Online Embodiment Touching Closeup Love: a leaderless and leaderful embodied racial justice practice group

5pm PT / 7pm CT / 8pm ET

“Hope is invented every day.”
– James Baldwin quoted in Resmaa Menakem’s book The Quaking of America

Join us. We are a group of 8 people who self-organize an online, bi-weekly, leaderless and leaderful, embodied racial justice practice group. We began in response to Resmaa Menakem’s call for people to practice the offerings in his book My Grandmother’s Hands: Racialized Trauma and the Pathway to Mending Our Hearts and Bodies with other people, and to commit to practicing for the rest of our lives. We are organizers, healing arts practitioners, teachers, facilitators, artists, yoga therapists and retirees. We are an intergenerational group, from our 30s to our 70s, in Illinois, New York, Ohio, Texas, Virginia, and Washington DC-Baltimore.

As we near 5 years of practice together, we want to open our circle up to others interested in experiencing how we gather. We’ll share what has been revealed to us over the course of our time in relationship with each other, and how we’ve evolved to shape our lives with each other’s partnership. Join us for discussion and practice that tends to our bodies and our mutual development.

Resmaa Menakem calls his landscape of practice Somatic Abolitionism, which is an embodied response to the problems of white-body supremacy. It is a “living, embodied, practice and culture of antiracism”. To learn more about Resmaa’s work, check out the Black Octopus Society. We are not experts in or teaching Resmaa’s body of work. We are gathering to share our relationships with one another and our commitment to resourcing ourselves, so we can show up more wholly and effectively in our lives and the conditions that have been created. And so, maybe, we can make small (perhaps inconceivable) shifts to these conditions, in our lifetimes.

Join us with a cup of tea and in comfortable clothing.

July 1, 2025: 5pm PT / 7pm CT / 8pm ET

Co-presenters include: C Meranda Flachs-Surmanek, Vinny Mwano Jeffrey Pulis Jennifer O’Hara Michael Burnham Jen Schneeman Beth Anne Brooks-Mwano, Barry Feldman