June 10, 2022
Resmaa Menakem joins UW Community Circle to explain somatic approach to healing
On May 3, 2022, the University of Washington Population Health Initiative, the School of Public Health, the Race & Equity Initiative and the Office of Minority Affairs & Diversity hosted a virtual guided conversation with Resmaa Menakem (pictured), an educator of anti-racism whose multiple books and courses implement a somatic approach to healing racialized trauma.
Over the past several months, a group of UW faculty and staff joined to create the UW Community Circle in which they read and discussed Menakem’s book My Grandmother’s Hands. The Community Circle was intended to create an intentional space for faculty and staff to gather in community with one another by discussing and applying the somatic healing practices from Menakem’s book.
The conversation last month with Menakem was the culmination of the time the group spent working through and discussing racial trauma while healing with one another. Members of the Community Circle and others who joined the conversation had the opportunity to ask Menakem questions regarding several ideas in his book including somatic abolitionism, differences between bodies and identities and maintaining somatic wellness.
Menakem’s work centers on the idea that in order to abolish white body supremacy and the trauma from centuries of systemic racism, people must start within their body where the charge of trauma is typically held. He emphasized the power of pause in allowing the body to heal rather than constantly working through racial trauma verbally, which is a significant step in the maintenance of somatic wellness practices in daily life.