacts your reflexive body armoring. Like, because what happens is we learn that body armoring when we’re young.

And if we’re getting messaging when we’re young around certain people and their skin color, and if we’re taught that people are dangerous or something like that, and that’s what we’re taught, of course, then body armoring is going to be a part of that process. So we’re going to, in a very young age, we’re going to link together a body contraction with a message that someone or a certain group of people are dangerous. That gets put into our subconscious.

And then as we get older in our adult world, even if intellectually we’re like, oh, those people aren’t dangerous, or people of color aren’t dangerous, or the people I was told about aren’t dangerous, but I still feel a subconscious body armoring. Now, I might not even be consciously aware of it, but whenever I have that even subtle contraction in my body, it sends a signal to my conscious mind that I’m not safe. That’s actually a signal that is being sent there.

So then I’ll be all of a sudden looking for what’s not safe, and I can project that into all kinds of places in the world. So it ends up being this loop can kind of happen inside of our system. And as we talk a lot about here is our subconscious mind is running the show, right?

The cueing that our conscious mind is getting on a moment-to-moment basis is determining where we’re consciously deciding to go. Our subconscious mind doesn’t have choice. Our conscious mind has choice.

However, our subconscious mind influences our conscious choices through body armoring, or contraction, or whatever’s going on in our sensation base, which is why we talk about it through sensation-based motivation coaching. So I spent a lot of time over the last couple of months since I’ve been rereading this book, getting ready for this podcast. I travel a lot.

I’m in airports a lot. Great place that people watch. So I’ve been taking time going back into my body and just looking at people and noticing what’s happening in my physiology, what’s happening around armoring in my body.

And I can tell you, I did the same thing several years ago when I read this book. It was really interesting how much different my experience is now than it was back then.

Ani
What was the difference?

Brian
I’ve been working a lot on that. I don’t remember specific instances, but my recollection is several years ago when I tried this, as to Resmaa’s point, indeed, as a white body looking at darker skinned bodies, I was having some reflexive armoring that would go on in my body when I’d be in the airport or when I’d be sitting at a restaurant or whatever it was. And I can tell you, I didn’t have that experience over these last couple of months, that not alone, but different, but I was really surprised, different things caused my body to armor.

Not just skin color, not just skin color. Because I would look at people with different skin colors and check in how I would feel. And then I’d look at other people.

And really for me, what makes me armor the most is body type, like different types of people’s bodies, especially large men, like cause me to armor. Large strong looking men cause me to armor. And also certain behaviors cause me to armor.

So when I see someone who has erratic behavior or potentially almost like a kind of aggressive behavior that also causes me to armor. So for me, I was like, oh wow, I’m still learning about that. Still learning about that process.

So that was one of my big, big themes and takeaways from the book around that part of body armoring. I have something else to say about it, but it looks like you have a thought going.

Ani
Yeah, I do. I love what you’re saying about the practice that you’ve been holding to be able to really look at it in your practical life. And I think that this, again, this book just gives us so many opportunities to do that.

What’s coming up for me is the idea of the generational conditioning that he talks about throughout the book. And I think that his stories give some really clear pictures around generational conditioning. And as a white bodied person, how the pain inflicted by white bodied people throughout the course of history, generation after generation can be passed down.

So when you’re talking about being conditioned as a young person, I’m thinking about that generational conditioning for many generations.

Brian
It gets passed down.

Ani
That have been passed down and lives in our body armoring and stuff. And the perceptual nature of all of that too. And he talks about the phantom of race was conjured to help white people manage their fear and hatred of other white people.

And that’s just one quote here through the course of the book, this, I guess, dismantling within myself of what color and race and culture and all of these things that we don’t often take a moment to think about because it’s just the water we’re swimming all the time, what those things are and how they were developed period, right? Like they were developed and they were perceptual and they were passed down to us. And now there are things that I guess, kind of like for you, the first time you read it, you didn’t, weren’t even aware that that was going on.

And then because of this book, it brought up a bunch of awareness that then you were able to continue to widen your awareness around and practice. And we can’t change anything we’re not aware of. And I think this is a fantastic opportunity reading this book to become aware of what’s going on with trauma and with race and with ourselves and our bodies and how we relate to each other in America and everywhere in a way that helps us all to become aware of things that we weren’t aware of before.

The body gives us the opportunity to do that in a way that you just cannot when you’re just doing it intellectually. The body is the way that we do that. And he really articulates that so well.

Brian
Yeah, for sure. And I think one of the things he says there that race is a myth. It’s just a myth.

And to be walked through that historical narrative was really interesting. Again, really compelling. To just kind of come back to that body armoring thought and what you were saying with generational trauma, what also occurred to me through this process, and Resmaa points this out in the book, is that in order for a human being to be aggressive or violent to someone else actually requires body armoring.

Like someone actually has to be able to armor their own body in order to perpetuate violence on somebody else. And it reminded me when I was a kid, I had a BB gun. And of course, when you get a BB gun, you just go out there and start shooting stuff, right?

And I shot a squirrel. And I can remember after I shot the squirrel and I ran over to it and I realized what I had done, I was distraught with grief. And I was crying and my body was convulsing.

And when I realized what I had done, and you can’t do that. I mean, body armoring would have stopped all that convulsing, all that processing of going through. To experience that was for me, oh my God, I never want to have that experience again, sort of thing.

But then something interesting happened. I’ve talked about when my grandmother passed away. And one of the reasons I really relate to this book is because I had a really interesting and powerful and deep relation with my own grandmothers.

When my grandmother died, when I was young, I armored a lot to defend against all the grief that I was experiencing at the time. And so I really armored up my body. And interesting enough, I actually became a really good football player because of that armoring.

One of the reasons I became such a really accomplished athlete in school, and not just any athlete. I mean, I played football and look at me, I’m like, I was the smallest guy in the team, smallest guy, probably not the lightest guy, but the smallest guy for sure. But I was also the toughest, one of the meanest, one of the most aggressive guys on the team.

And I got myself in so much trouble because I would just hurdle myself into guys three times the size of me. I got concussions and I strained my nerves in my neck and all that kind of stuff because I was so aggressive and angry and mean. And it didn’t stop me from just going out there and actually kind of hurting some people on the football field.

And so as I look back at that, I’m like, it’s so true that the more armored you are, the less empathy and compassion you can have for the results of our actions on other people. And so I’ve kind of lived both sides of that. And over time I’ve practiced disarmoring myself, disarm myself so I can live with a greater appreciation for the impact that I have on other people.

So that I feel when other people feel hurt, when I do something that hurts someone else, I deeply feel that now. And that has helped me to become a more compassionate, more understanding, more forgiving person. And I think one of the themes when we kind of think about a book like this for me, and maybe some of the work we do at the Somatic Coaching Academy we don’t talk about a lot, is that I know that if we can help large numbers of people bring down their level of body armoring, then we’re going to be a more compassionate race of people.

I mean, not like the human race, not really talking about like racial divisions around skin color, but just as a species maybe is even better. So let’s take the word race out of it. Let’s just say species.

As a human species, we’re going to be a more compassionate, loving, connected, empathetic, mindful species. And that goes along with the idea of body armoring. And in that way, we can take it out of the intellectual sphere, and really bring it into an embodied place.

Ani
What you’re talking about reminds me of a call to action that he gives. Well, it felt like a call to action to me at the end of the book, when he says, when white Americans learn to manage their own bodies, and like I’m listening to you talk about body armoring, so I’m thinking about that, they will no longer feel the need to manage black ones. When white Americans build culture that is sane and loving, they will no longer feel a need to exclude people of color from it.

Like that, to me, what you’re talking about is around that, right? Like people really learning how to manage their own bodies. And you were able to do that.

It sounds like when you were younger, you actually, your subconscious, I guess, managed your body by armoring, because you had so much grief around your grandmother. And then the unraveling of that throughout the course of your adult life, that armoring, to be able to, but learning how to manage our bodies, like it’s a skill and it takes time and it takes practice and it takes dedication.

Brian
And it’s not rocket science either, in a lot of ways, Ani. Just the somatic practices we teach with the core centering practices, if you do those regularly, you will let go of body armoring. You will slowly over time, let go of the armoring in your body.

And then that leads you to more powerful places where you can go deeper within yourself for more transformation. But you can’t even transform your own life if you have body armoring in your life. Because you have all these built-in defense mechanisms to changing, even if you want to change yourself.

Ani
Correct. Right. And so many people want to change the world.

And the fact is that working on managing your own nervous system and your perceptions of threat and armoring allow us to be able to do that in ways that he talks about. It’s so powerful. It’s not our mission and purpose here at the Somatic Coaching Academy at this time in history, but there are a lot of different somatic groups that actually do, as their purpose and mission, take on activism work of some kind.

And Resmaa tells us why that’s so important in all of this stuff that we’re talking about now.

Brian
Yeah. So as far as I’m concerned, we talk about we read the books so you don’t have to. Well, we’ve read this book, and I think you should probably read it too.

Ani
Yeah. Especially if you’re a person who really wants to make a difference in the world. And that’s not everybody’s jam.

But if you’re a person who really wants to do your diligence to be the best human you can possibly be, no matter what color body you’re in, you’re going to get a lot out of this book. And just another added thing about you’re going to want to read this book. If you do any work with police officers or other people who deal with secondary trauma around police stuff, because some of our students do, by the way, you definitely want to read this book.

The ideas around how the policing system has been interwoven with race and culture throughout the course of our American history, specifically, is really important. And, you know, I’ve heard from some of our students who work in some of these systems, how challenging it can be to help people to understand the importance of body centered work. And we work with them to be able to help people to talk about those things and to see why they’re important.

But they are really important. So if you do any work in the justice system, social justice system, even schools, you know, it’s a fantastic book. So definitely go grab yourself a copy of My Grandmother’s Hands, enjoy the practices, enjoy the story, and let us know what you think and what the most powerful points have been for you, because we would love to hear about it.

Brian
I’d love to know that. And thanks so much for joining us this week, friends, and we’ll see you next week again on the podcast.

Ani
Bye-bye.