THREE BRAINS AND MLK

IF ANYONE KNOWS WHO CREATED THIS GORGEOUS IMAGE, PLEASE CONTACT ME SO I CAN IDENTIFY THEM!!! 
This week I recorded a guided meditation (please note this is an AUDIO FILE, not a video). Please click below to listen:

Audre Lorde, “Coal”
I
Is the total black, being spoken
From the earth’s inside.
There are many kinds of open.
How a diamond comes into a knot of flame
How a sound comes into a word, coloured
By who pays what for speaking.
 
Some words are open
Like a diamond on glass windows
Singing out within the crash of passing sun
Then there are words like stapled wagers
In a perforated book—buy and sign and tear apart--
And come whatever wills all chances
The stub remains
An ill-pulled tooth with a ragged edge.
Some words live in my throat
Breeding like adders. Others know sun
Seeking like gypsies over my tongue
To explode through my lips
Like young sparrows bursting from shell.
Some words
Bedevil me.
 
Love is a word another kind of open--
As a diamond comes into a knot of flame
I am black because I come from the earth’s inside
Take my word for jewel in your open light.
Audre Lorde, “Coal” from The Collected Poems of Audre Lorde. Copyright © 1997 by Audre Lorde. Reprinted with the permission of Charlotte Sheedy Literary Agency and W. W. Norton & Company, Inc., www.nortonpoets.com.
 
 
“This is poetry as illumination, for it is through poetry that we give name to those ideas which are, until the poem, nameless and formless—about to be birthed, but already felt.
…For each of us as women, there is a dark place within where hidden and growing our true spirit rises…. These places of possibility within ourselves are dark because they are ancient and hidden; they have survived and grown strong through darkness. Within these deep places, each one of us holds an incredible reserve of creativity and power, of unexamined and unrecorded emotion and feeling. The woman’s place of power within each of us is neither white nor surface; it is dark, it is ancient, and it is deep. When we view living, in the European mode, only as a problem to be solved, we then rely solely upon our ideas to make us free, for these were what the white fathers told us were precious.
But as we become more in touch with our own ancient, black, non-European view of living as a situation to be experienced and interacted with, we learn more and more to cherish our feelings, and to respect those hidden sources of power from where true knowledge and therefore lasting action comes. At this point in time, I believe that women carry within ourselves the possibility for fusion of these two approaches as keystone for survival, and we come closest to this combination in our poetry.
…For women, then, poetry is not a luxury. It is a vital necessity of our existence. It forms the quality of light within which we predicate our hopes and dreams toward survival and change, first made into language, then into idea, then into more tangible action. Poetry is the way we help give name to the nameless so it can be thought.”
From the essay Poetry is not a Luxury, published in the collection Sister Outsider, Penguin Random House/the Crossing Press; 1984, 2007 by Audre Lorde.
 
 
POETIC THEMES
            In a book about language and embodiment, it seems right to celebrate Martin Luther King  Jr.’s powerhouse poetic style by examining the revolutionary function of language. In Lorde’s turn of phrase, “poetry of illumination” transforms our dark, formless reserves of power into tangible ideas and actions. I’d like to lift Lorde’s alchemical process from its material feminist frame and examine it through new formulations in the field of Embodied Social Justice. Resmaa Menakem completely transformed diversity activism by introducing a trauma-informed lens, insisting that the perpetuation of racism in our culture can only be healed through a somatic approach.
           We all need, Menakem teaches, to metabolize the poisons of white supremacist culture that we have introjected into our bodies. This intervention imports into race relations the current shift in psychology from exclusively cognitive approaches like talk therapy toward body-centric healing modalities. It bears mentioning that the discovery of physiological centers with which we can retrain the nervous system predates the field of psychology. The West discovered the “wandering nerve” just like Columbus discovered America. In any case, a new body of race equity activism, like progressive psychology, now acknowledges that if we truly want to change, we need to work with more than the brain in our skull, but also other conscious domains of the body.
            The field of somatics has been developing practical applications for working with the seats of consciousness outside the brain, like the psoas, the diaphragm, the endocrine glands, and the gut. Leaning into change requires that we listen to the intuitive wisdom of other equally aware body systems. Here I want to borrow an approach I learned from Susan Raffo, which she calls the “three brain system” (not so very different from Aristotle’s rational, nutritive, and appetitive parts of the soul). The head brain focuses on executive function and individual knowledge. The heart brain focuses on connection, and the gut brain, on nourishment. Embryologically, these three brains were linked, and it’s worth speculating on how we each, individually, might put them back in conversation with one another. 
            An elemental approach to the three primary seats of consciousness configures the low body as earth, the core as fire, and the head as air. A model for how the three systems collaborate in speaking truth to power is Audre Lorde’s poem, “Coal.” Doing what it describes, the poem is performative. The first stanza functions like a little microcosm of the poem’s big world: speech is compared to the process of taking the earth element and firing it deep within the earth’s core until it emerges as a diamond. The poem’s form begins with one letter in its first line: the element that is being fired is the “I.” Even as the first-person singular gains further definition in the second line as black, Lorde identifies the poetic/alchemical process as speech, originating in “the earth’s inside.” The earth element moves through the fire of glinting, gorgeous variations of what speech can look like in one long middle stanza about language. Words are tongue-roving gypsies. They sing out or breed like adders or break at the stub or burst from shells, knowing sun and seeking explosion. Word gems.
             And the earth-to-jewel process of the poem itself feeds us into the final stanza, whose subject is love. But not woo-woo huggybear love, but the deep internal fire of giving a shit, inside this unbelievably pressurized environment, until that which we care about explodes and our thoughts come out in the open. But lest things get whitewashed, Lorde hammers home the centrality of race; she states bluntly, “I am black because I come from the earth’s inside,” and reminds us that speaking up is “coloured by who pays what for speaking.” The level of risk required to speak up correlates directly to our responsibility to do so. So on this MLK Day, the only holiday celebrated through political action, what message is your gut, heart, and head gestating?
 
 
PRACTICE
            To answer the injunction to speak truth to power, we might experiment with Lorde’s earth-to-gem alchemy. We linger with a query while placing our awareness sequentially on body’s three brains to listen for their wisdom. Could we practice, somatically, moving up through our roots through the fire of what we’ve been through and what we care about, in order that we might air our truth?
            It might be useful to preface the practice itself with some insight borrowed from Tema Okun about freeing our process from white supremacy cultural norms—like perfectionism and defensiveness. In our discernment, we might instead honor the slow and complicated processes of working through conflict. We need to prioritize how we do the work over any specific outcome. In keeping with the grace of a more compassionate approach, be gentle with your expectations. This practice will not necessarily generate a letter to your senator, although it might! What’s key is that you come closer to capturing a truth, your truth, the word-adders breeding in your throat.
            Part of the work for white folk is metabolizing our reactivity to race-related stimuli, to stay in the fight and continue to act as allies. But the queries below might show up really differently for people of color. Nkem Ndefo teaches a process of slowly building resources for facing adversity that she calls “Alchemical Resilience.” Rather than expecting folk to simply “bounce back,” those who have not historically had access to pleasure, ease, or joy have a chance to build their capacity slowly, over time. Integral to respecting the different needs of justifiably vigilant nervous systems in building agency is observing the right to recognize your own discomfort and decline any given practice. For marginalized people who have not had access to this right to stop, defending it is revolutionary. So I encourage you to tailor this practice in any way that feels protective of your boundaries and gentle with your wounds.
            The invitation is to begin at the root, with movements and postures that create sensation in the feet and legs, belly, and pelvis. Whether it’s sitting with one ankle on one knee or kneading the arches of your feet, find an intense but safe level of sensation in the area of your body that today seems to evoke foundations, origins, a sense of home base. As you make contact with gut feeling, consider: What was your first awakening to your own race identity? Stay with the feeling in your lower body as you paint the scene. Does this recollection bring about a change in pelvic tone, facial expression, or some other zone of muscle tension? How many different emotions are associated with this moment, and can you dip your toes into each of them without drowning? What is the tone, the color, the texture of your gut response?
            As you move to the feeling in the core, place your body in shapes that center your awareness here. Be with the rhythm of your heartbeat, admire the fancy tango of diaphragm and lungs, feel for the subtle burn of the digestive fire. Hone your attention on all the interactions of inner and outer worlds—blood going in and out of the heart chambers, the shifts in temperature and humidity taking place in the lungs, all the magical transformations you might intuit in the organs of purification and detoxification. Then call to mind an experience that shifted your thinking from one understanding about race to another. This could be a scene from later in childhood or it could be yesterday. What were the interactions at play, who was a part of it, what was the feeling state in this moment of change? Could you associate a color or type of weather or a musical tone with the time before and the time after?
            Bring your attention to the neck and head (especially the throat). Explore movements that close and compress the larynx, and then reopen and stretch it. Just be with the question of what you need to say, without any expectation that it be articulate or elegant. Typically, body wisdom emerges as something very, very simple. Take some time to listen, rather than sculpting or forcing a message. If you feel stuck, return to either of these two primary scenes and see if there is something you wish you had said. Try to speak it out loud, or if that feels hard, write it down. After a few minutes, whatever comes or doesn’t, let it go. Release it, take rest, chill, do something comforting and familiar and nurturing.