aaron’s Reviews > Tending Grief: Embodied Rituals for Holding Our Sorrow and Growing Cultures of Care in Community > Status Update

On an embodied level, the Void has created a sense of being numb, of being unable to feel deeply or emphasise with others who appear to be different than your kin. From the beginning of the transatlantic slave trade to the present, disembodied knowledge has become the dominant social paradigm in the West. Disembodied knowledge can be defined as “intellectual knowledge without concomitant integration of somatic, intuitive understanding [—] and the spiritual wisdom the combination yields.” It has been viewed as superior and the general public has been encouraged to embrace it as part of progress. Cartesian dualism also refers to this mind-body split that has become dominant in the west; it creates a sense that the mind is the essence of human beings, and the body has no wisdom to provide other than being a fleshy vehicle for the mind. As a result, we have been socialised to ignore or numb any sensations or embodied signals that convey moral rights and wrongs; instead we rationalise the deep injustice we see unfolding around us.

Somatic educator Madeleine Russ-D’Eye speaks to this pervasive knowing in her series “The Roots of White Supremacy Are in Our Bodies.” She notes,

“We must explore the ways we relate to the sensations and emotions that arise in our bodies in relation to our life experiences. Only then can we actually learn to notice, and *feel*, the *Implicit Associations*—the meanings and associations our bodies make, beneath our conscious awareness—– that underlie and result in behaviours and attitude that marginalise others. We must then learn to *tolerate the discomfort* of not acting on these associations long enough for alternative (ideally, more collaborative) outcomes to arise. Another dimension of discomfort that I suggested white Allies must learn to welcome is tolerating *the discomfort of emotion*—and of change, and the unknown—moving through our bodies. Being present this cities experiences us to our own experience of life in all its textures, and make us capable of acknowledging and truly caring about the life experiences—in particular, the suffering—of our fellow humans. I shared my belief that this is a requisite energy source for our whole hearted participation in personal and cultural transformation at this time.”

I hope these important threads of history, and how they relate to the people who called themselves white, will become widely discussed in the year to come, especially amongst the younger generations.”

I hope people will begin to reckon with the wounds, take responsibility for the legacies they are entangled with, and repent superiority, which is built on a house of cards.
when we acknowledge the historical processes our lives have been shaped by, and when we touch into this level, we can cultivate the agency to repot and behaviour from all wounds and create new stories and ways of being, rather than unconsciously reproducing the violence of the void. How do we learn to collaborate in a way that sustains the web of life for the next seven generations?

[goes on to forward grieving the violence of Empire and the Void space that has come to exist in many as a result of it] (pp. 44-45)