Nkem Ndefo: Coming Home to Yourself

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Today, I'm in conversation with Enchem Ndefo. We have a chance to remake culture in every interaction, every conversation, every email, every text. Every time we talk to ourselves, every, like, how we cook for ourselves. I mean, everything you do has a chance to remake, right? Enkem Ndefo is the founder and president of Lumos Transforms.

and the creator of the Resilience Toolkit, a model that promotes embodied self-awareness and self-regulation in an ecologically sensitive framework and a social justice context. Licensed as a nurse midwife, Enchem also has extensive postgraduate training in complementary health modalities and emotional therapies.

She brings an abundance of experience as a clinician, an educator, a consultant, and a community strategist to innovative programs that address stress and trauma and build resilience for individuals, organizations, and communities. Enkem is particularly interested in working alongside the people most impacted by violence and marginalization. She's currently leading an embodied diversity, equity, inclusion, and anti-racism initiative for the Los Angeles County Department of Health Services.

In this conversation, we explore all of the wisdom she has to share from this fascinating well of experience. We talk about the traumas and behavioral patterns that we carry in our bodies. The power of learning how to tune into ourselves to settle and recenter when we're triggered. And how becoming more attuned to our bodies and our reactions. can help us cultivate more capacity to engage with hard conversations and to contribute to transformative change. All right, let's dive in.

Just from what I've been able to glean from my research, my impression is that you've occupied so many different roles over the course of your life. I know you've... worked in needle exchange programs that you've worked in gang intervention that you've overseen at-home births as a midwife that you're an educator a facilitator a researcher a community strategist And I know that I'm probably missing a lot of your incarnations in that overview.

And I think a lot of the folks listening to the podcast today are going to be coming to your work for the first time. So I'd like to start by asking you if you could just give us a sense of... where you see the focus of your work now, what's really top of mind for you, and how your path, kind of all of those various roles that you've inhabited and learned from, led to that current focus. My mom some years ago said, you have such an eclectic career. I was like, oh, nice, thanks.

But, you know, at that point, I kind of explained to her the trajectory and she's like, oh no, now it perfectly makes sense. So I've always been interested in relief of suffering. I've always been interested in equity and liberation. And I am, I think, my just predisposition. I'm a systems thinker. I like to get underneath. I'm very curious about, well, what's under that? What's under that? And how does that relate?

um i also don't believe this is a dress rehearsal like this is the thing um and so i take it pretty seriously and in a you know in a playful serious kind of way like playful where you can and serious where you need to be and so the trajectory was as i was like oh this seems to be um a point of like if i do work here this is relieving suffering this is causing some kind of transformational change right and then as i do the work

realizing the limitations there and say, well, what's underneath this? What would help with this? And so when I was a community health educator and I was like an organizer and doing needle exchange with. And I was like, seeing people use, we were doing harm reduction before harm reduction had a name. And this is like the late 80s in San Francisco. But seeing people use and like, well, what?

At least they're not getting, you know, HIV and Hep B and spreading it. But like, is there something that can be liberatory and reduce the suffering here in this addiction? I had my first child with a midwife and I was like, that's it. Like, that's the sense of not just an educational, an offer. There's like a sense of empowerment.

So I'm like, I'm going to do that. So I went and did that and did bursts. And then I discovered that trauma really is will hijack everything. It's the mother, the mother, the father, the source. Like it's like way, way, way upstream. And so started dipping my toes into working around trauma and stress and resilience. And I'm a tinker. I'm very like learn through experience and learn alongside and with people.

And I like working with lots of different kinds of folks in different contexts because it's like, I like the challenge. And also there's just more, you learn more about what works and what doesn't. Like it's great in theory. But I mean, when I was doing a lot of work with gang intervention, these are people that live in the community. They're former gang members. They're helping people get out of gangs. They're mediating to stop escalations of gang wars. What retreat are they going on?

What retreat are they going on? And these are people doing the work and they don't use the politically correct terms. They are doing the work. And so how, but also both with primarily they're traumatized from their own experience, the lineage, the systems, and then the work that they do. And so trying to figure out how do you work? Like, how do we create?

work that helps them come home to themselves. I'm still a midwife even if I'm not catching babies. Help them come home to themselves, connect to their power, begin to understand their... themselves even better to make changes. And so like one of the changes is like, yeah, they feel better. They're carrying less stress. We're using embodied practice.

but what also came out of it was like materially they're not paid well because they don't have degrees they have a degree from the streets but that doesn't carry with a paycheck so then it became a thing about like you're not like the material conditions. So they started talking about organizing and to get more. That to me is like the focus of my work. is seeing people come home to themselves come and connect to each other and open up space for internal healing systems healing

So in all kinds of contexts, doing that. Yes. Yeah. There. Was that a quick, that's a quick flyover. I think that was an excellent flyover. Maybe we'll drop deep and we'll take some pit stops in there. We definitely will.

I want to talk to you specifically about the resilience toolkit, which you created in a moment, but I want to get there by beginning with the concept of self-regulation, which I think... has to do with this idea of coming home to yourself. I've been on a personal exploration for many years now of reconnecting to my body, working through past trauma.

studying energy work, kind of gradually learning more about embodiment. But I would say that I was not really using the phrase self-regulation with any frequency until relatively recently. And having now invited that phrase into my vocabulary, I find myself using it constantly. And I was recently listening to an interview with the trauma researcher, Bessel van der Kolk, who wrote The Body Keeps Score.

And he was talking about how he thought all children should learn the four R's, which is reading, writing, arithmetic, and self-regulation. But of course, in this... capitalistic culture, we do not learn about self-regulation. We learn instead about productivity and hustle and consumption. And I'm curious if you could speak to the concept of self-regulation and how... And maybe even why you think that skill is not something that we're taught.

I have so many thoughts here. And so let them kind of spill out and see what kind of order they fall into. Like when I hear the term self-regulation, I also hear it's often used as a way of self-control. It's a used in the way of mastery. And I don't like to use that word, but I'm using it now in a very specific context, like a colonial context of self mastery. And so it's that you can be more in control.

So you can be more productive so that you can't, it like actually is in service of production and consumption. It's not in service of being more human. So I want to be really clear that that's not the way that I think about. But it can be used that way. Like these children in class need to learn self-regulation so they can sit still and we can drop material into their head and they can spit it out their mouth. That's often how it's used.

And so being careful self regulation in a broader sense is asking us to tune into ourselves and ask what is it that I need in this moment and to be able to modulate. our own responses and our own interactions. We can regulate, we can modulate. And I think modulate might be even a nicer word than regulate, which has a little bit of a control quality to it.

um we are taught in this culture about being controlled from the outside we're controlled by rules and laws and so it's a little it's an anarchistic idea that you would move that locus of control internally. And I think it's threatening. I think it is threatening. So there's that. Additionally, there's a question about why it's not taught. Self-regulation in this way asks us to connect to not just our emotions, but our somatic.

landscape you know this this whole milieu inside which is seen as i think quite dangerous or less than or not reliable it's not objective it's not logical so there's all of that dismissing like what what kind of wisdom comes from connecting to internally um so that there's that strain is also running in the culture and then You know, another problem with self-regulation is it's highly individualistic. And I think.

children, especially thinking that children need to learn these four R's, like self-regulate, when actually it's like, it's a strange ask because really children. especially up to age nine, they're really in their caregivers nervous systems, they're co regulating. So to ask them to be it's almost like three months old you should sleep through the night you can self-regulate all through that all that distress of being alone all night long like but what culture does that our culture it's bizarre

right? As opposed to sleeping with a sibling or sleeping at the breast or sleeping like in connection. And so I think our, it's. how are we aware of ourselves in connection and how are we influencing and being influenced in connection to bring awareness to that and To not control in the sense of control, but to be able to work with instead of at cross purposes. That's, I think those are my kind of the little buckets of thoughts I have about your question. Did that answer?

Yes, yes, absolutely. And I would love to use that to kind of move into talking about the resilience toolkit and why you created it. But I don't think we can talk about that without also talking about the ways in which the dominant culture uses the word resilience and the way in which it uses the idea of resilience to...

of individualized systemic problems. So perhaps you could first talk about the word resilience, as we just did sort of about the word self-regulation and how you're interested in framing it, and then share a little bit about how the resilience toolkit...

functions as a resource for building people's capacity for self-awareness and self-regulation or maybe modulation, if we want to use a different word. Yeah, I mean, if I'm going to come back to the example of working with gang intervention workers, these folks are hella resilient. It's actually an insult to say, you need to be more resilient. Like, who gets told they need to be more resilient?

typically people on the receiving end of the brunt of multiple intersecting systems of oppression. And basically it's saying like, you need to toughen up so you can take more crap. No, no, no. It absolves systems of any responsibility, any culpability in the creation of suffering, in the creation of violence. No.

So I reject that narrative. And I punt it around like for a different term. I mean, I've been doing the work not with any name, really. I would sometimes call it transformative resilience. I would call it different things. And then in like 2017, I settled on the resilience toolkit, but I thought it for a long time. Is there another word? And I'm like, no, let's just reclaim resilience because it actually is a really good word. And just like, you know, reclaim it. My sense about it is.

It's more than, it's not about, it's about a quality of being flexible and strong that is needed. We like to use my colleague and friend Erwin Ambrose coined alchemical resilience. We actually were calling it transformative resilience. And we got a cease and desist letter because someone had trademarked it.

just saying very american hi like you know but it doesn't really roll off the tongue so i'm actually happy because we now call it alchemical resilience and we're not trademarking it but we're just saying it a lot um And alchemy, right? You're creating something greater than the sum of its parts. So a little bit of magic going on. And so this idea that...

Although we know most suffering comes from a systemic level and then trickles into the individual, the interpersonal and all of this, systems don't change themselves. People with a lot of privilege are not going to change systems that privilege them. So the people who are tasked with changing systems are those who are.

you know, oppressed by those systems. And so the truth is like it or not, the reality is we do need more resilience to be able to do this, to be able to realize when we can come out of, you know, defensiveness and set our shoulders down and open our minds a little and be able to dream new worlds and build them together relationally and not perpetuate, you know.

the systems of harm that we're trying to shift. And so the idea is to develop a type of resilience that gives us the capacity to change the conditions of adversity, basically so you don't have to be so resilient in the first place.

So that's what I would say about resilience and why. And could you describe that one of the... the tools that you use in the resilience toolkit is the idea of this kind of continuum moving between spaciousness and sort of shut down this. I'm curious if you could describe that. continuum a bit to give people a little bit of sense of what some of that building capacity and awareness for resilience looks like, if we could kind of anchor that in a specific example.

i'd like to back up a little bit and actually just frame what is the resilience toolkit and then i'll seat your question the answer to your question in that framing in the scaffold perfect so the resilience toolkit does five things and and i'm going to even back up a little further i realized when i realized that trauma was is such a source of so many problems you know traumatized people create traumatized organizations on and on and on

I realized also that people aren't really ready to sit and face trauma because they're often in it. And this is from working with people who would literally, I was at a meeting in South Los Angeles where a woman stood up and the community member and said, trauma, trauma, trauma. You keep shoving that word down our throats. No.

Like we need to listen. Just we can't be like, it's like you have to use the correct word. That's what this is. So I realized it's what's needed, but people aren't ready and that there are some trauma healing systems, you know, to some better than others.

um most of them individually focused but people need preparation to be able to even get on the bridge and so the resilience toolkit is designed for that bridge to help people get on the bridge to build capacity to for the healing work for the change work okay and so knowing that the goals are is to help people develop awareness of their own state

whether it was stress, trauma, relaxation, right? And then from there, the second goal is to... discern is that an adaptive response for the moment we don't we don't it's not individualized it's the person in their ecology right and if it's adaptive then go and use it it's adaptive but if it's not adaptive the third tool here is the goal is to be able to choose from a menu of very short real-time practices to settle that response so it is adaptive

And then to how do people develop habits to use these over time? The last goal is, is that if you realize, you know, I'm in an adaptive state for, you know, I'm like super armored up because I'm dealing with all kinds of. you know, heteropatriarchy, ableist, racist bullshit. The point being is always regulating myself.

selling myself is not the answer. It's about now having the discernment of I either need to leave this place or situation or relationship or workplace, or I need to work to shift it. So that's the last goal.

So your question seated in that is about this continuum. In order to help people understand their internal experience better and where they are in terms of response. stress, trauma response. We use a number of different models. One of the models you're talking about is this idea, which I'll talk about right now, of a continuum between a settled spacious, connected, relaxed. It's like open, juicy. Just when I talk about that, that just, I feel my body go, that feels good, right?

where our mind, we're clear. We're again, connected to ourselves and each other. We have a vision for that. We can see the big picture. There's flexibility. There's ease. But as stress rises, we become more compressed and pressured, both physically but also mentally. Our vision, you know, we go from glass. half full to glass half empty and rapidly depleting time is hurry hurry we're defensive we're reactive and it's you know there's a whole cascade of physical

you know, psychological, behavioral response. And that as it goes even further, we actually go into collapse and we shut down and we disconnect. So it's a continuum from connection. We start to disconnect through that pressured stage until we have a more complete disconnect of this shutdown. We go from sensation to more numb, numb, numb, numb, numb, numb. We go from hope to hopelessness.

And that this is one way by using this kind of model that we can start to say, like, where am I? Like, am I in the middle here in this pressured state? Or am I? You know, am I really shut down and disconnected? And then you can ask the second question. We use guiding questions to move through the goals. Is this adaptive for me? It's me being shut down. Like if I'm in an abusive relationship at work and.

in home, being shut down and numb might be really what I need. When I come back to myself and start using my voice, the abuse might worsen. If it's, I'm responding, you know, I smell smoke in my house. I see a fire. I respond with a pressured, hurried sense. This is fantastic. It's not like, oh, I have all the time in the world. Let me just, there's little flames. Not appropriate to be spacious in that moment. So it's sort of the wisdom to help people grow the wisdom of knowing where you are.

I think it's like, I'm actually going to say the knowledge of where you are, the wisdom, is it useful for you now? And then the skills to shift your system.

That's what I'm interested in. And like, for example, people doing organizing work. If you're doing organizing work, change work. Knowing when you're strategizing, when you're dreaming.

if you're not settled and if you're not in that spacious place your dream will be constrained by the pressure state that you're in or the disconnect state and then whatever you're building the way that you're moving the processes you're using will recreate your state your state like it perpetuates um and so but there are times like if you're doing a mobilization you need to be able to move you need to live quick

You know, sometimes more hierarchy is needed when there's things are more urgent. And so knowing, again, that wisdom of discernment of what's useful when and then to be able to have that in the body connected. And I like to test it in all different kinds of places. So does it work with gang intervention workers? Yeah, because guess what? They need to go from mediating an armed conflict.

to doing safe passage for kids to be able to you know get to school and like escorting kids like where i think about working i've done a lot of work because i'm a midwife with birth professionals and particularly like did some work with doulas, which is really interesting because their job is they're there to add, they're a doula is someone who is, they're not medically trained, they're a support person for a birthing person, birthing family, as opposed to like a midwife, we are trained to.

do all the support and the deliveries and all that stuff so a doula is an advocate so they have to go in and advocate for the wishes of the birthing person against the medical system, if we're talking about the US, often. But then that's a certain kind of fight, a certain kind of pressure, a certain kind of, then they need to turn and be able to warmly support a birthing process that is exquisitely sensitive to stress hormones.

exquisitely sensitive and will shut down so they've got to like pivot and then be like in this gushy warm place and then armor up and advocate and so many of the dualists when i would work with them they would be like They didn't even realize that that's what they were doing and how hard that was. And when we brought intentionality to it and for them to be able to recognize their somatic signals and realize when they were starting to track.

in some of the muck of advocacy into the relationship with the birthing person or family that then it created like some rancor in there. So being able to use that skill set in there around to navigate was really fun to develop that insight in working with doulas and using this approach.

I took a course with you and Ray Johnson over the summer, which is called Embodied Activism, which I would also recommend to anyone listening. I'll put a link to it in the show notes. In that course, you two talked about how when we experience hardship, we return to what works. Can you talk about how we all have different...

stress or trauma patterns in the body and even maybe how different emotions have certain sort of signatures in the body? I just encourage like curiosity and to like, that's the fun of this. I mean.

it's fun for me i'm like so curious like what's that shiny penny um and that's why i like the toolkit i like the exploration of what is this happening in me and what might it mean in some ways it's a bit of an epistemology of the body in like how do i what's happening inside of me and how do i know what this is how do i make meaning of what's what's happening inside of me and in that observation over time you learn your own patterns which i think is like

someone can tell you oh that's anger over there look at that you're you know your jaws like this your ear like this and it might be but it like might be anger with shame you know tinged with shame or it might be anger with like a you know I don't know, a sprinkling of fear. I think it's more meaningful when you're doing that exploration yourself and noticing when, oh.

in this situation, like I'm feeling this, what situation am I in? What just happened? What's going on? And start to make those connections. And I love to see, especially when people. are doing this and like we have a practice group it's an ongoing like after we had a lot of requests and we finally did it it's been a we did it in the summer of 2020 we started just a weekly practice group and it's short it's facilitated but people come

And they begin to have that exploration with each other and sharing like, I notice, I notice. And so we develop a language because there's a real poverty. of language around our internal experience. The word is interoception, the real poverty of interoception in our culture because it's devalued. And so as people begin to have the language and then they start to notice the patterns of when things show up and as they become aware of them.

there becomes more intentional like choice points open up and intentionality about oh look at this pattern i didn't even oh and so then as you start to feel it because you are the one who observed it you start to feel oh this at the beginning of the pattern I feel this then a choice point starts to be like do I want to am I do I want to go down the rest of this pattern or might there be something else and some discernment about what might be useful and so

Yeah, I think that, you know, our human bodies only have so many forms. So there are places where grief tends to lodge and anger tends to lodge. But, you know, we can be exceptions.

I wanted to talk a little bit more about the power dynamics and inequities around resilience as well as burnout and overwhelm. I started to... touch into that a little bit earlier, but I wanted to go a little bit more deeply into it. Burnout, overwhelm, or obviously outcomes if you're unable to self-regulate on an ongoing basis. Something that came up in the embodied activism course that I was just referring to is the idea that if I am holding privilege and I'm a white cisgender.

queer woman so I do hold a lot of privilege in many spaces if I'm holding privilege and I get overwhelmed what happens is that becomes someone else's problem If I'm unable or unwilling to self-regulate and I become overwhelmed, I have some power, some privilege, then my lack of self-regulation basically kind of spills over into whatever interpersonal situation I'm in. And then it becomes something that...

you if I'm in a relationship with you or the group have to deal with. And I'm curious if you could talk a little bit more about that, those power dynamics surrounding resilience and overwhelm and also privilege. Well, I mean, if we know that resilience comes out of adversity, the more privilege you have, the less adversity you have. So the more privilege you have, the less resilient you are. There's more fragility.

You know, you count your privileges and count your fragilities. You've got the little chickens and their little chicks are hatching. Not a given, right? It's not a given. It's something that we can work towards. And I think it's especially acute when those power dynamics have not been named and they're just running and we have a space of multi-identity folks.

and it's not just um to be able to regulate it's even the awareness right like if you like it's both the awareness and the ability to to say like huh wow i'm having like it's about more about self-responsibility i'm gonna actually say then even self-regulation like i am recognizing i am triggered for whatever reason and i am owning that this is my trigger and that i need to do something for myself right so there's like a it's a little bit bigger than than self

a regulation and so if you have a multi-identity space and what often will happen is someone gets triggered and depending on their identity we're going to fall into some tropes so a white woman starts crying And everyone goes, oh, the cultural trope, oh, protect the white woman. And whatever happened is like now secondary to protect the white woman, because this is a cultural trope that we will fall into. And so people with.

other identities that are not as privileged as the a white woman crying suddenly like We'll often go into appeasement to like make sure it's okay because that's a cultural trope. And if you get angry, you're in, like, so we're walking on all of this stuff that's not been examined. And so.

If you have really multi-identity spaces and you want to do some work, often people have to do affinity group work first to grow some of those base skills to be able to navigate multi-identity spaces with any kind of self responsibility.

self and other responsibility because the other thing i'll also see is then there's collapse and shame where white people are particularly if these are work that i've seen is feel like they have done so much harm so they're like self-flagellating also not useful and then makes like that shame is like a like sucks all the energy in the room because shame is by definition disconnecting and self-involved so there's a certain like um i don't know

skill set competencies that we need to have to do then like recognizing that like oh wow i've got some growing here to do and we're going to bump into these things and it's like it's not the end of the world it's how do we work through them um and so it's really good for people with more marginalized identities to not rush and take care of privileged people right and it can you know historically be quite dangerous to not rush and take care of

of that. So one of the things I love is there's an organization called White Nonsense Roundup. They're at least on Facebook. So this was several years ago and they Basically, it's a group of white volunteers who just let us take care of white people's nonsense. And so in a situation I was somebody it was like a Halloween and somebody.

on my friends list thought it was okay to put like this thing about blackface and i was just like it was like nine in the morning i was like i go this is racist like and they double down and they doubled down And this is like a trauma expert, author, like, right? And I was so tired. And I just said, you know what, you just tag White Nonsense Roundup.

I said, I just tag in white notes and they come in and they, if it's a public conversation, they'll take care of it. And I was like, so we can take care of each other too. We doesn't have to be just internal. And that was like, you know, really great allyship. Really great relationship.

I wasn't familiar with white nonsense roundup. I will find them and also link to them in the show notes of this. It was just like, I could just set it down. Like I didn't have to go and like fight. I didn't have to go and placate their upset, like that we can do this together. And we're going to figure some of this stuff out together. So how we can get creative about this, because I don't think there's one way here. This isn't like we're in a hot mess in some places.

you know yeah couple places at least i think but i'm just talking about in terms of this and there's some places where people are doing it right like they're figuring it out and doing it and so i also think like as we figure things out that work we should be sharing like this

worked and like a little bit of a community of practice around how we get free together. So I want to continue to... pull on this thread of talking about overwhelm, burnout. We live in a culture that is extremely focused on productivity that just inculcates us with this idea that our worth is linked to what we produce.

Which is, of course, how so many of us fall into burnout and into overwhelm in the first place. But what I'd like to do now is kind of think about connecting the dots between this toxic focus on productivity. and overwhelm, and then how that impacts our ability to have hard conversations. So when we're doing this work that you're talking about, when we're addressing inequities that exist in our social structures.

in our workplaces, even in our interpersonal relationships. These hard conversations are obviously going to arise. So my question is, how does over-focusing on productivity impact and potentially falling into burnout impact our ability to be present in those conversations. We're just tired. You don't have the bandwidth. Just plain and simple. You're just tired.

I mean, I think even the emphasis, even framing it as like the emphasis on productivity, I would say is a privilege for most people. It's an emphasis on survival. It's not on being productive. It's on, I am not being paid a material wage. to live. So I'm not interested in being productive. I'm interested in keeping a roof over my head and food in my kids' mouths. So I think we need to, because if it sounds like, oh, if it's just a focus on productivity, I can just slow my work down.

Right? Yeah. Like, it's like, as opposed to when you don't have control over your work. And it's why we're seeing strikes, right? Where people are like, that's it. No. Right here in Los Angeles, we're in the movie industry, the IATSE strike, where they're just like, no, these conditions, no. So I'd like to reframe that around survival. Yeah. It's a really ugly beast because when you're just trying to survive and you're bone tired, what energy do you have?

to break those chains. And so this comes to me right back. So my son, I have a 20-year-old son, and he was canvassing for Bernie Sanders. He was doing, he didn't know that he was doing it with DSA and he, they were doing deep canvassing. He didn't really know what they were doing, but it was deep canvassing. And so he called me and he said, mom, I came to like, we were.

talking to this woman and she had four kids and she was like so tired and did it and like and she just didn't understand that her issues were political and she just and he goes now i see why you do what you do when we can offer things to people where they are in their workplace and when they can recognize.

we all go to sleep sometime maybe it's daytime because we work night shift or whatever we all go to sleep sometime and even if it's not enough sleep if somebody can learn a little practice that helps them settle their stress just a little bit so they sleep a little bit better they wake with a little bit more energy they have a little more bandwidth so when the union reaches out to them they're more likely to say yeah i'm gonna do something so that right like how do we

come out of that is by building just that little bit extra space that allows that reach out, that connection, that dreaming of something different that will get people off.

You know, like, you know, put like, you know, lay your body down on the gears of the machine, right? So when we're trying to build that capacity. you're talking about that we've been talking about. And I've heard you use the phrase a few times in the course that I took with you, you know, getting into the conversation and staying in the conversation.

We're trying to build capacity to do that. One of the things that you talked about was learning to discern the difference between safety and comfort, because obviously we're not always going to be comfortable. And I don't think in fact that any type of generative change or creativity or transformation really comes from a place of comfort. Could you talk a little bit more about safety versus comfort and the role that that distinction plays in?

staying in some of those more challenging conversations? When we are conditioned to be, when we're truly unsafe, like... I mean, we have a system in our body that helps us determine whether we're safe or not. It's called neuroception. And often, especially for people with a lot of trauma, being uncomfortable can feel unsafe.

Being uncomfortable can feel unsafe. And so learning to discern the difference is super important. And so really, can we ask, like, am I materially... in danger right now like is someone coming running at me with a knife is there somebody armed here am i in danger of losing my job is there i mean there's not just like physical danger but like is there emotional danger is there economic danger like what and

to be able to ask those questions and when we're really like you know pressured and in that state we're going to often see danger where there isn't danger But even asking the questions starts to get us on the like, you know what, maybe I'm actually a little safer than I thought. And you can let some of that go and lean into a little bit more discomfort.

and be like oh i'm uncomfortable but i'm safe and so it's just an important question to ask ourselves because it's a skill to develop to be have that discernment especially if you're carrying a lot of trauma This is why I like using like short practices to settle my system. So if I've noticed that I'm like, I'm like this and I'll do a practice.

If I don't settle, it's usually a sign that this is not a very safe place. But if I settle, I'm like, oh, note to self, this was safer than I thought. My body was misreading the keys here. So it's in practice, you get better at it.

And so even like, if I'm facilitating, I will offer the question. So if you're feeling discomfort right now, or you're feeling unsafe right now, can you like, how do you, how do you know it's one or the other? What's telling you in your system? What are the cues in the environment?

And I'm not questioning anybody. I'm asking people to question for themselves. And, you know, I think if you're working in a group or a relationship, we get better at it. And we hope with time and it smooths a lot of the growth.

Growth happens more easily when people have this skill. One of the things that I've heard you say is that settling in the body creates a home for other people to join you. And I would love to hear you say a little bit more about that idea, how settling can help invite others in. how much we're communicating on that sort of body level that we're not maybe thinking about sometimes.

In real life, if you have the COVID luxury of being around people in real life, we exude pheromones that are either threatening or welcoming.

um based on our state so you can be saying all the things and your body could be like danger danger danger people are like and they don't know why but they're like But we, you know, you communicate it other ways, the prosody in your voice, you know, the sing song quality of your voice that indicates you're relaxed versus a very monotone or flat or fake, like real fake.

right like so how you're communicating welcoming the pace of your speech the relaxation in your face and your neck muscles so this stuff that's you can't fake it well let me imagine some actors could do it or something but You're saying like, there's a doula group that I was working with and they, one of them got it. It was like a series of sessions. And she said, when I am safe, I am safety for my clients.

you're like a harbor you're like a like a you know like it's okay we can sit here you create a container you create a container with your nervous system Our nervous system resonates with others. So also being more settled. It's like you were sending pings to each other. If I'm like, you're like ping, ping, ping. Oh, this feels good.

This feels good to me. It's yummy. I want more of that. Your approach to embodied change as I understand it is... really rooted in recognizing that we're full humans and that we're in relationship all the time and of looking at the body and at the systems we live in simultaneously. because they can't be separated. And where I'm headed is I wanted to ask you a question. You use the language of transformation a lot.

Lumos transforms. And I was curious to ask you about transformation on an individual versus a collective level. And if there's something to be illuminated about. how much the dominant culture tries to lure us into this model of sort of consumptive individual transformation or healing, almost maybe as a distraction from collective transformation or from collective liberation. And we subscribe to it too. And then it gives us a sense of control. So we love it. We can't just blame them.

You know, I mean, we get free together. It's like, if you're in connection, like we are in connection with anyone, like in my mind, I think there's like a lot of metaphor and visually I see like a net, right. And each of us is a little node on that net.

If I move my position, it can't help but move everything that I'm in connection with. And sometimes we think about collective liberation and it's like... thing it's like over there it's really big we're like are we even moving towards it like because it's like over there and i actually like to think of it as a process

We have, and I've been saying this a lot in the last, I think this really big job right now project and like mind boggling complexity. And I love some complexity, but this is mind boggling.

and i say i've been saying often is we have a chance to remake culture in every interaction every conversation every email every text every time we talk to ourselves every like how we cook for ourselves i mean everything you do has a chance to remake right um you know the joy with which you wash dishes like i don't know like and i i just like to think of all of that

So Lumos means light, right? And for the Harry Potter fans in the house, Lumos is the spell for lighting your wand. And so light, so I have this image of like light.

like you kind of stoke your light and then this like little lights like start popping on and we stoke each other's lights until it's like it's this field of brilliance I it came so I think that's like the liberation that's happening um so it's on the bottom of our emails for our organization ella baker if you those who don't know ella baker was a

prominent figure, but though not well credited in the US civil rights movement in the middle of the last century. And in fact, I think Rosa Parks was inspired for her work by attending an Ella Baker talk. I'm so excited. So Ella Baker has a saying, give light and people will find a way. Give light and people will find a way. So I think about. So there's no.

If you're doing it individually, it's still impacting the collective. And I think it's a false binary and we don't have to fall into that false binary. The individual, you know, what happens in little happens in big. With intentionality, I think it's more powerful for sure, but I don't think we need to fall into the trap of dividing that line so sharply.

I think that's a good place to wrap up. I have one final question that I'm asking everyone who is on Hurry Slowly this season. As we try to... integrate or make some sense of or find some light in everything that we've experienced over the past 20 plus months, everything the pandemic has thrown into relief, magnified.

exacerbated, revealed. So we try to integrate all that and kind of begin again. I'm curious, what is one question that you might ask the folks listening to reflect on for themselves? What are you noticing? It's a question I ask often. Just what are you noticing? I think there's a lot of power in noticing. What are you noticing in yourself, in others?

Because when you ask that question repeatedly, it doesn't have judgment to it. Just what are you noticing? Patterns start to emerge. And from patterns, we move. When I was in my first year of exploring sobriety, I remember talking to another woman who was sober about what shifted when you removed alcohol from the equation. And she said,

And then went on to talk about a variety of different things that she had been observing. But I remember thinking, you can stop right there with just, you start noticing. There is so much power in the simple act. of noticing. And I would add that often the first step is to begin by noticing the behaviors that you are engaging in in order to not notice certain things that you might prefer not to see.

And that behavior might be drinking, like me. Or it might be consuming media. Or it might be over-talking. Or it might be never allowing yourself to be alone. What are you noticing? And where is there a veil between you and the noticing? This podcast is produced by Matt Susich with additional audio assistance from Devin Craig Johnson.

If you'd like to stay in touch with me, you can sign up for my newsletter at hurryslowly.co slash newsletter. And if you'd like to make a contribution to the podcast to help us continue doing this work, you can visit hurryslowly.co. slash donations. As always, thanks for listening and remember to hurry slowly.