STRONG LIKE FLOWERS
PLAYFUL LIKE TOADS

Movement Experiments for Cultivating Embodied Antiracism
Strong Like Flowers; Playful Like Toads

REGISTRATION HERE

A collaboration with my friend and colleague Kara Bender, to explore the way white body supremacy habits show up in our bodies and how we can transform them. Movement, sensation and feeling can reveal thinking patterns, because these are all part of the same neurobiological system. Come explore gentle, playful movement to see how easy it is to build new patterns of action. Habits run us until we upgrade our nervous systems with new ones.

Participants will be invited into gentle guided movements or thoughtful reflections with the intention to notice sensations, feelings, quality of movements, or thoughts that arise. Going slow, pausing and noticing gives us an opportunity to discover our habits of thinking, reacting and moving in the world. We begin to notice that our socialized ideas of how to “be” are habits that sometime serve us and sometime interfere with our intentions. Through these processes we can cultivate a myriad of options where we previously hadn’t even perceived a choice. 

Simple, accessible, movement experiments will be drawn from the Feldenkrais Method®, Theater of the Oppressed, and Strozzi / generative somatics practices. Within these, there will be both individual practice spaces as well as collective / small group practice spaces. Reflection, debrief, and discussion will be imbedded in these explorations. 

Everything is a choice. Consent will be practiced at all times.

Pausing and observing is encouraged. 

No movement / dance / embodiment /racial justice experience is necessary, only a willingness to try out a somatic (body-based) approach and engage in conversations about the supremacy cultures we are socialized into.  

Try out a Free Practice Session at our Q&A HERE

This experience is designed for people who identify as white. This is not to take the place of multiracial dialogue and action, but to supplement it and create greater capacity for cross-racial solidarity. The impetus for white people to do their own work with one another often comes directly from people of color who have requested that white people take responsibility for educating ourselves about racism and engaging in the work of educating our communities. For more understanding about all white space READ THIS

REGISTRATION HERE

Recording of Q&A/Free Practice Session

DATES and PRICING

DATES: Come to one, two or all three.

SAT, AUG. 3 from 9am – 12noon
SAT, AUG. 3 from 2pm – 5pm
SUN, AUG. 4 from 9am – 12noon

Module PRICING Options: 

ONE: $88
TWO: $176
THREE: $244

Pricing is based on how many modules you choose to participate in regardless of the days and times. There is a price break of $20 for attending all three modules over both days. The full price is $264, but we are offering 3 modules for a discounted $244!

Scholarships: if the rates above still create a barrier to accessing this course, please apply for a full or partial scholarship through the Robin Radford Cross-Class Solidarity Scholarship Fund. Please click on this link for the scholarship application. If you have questions about the scholarship application process please email Kara at: info@seedandspiral.com

Cancellations & Refund Policies:

Registration closes on  Wed. July 31st at midnight Central Time. If you cancel before Wed. July 17th at midnight CT, then you can receive a 50% refund. No refunds will be issued after Wed. July 17th.

LOCATION: In Person only
(no online option at this time)

MaToVu 4200 Blaine Ave. STL 63110

COURSE FACILITATORS

Kara Bender (she/her) is a systems thinker, organizer, participant-centered educator and an embodied and playful facilitator. Through her consulting organization, Seed & Spiral, she encourages growing our collective imaginations for liberation through body-based, earth-centered, equity offerings. She is deeply committed to naming her stake and responsibility as a white cisgender woman in ending oppressive systems and has over 15 years of experience in community organizing and antiracism facilitation. When she is not working, she spends time biking in parks near her home, scouting the next best ice cream place and reading sci-fi fantasy novels next to her kitty. 

Kelly Feder (she/her) has always been interested in human potential and how we create and move beyond our limitations. She brings the unfinished, imperfect process of her own transforming self into her teaching, inviting compassion in the midst of uncertainty to linger in and learn from the complexities of the habits that shape us. As a Certified Feldenkrais Teacher of Somatic Education, she invites people into a process of Awareness Through Movement® to recognize our habitual patterns of thinking, moving, sensing and feeling. For 20 years, Kelly has facilitated people in this process of self recognition and change so that transformed people can begin to transform culture. 

“We act in accordance of our self image. Each one of us speaks, moves, thinks, and feels in a different way, each according to the image of themselves that they have built up over the years. In order to change our mode of action, we must change the image of ourselves that we carry within us. What is involved here, or course, is a change in the dynamics of our reactions, and not the mere replacing of one action by another. Such a change involves not only a change in our self-image, but a change in the nature of our motivations and the mobilization of all the parts of the body concerned.”

Moshe Feldenkrais in Awareness through Movement 

“Our bodies have a form of knowledge that is different from our cognitive brains. This knowledge is typically experienced as a felt sense of constriction or expansion, pain or ease, energy or numbness. Often this knowledge is stored in our bodies as wordless stories about what is safe and what is dangerous.

The body is where we fear, hope and react; where we constrict and release; where we reflexively fight, flee or freeze. If we are to upend the status quo of white-body supremacy, we must begin with our bodies.”

Resmaa Menakem in My Grandmother’s Hands

photo by james eades unsplash

photo by ehimetalor-akhere-unuabona at unsplash

photo by nathan dumlao at unsplash

“Being an antiracist requires persistent self-awareness….” Ibrim Kendi ibrimxkendi.com

“The fight against racism is our issue. It’s not something that we’re called on to help People of Color with. We need to become involved with it as if our lives depended on it because really, in truth, they do.”
Anne Braden

“White-body supremacy doesn’t live in our thinking brains. It lives and breathes in our bodies.” Resmaa Menakem My Grandmother’s Hands