The meaning of embodiment w/ Prentis Hemphill (Transcript)

[00:00:00] Chris Duffy:
You are listening to How to Be a Better Human. I'm your host, Chris Duffy. A topic that has come up a lot on this podcast and in my conversations with friends and family off the podcast is the way that our brains and our bodies are connected. It can be really easy to imagine that our mind, our brain, our perception of reality is floating off somewhere that it's not in any way connected to this messy blood and guts filled body of ours, and however much we want to think that our brain is somehow elevated and different from the rest of our physical form.

It's not, it's connected, and you know that that's true. If you are someone who has ever experienced a mood crash after not getting a full night's sleep, or picked a fight with a loved one because you thought you were angry about something and then it turned out you were actually just hungry.

Right. These are all things that we have experienced. It's very relatable because it's fundamental to being a human. Now, at the same time, translating that idea that our brains and our bodies are fundamentally linked, that it's a two-way street. That's new territory for many of us. It's certainly new territory for me, and that is why I think that today's guest, Prentis Hemphill is so interesting and so important.

Prentis is the author of, What it Takes to Heal: How Transforming Ourselves Can Change the World. Prentis is a therapist who focuses not only on what's happening in our minds, but also in our bodies and in the broader world and in historical context.

Here's a clip from Prentis' podcast where they talk about where this journey began.

[00:01:28] Prentis Hemphill:
I decided to become a therapist primarily so that people like me could sit across from someone like themselves. As a therapist, I was introduced to somatics and somatics taught me the importance of the body and how much history and possibility we hold in them.

Since then, I've worked as a politicized healer trying to bridge healing work with the political domain. And somewhere in the midst of that work, the whole world changed.

[00:01:58] Chris Duffy:
We're gonna talk with Prentis about all the ways that the world has changed and how those changes have affected their work, their practice, their patience, and their own vision of self and health, all of that after this break.

Today we are talking with Prentis, Hemphill about our minds and our bodies, how they are connected, and also how they are affected by the broader world and historical forces around us.

[00:02:28] Prentis Hemphill:
Hi, this is Prentis Hemphill. I'm the author of What it Takes to Heal, and I'm really happy to be here today.

[00:02:33] Chris Duffy:
So, Prentis there's, there's so much that I want to talk to you about, but I think because some people who are listening may not be familiar with all of the terms that I'm imagining we'll use, can you start by just giving us a little bit of a background on what somatic work is?

[00:02:49] Prentis Hemphill:
Somatics basically points us to the body as the primary site of healing, change and transformation. So, I'm trained as a talk therapist, as a psychotherapist, but somatic says, talking is great, but if we don't include the body and how we are approaching our healing and transformation, what we're basically doing is putting a seed on hard soil.

That we actually have to include the sensations of the body, the feeling of the body to be aware of what the body is actually doing in order to actually have change take root. So somatics, recenters the body and any effort towards healing, change and transformation. And it also understands that whatever happens to us in our lives actually happens to our bodies, not just our brains or our psychology,

[00:03:39] Chris Duffy:
You know, your work combines somatic work, healing therapy, and also activism and organizing and thinking about broader systemic issues. And I think that at first, many of us may think of those as kind of separate pieces, but they're all part of the same thing. So, how did you first start to see these as really being interconnected and necessary to work on together?

[00:04:01] Prentis Hemphill:
Absolutely. I come from a lineage of people that have been thinking about these things long before me, many, many years. But what somatics basically has us look at, become aware of is that we embody things over time. You hear this word embodiment. It's like a buzzword. I, I saw em embodiment on the side of a, a bus in my town recently.

It was like the embodiment of something. So, you can think about embodiment this way. We practice things to the point that they go offline. And we don't have to think about them anymore to do them. I often use the example of learning to brush your teeth 'cause I have a two and a half year old who I'm teaching to brush her teeth.

When you first learned to brush your teeth, you had to think about it because there's a lot of different motions and movements that go into brushing your teeth. What direction am I doing? What tooth am I on? You know? And she ends up brushing and brushing her face, not just her teeth. But now at this point, you and I brush our teeth and everyone listening hopefully brushes their teeth in the morning without having to think about it very much.

It has become embodied at this point. We don't have to say, “Okay, I'm going round in a circle. I'm on this tooth.” A lot of us brush our teeth and check our phone or brush our teeth and do something else.

We, it's so deeply embodied, and it's not only things like brushing our teeth or playing sports that become that deeply embodied. It's also our emotional habits. Our tendency towards intimacy and being able to open up with other people how we are in conflict. We start to embody certain practices that become so deeply entrenched that they no longer require us to think about them or consider them.

We've practiced them over time, and that goes for larger beliefs in social norms. So, we come to embody things, values of our society that may or may not actually align with who we deeply are on the deepest level, who, what we actually believe about humanity or equity, but we can become embodied in those.

So even, you know, I, I, I often explain that even patriarchy or a misogyny, it has a certain set of postures. It has a certain set of ways of coming out of our bodies that it's not just an idea. It's a way of being in relationship to other human beings. It's, there's an embodiment to it, and it's important for us to become aware of the things that we've embodied that may not actually align with what we believe.

[00:06:31] Chris Duffy:
You know, I, I, I've seen some really similar stuff with my own baby at four months old. Just like understanding the way the world works, having the ability to turn your head and control what you look at. Things that I never thought of as abilities.

[00:06:44] Prentis Hemphill:
Yeah.

[00:06:44] Chris Duffy:
You know, it doesn't take too much of a stretch to push that into the world of metaphor that like we learn how to look at and what to not look at and that what is part of our body and what is not part of our body and what is acceptable and what is, you know, cause and effect.

I know these are things that you've thought a lot about.

[00:07:01] Prentis Hemphill:
Absolutely. And I I, I love that you brought your four month old into this because I, I actually having a child, you can see so much of how they're just constantly learning. We're constantly experimenting and learning and practicing. You know, in somatics, one of my teachers would always say, “We're always practicing something. You just may not be aware of it.”

But we're always, always practicing something and you can really see it with a child. We learn about the order of things, about the order of the world through watching the adults and the people in the community around us. We also learn in our own homes about the emotional range that's allowable and what's not allowable.

If we have a, a parent that's constantly in some level of fear or terror, we learn that the world is a scary place. Or if we have a parent who rages, we learn potentially to be small or we learn to be reactive to that rage. We get shaped in these ways. I mean, we come into the world as we are, and I think we come in with some of our own ingredients, and a lot of that is inherited from our ancestry too, from those who came before us.

And we get shaped in our homes and we learn this is how we move. This is how we don't move. This is what we feel. This is what we don't feel. And some of that gets even more narrow. This is what you feel as this sex, and this is what you feel as this sex. This is what you cannot feel, cannot do. Those lessons and you know, a lot of what I'm saying is not that all shaping is wrong, because we sort of have to shape our our kids.

[00:08:40] Chris Duffy:
Mm-hmm.

[00:08:41] Prentis Hemphill:
We shape each other all the time to caution for certain things, but a lot of the shaping. That we bring to especially that relationship where a lot of us experience in our family is that we are shaped by the unprocessed, the unfelt, and unprocessed content that our caregivers bring to us.

And that can be their own personal trauma. It can be sort of the collective traumas or undone stuff in our society that we get shaped by that even what they are unaware that they're bringing to us. And I'm saying that that shapes not only our kind of worldview, we think about it, you know, in this conceptual space, but it shapes our very tissues and behavior and how we interact with one another and how we interact with the world.

[00:09:27] Chris Duffy:
I'm sure that everyone who's listening has some connection to that. And just to share my own personal one is. I had been in therapy and then restarted therapy as we were expecting our first child. And one of the things when my therapist asked me what my goals were, were to say like, “I don't, I want to solve these things in myself so that I don't pass them on to our kid.”

I and something that my therapist said that I thought a lot about is he was like, “You don't have to solve stuff to make it not get passed on. What makes it not get passed on is you being aware of it and then talking about it openly.”

[00:10:01] Prentis Hemphill:
That's right.

[00:10:01] Chris Duffy:
It's okay if you still struggle with it as long as you know you're struggling with it.

[00:10:05] Prentis Hemphill:
Yeah. My book, I tell this story about, you know, I grew up with particular kinds of childhood trauma I had, there was abuse in my home. And one of the things that I learned through that was to retreat from connection. And I spent a lot of time working somatically around my retreat from connection, intimacy, et cetera.

And when I had my child when she was born, I remember feeling like her gaze was so present, you know, she just was taking me in. And it made me feel, I could feel that impulse to retreat to kind of sit back a little bit in my chest, to move some part of me away from that connection and noticing that I recentered, I started to breathe, come back into my face, come back into my chest, allow myself to be perceived and also to perceive her.

And what I realized in that moment was that that's kind of all it takes. I'm doing that retreating thing because she wants to, 'cause she is close to me and if I can just breathe and stay present, you know, I'm doing it in a clumsy way. It's not perfect, but I'm allowing that connection to happen. That is what it takes to interrupt a transmission of a lot of stories, a lot of trauma is just the awareness and the attempt.

It's not about being perfect.

[00:11:34] Chris Duffy:
On your podcast, Finding Our Way, you talked about how you work with commitments, like a, a statement that you're working towards or that you're centering around for a year or two. And in an episode that I thought was an incredible, beautiful episode, The Body was Sonya Renee Taylor.

You said that the commitment that you had been working on for a few years was to give and receive love.

[00:11:56] Prentis Hemphill:
Yeah. That was my big commitment, you know, working with a somatics practitioner in the very beginning years. You know, they said, “What is it that you're committed to?” And the commitment really serves in, in our work around somatics and embodiment.

It's sort of like the lighthouse. It's the thing that you long for, but maybe afraid to say. The thing we always say, it kind of gives you a, a quiver. You know, it makes your stomach kind of lurch to say it out loud. That's often the thing that we long for. But you know, it's a thing that will rearrange us if we actually move towards it.

It's different than like, “Oh, I wanna do this thing.” But it actually doesn't cause our body to do anything differently. You know, that's, that's something that may be more possible, less charged, but deep transformation is gonna start from that place that gives you a little bit of a queasy feeling 'cause that's the indicator that it's gonna require, uh, new practices, new actions, or rewiring, uh, uh, change in your identity.

So we look for that, that quiver. And, you know, when I was doing my commitment, I was like, “Okay, I. I should be committed to being better at my job.” I should be committed to, you know, all the things I should be committed to. But the thing that actually made my stomach lurch was giving and receiving love. And when I said it out loud, you know, I said it and my face kind of screwed up because that's the thing I really longed for and had no idea how to live, how to have that.

And so what you do with any commitment that you articulate in somatics is that you go about practicing. I had to practice Giving and receiving love and that meant a lot of things. It meant some physical practice, some body specific kind of body work 'cause my chest had gotten so tight. I, I physically was kind of bracing against receptivity and letting out my own cares.

There was a, a physical element of it and how I was holding myself. And so I worked with a practitioner sort of softening the tissues in my face and in my chest. I started singing love songs to myself and particularly Whitney Houston love songs to myself 'cause it's really hard to find love songs that could be applied to the self.

I since have created a playlist with a lot of our listeners on, on Defining Our Way podcast that are love songs that we sing to ourselves. But I wanted a love song that could just say, “Oh, I give myself unconditional love.” Because often it was like, “It doesn't matter if you mess up. I love you.”

[00:14:23] Chris Duffy:
Mm-hmm.

[00:14:24] Prentis Hemphill:
You know, it doesn't matter what comes between us. I'll love you the other. But there was nothing that was like, if I show up badly. If I make a mistake, if I do something stupid, I'm still lovable. And so Whitney Houston has the best love songs, I think, for this purpose. And I started singing them out loud to myself. I felt completely silly and awkward in the beginning, but as I did the practice more and more.

It started to really work on me. I could feel it, and I started to develop a different kind of relationship with myself. So it's a practice that I, I still highly recommend. It was very effective.

[00:15:01] Chris Duffy:
What's the most effective song for you personally?

[00:15:03] Prentis Hemphill:
Oh gosh. Okay. It, it, it's sort of contextual, but I would say I wanna run to you from a lot of the bodyguard songs really, really work.

That whole soundtrack really works for pouring back into yourself. Um, You Are All the Man That I Need was another one. Um, saving all my love for you. Yeah. There's some really great Whitney Houston songs that are just like, you're it. You're wonderful and I love you.

[00:15:32] Chris Duffy:
And, and what a perfect, incredibly appropriate title that your, uh, somatic work was from the soundtrack of the Bodyguard.

[00:15:38] Prentis Hemphill:
Yeah, it's so true.

[00:15:43] Chris Duffy:
We'll be right back with more Prentis in just a moment.

And we are back. I'm a person who is, I think I really have a tendency to live in my head, right? Like I'm a, I'm a thinker, I'm a writer. I like to read, I like to have conversations. And I've never been like all that talented or gifted at sports. There's real pluses to spending a lot of time in my head, like imagining things and coming up with ideas and creativity, and a lot of my work requires that.

But the flip side is I definitely also have the ability to, you know, lose contact with my body to realize that I'm all like intense all day, or to kind of overthink things and start spiraling into, you know, catastrophic thinking or reading into a situation.

[00:16:32] Prentis Hemphill:
Yeah.

[00:15:32] Chris Duffy:
That doesn't, that is actually tiny and making it huge. So, for people who are listening and they are thinking like, okay, I, I buy Prentis’ thing. I I get it. It's so powerful, but my body is, it's not easy for me to access. How, how would you recommend that they start Sure. Getting into this type of, of work and healing?

[00:16:52] Prentis Hemphill:
Yeah. I mean, you know, it's funny because I think if you asked any of my friends from 15 years ago, they think it's completely bizarre that I am doing this right now because I share a lot of the same characteristics that you just described, um, have described me over time. And what I've learned is that it's not actually about abandoning our mind.

I mean, it's more about the integration of the mind with the other feeling centers of our bodies. I mean, there's so many neurons and neural pathways in our hearts and our guts. And I actually think em embodiment in large part is about allowing the natural relationship. Uh, so if you're reading something, you know, reading from an embodied place, taking it in, really allowing it to move through your body breath is, you know, it, it's one of those things that, you know, we're constantly doing and people talk about breath practice all the time.

But it is, breath is actually how so much moves in our body through breath. Um, it supports our organs in, in doing their functions. Our lymphatic system is supported through movement and through breath. So as we read, being close to our breath actually allows the feeling of whatever it is we're reading to move through us.

And when I do that, I feel like my brain gets to coordinate more with my heart, gets to coordinate more with my guts. So I'm not leaving my center, my belly. I'm not leaving my brain behind, but I'm saying, “Hey brain, you're in a body and this is content that is impacting you.” A lot of the tension that we have at the end of the day is because a lot of things have impacted us, but we, we've tried to prevent them from impacting us.

We've actually had the feeling, but we stopped our breath so that it didn't actually permeate through. So I, I think it's very simple, just allowing the feeling to move through our whole being is really as simple as that.

[00:18:57] Chris Duffy:
One of the things that is a scientific study or theory that I've thought about probably the most is I once had the opportunity to interview a neuroscientist, Joseph LeDoux, who is, you know, very, very much like in the establishment, very well respected, lots of peer reviewed papers, and one of the things that he said is that.

You know, for years we used to think that you have an emotion and then your body produces the feeling. So I'm scared my heart starts beating quickly.

[00:19:27] Prentis Hemphill:
Mm-hmm.

[00:19:28] Chris Duffy:
And there's an emerging view in neuroscience that that's not the full story. That part of it is actually your heart starts beating quickly and then your brain tries to understand.

[00:19:39] Prentis Hemphill:
Exactly.

[00:19:39] Chris Duffy:
Are you scared or are you excited? Are you aroused or are you terrified? And it's not necessarily just coming from the brain, it's, it's the brain taking the cues and then interpreting, which I feel like so much of the somatic world that I think sometimes people maybe would be a little skeptical of right?

Like, I don't know about that. Is kind of just saying the same thing that like if you make yourself.

[00:20:01] Prentis Hemphill:
Yeah.

[00:20:01] Chris Duffy:
Slow down your breathing, your body will understand that you're safe because it won't have to interpret.

[00:20:06] Prentis Hemphill:
Exactly.

[00:20:07] Chris Duffy:
Is this exciting or terrifying?

[00:20:08] Prentis Hemphill:
I mean, there's such a deep relationship between I think a lot of the emerging neuroscience and a lot of the somatics work, not, not all, but there is a relationship and I think what somatics does is try to give people practices and tools to do the things we're now understanding are really necessary.

But I, I think the flip side of that is understanding how much we all have stopped or interrupted, what are pretty natural processes in our bodies.

Breath, for example, being one. The way we, the way that we all shape our breath has a lot to do with our environment, our training, our society pressures, et cetera. We end up accumulating all of this stuff that we haven't actually allowed to move through us because we're afraid or we don't have time, or whatever the narrative might be for you.

But I think it's actually quite simple to really be seated in our bodies as opposed to just kind of concentrating our life energy just in our brain. So breath is really the first somatic practice. A lot of other somatic practices, but I would say breath is the primary one.

[00:21:18] Chris Duffy:
I know that you've spoken a lot about this and, and thought about how, you know, the, sometimes even I framed it this way, I was like, it's the brain versus the body when in fact the brain and the body are part of one continuous organisms.

[00:21:29] Prentis Hemphill:
Yeah.

[00:21:30] Chris Duffy:
Yeah. I mean that, the other thing that I think if, if you're someone who's listening and, and maybe having some of that like instinctive pushback or like skepticism against being in this. The other thing that I think really opened me up to it when I first started learning about it is the idea of placebos, right? There's like decades.

[00:21:46] Prentis Hemphill:
Mm-hmm.

[00:21:46] Chris Duffy:
And decades and decades of research showing that you can give someone a sugar pill and have a demonstrable effect, and I think that's often framed as like, well, that means that this drug didn't do anything. But in fact it's also really clear proof that there is like a very clear, measurable effect that our brain alone has on all sorts of conditions.

I understand that this is a slippery slope towards like you can just think your way to curing cancer, which I is not what I'm saying.

[00:22:14] Prentis Hemphill:
Sure, sure. Sure.

[00:22:14] Chris Duffy:
But the idea that your brain has a, a very clear effect that science has known about for decades on your body is also just, that's just true. That's there.

[00:22:24] Prentis Hemphill:
And that the body has an effect on the brain. And even neuroscientists saying the mind is actually a creation of many processes in the body, which the brain plays a significant part, but it is not, the mind itself is not solely a creation of the brain because the gut. I mean, we talk about the gut brain access.

There is constant communication between those and they create by what they're taking in and responding to what we call the mind. I often say that, you know, we talk about the mind body split. I actually think the mind body split is not, uh, a thing. It's just the way that we've decided to be in our bodies.

In this moment in time in this society, but there's not actually a split. It's really about our society and our culture saying, “What's most important is your thinking. What's much less important are your emotions and your feeling, and do everything that you can to suppress those.”

[00:23:19] Chris Duffy:
One thing that I really value about the work that you do in your book and in your podcast is trying to figure out really practical ways that anyone can put this into place on the ground as well.

One of the episodes of your podcast, you talk about how to embody interdependence, which is interesting to me because that's, interdependence is something that I would've not thought was possible to embody because it is with other people.

It's not just an internal you thing. You talked about a bunch of different ways that practices that when you start doing them they help you embody interdependence and accountability. So, some examples were like trying to start giving gifts to friends, sharing eggs from chickens with neighbors. Yeah. I'd just love to have you talk about what it means to embody something like interdependence or accountability.

[00:24:02] Prentis Hemphill:
Interdependence already exists. We are already interdependent.

[00:24:06] Chris Duffy:
Mm-hmm.

[00:24:06] Prentis Hemphill:
It is already a reality, but most of us are, are postured in a way that we ignore that or don't nurture those channels of interdependence. The food that you ate today, everything that you're that surrounds you as created by other human beings in the environment, et cetera, et cetera.

But most of the time we just ignore that because it's not important in our society, though. I think it is deeply important. So a lot of what I talk about when I'm saying embodying it is really about the recognition of and being present to those connections and whatever brings. More presence to that I, I think that being aware of and engaging in that reciprocity is one way to actually feel what interdependence is about.

So, I think during that time it was locked down and I was sharing things with my neighbor. I had a chicken who was producing eggs. I can't eat all those eggs, give them to my neighbor. They had things that I needed. They had a tiller for the garden. They came over and brought the tiller and there was this exchange that required certain things of us.

I had to realize that I had a need that I couldn't fulfill. I had to make a request, which felt really awkward and funny, and do it anyway and live with that awkwardness. I had to wait for their answer and then they come over and share with me and we sit around and we use it. And there's all of these moves that we make that are often outside of the moves that we make on the daily, but change us, you know, when we actually make them.

But also physical practices. When I work with couples or work with folks that have had conflict, there are, especially if they've been in relationship with each other, I have them put their hand, one person put their hand on someone's arm and make a request or say a hard thing or put their hand on the other person's chest and say something that they've been afraid to say or hear something that they've been afraid to hear.

And it really changes the quality, both of how people say it and how deeply it can be received to bring in the physicality of it. But I, I remember a couple I was working with, I prescribed, um, the wife and that couple to hold her hand to her husband's chest for I think, like 10 minutes every night without words.

And what the depth of their ability to feel one another to have more nuanced and deep conversations started to shift when they had this practice of intentional connection with each other. That's, that's embodiment.

[00:26:33] Chris Duffy:
This is the thing in relationship, which is like, “I think that you are being mean to me. Oh, I just needed a hug. I needed a, a long hug, or I need to like hold your hand.”

And then all of a sudden, “Hmm. Turns out that maybe I don't feel as disconnected as I did before.”

[00:26:46] Prentis Hemphill:
Being held by someone gives the body a kind of sense of surrender. We can escape potentially from the moment that kind of fight, flight, et cetera.

If there's a kind of larger, or not necessarily physically larger, but we have that our, our body feels, “Oh, I can be held. Oh, I can let go of something.” So we need those practices. We need to be held. We need to rock. We need to dance. We are living alive beings and there's a lot of movement that we don't do that would actually serve us in, in re-grounding and becoming more present.

[00:27:22] Chris Duffy:
What should people be doing to start putting these ideas into their lives and to start seeing some of the effects or even to just start building the habit or the routine of this stuff?

[00:27:32] Prentis Hemphill:
So every day I do a centering practice, probably five times or more a day where I just it's not about getting calm or becoming a, you know, yeah, a more, a calmer, stable person.

But it's about saying, “What am I right now? What do I actually feel? What is the quality of my breath? What's my mood? What are the sensations going off in my body?”Are there places that are tight or bracing and getting clear?” So I do that five times a day. Our sort of centering practice that helps us fill out and become aware.

I would start there a simple sort of centering practice. Become aware, and if there's any, uh, emotional attachment or any story, become aware of that and then decide what it is that you're trying to do, what you wanna be, what you wanna be doing. If there's places where you're like, you know, “Actually I want more intimacy, or actually I wanna feel like a more competent leader, actually I wanna lead in, in this particular way with more vulnerability.”

Get clear on that, and then practice, and don't try to do everything at once.

[00:28:39] Chris Duffy:
Mm-hmm.

[00:28:41] Prentis Hemphill:
Start to rebuild trust with yourself by getting a practice under your belt that you're doing well for a while, for a week or a month before you start adding more practices 'cause it's about, yeah, rebuilding because trust that you'll listen to your body, you'll respect your limits and your pace, and not just continue to override your own body and your system. So, I'm moving in that way.

[00:29:04] Chris Duffy:
You know, we often hold stories about ourselves through experiences or generational trauma, but what can we do with all of that? Like, how do you start to unpack a narrative and heal from a story that's not just about you, but about generations or maybe about, you know, a collective experience?

[00:29:22] Prentis Hemphill:
Chris, what a, what a big question, but I, there's two points. I often say that some things have to be healed. You know, I'm a black person living in the United States, I can't actually heal the legacy of enslavement and exploitation in my one body. I actually need spaces where I can be with people that potentially share those experiences and feel those together.

I actually think it moves something in the collective. Collective trauma is a thing and collective trauma requires collective healing, not individual healing. Um, so there are spaces that need to be more spaces where people can feel things together. I think that's one aspect of it. What we can do individually is feel that we are generational.

I, I have inherited generational trauma, but I'm also a part of, I, I'm not the end of, it's not necessarily a biological line. It's sort of the collective line that there's something I can do in this lifetime and then the, then the next generation will take up some aspect for it themselves. I think a lot of times we think so individualistically in this culture that we try to solve everything in our lifetime.

There's something you will pass on something and something has been passed on to you, so you do your part in this lifetime, and then someone else will take up the mantle. So just to take a little, a little of the pressure off.

[00:30:44] Chris Duffy:
In your book, what it takes to heal, you're writing about how we don't have to take on these emotional burdens alone and how healing can be done in community.

Can you, uh, tell us about, uh, a time or a powerful moment when you personally healed or, or witnessed healing in a community that inspired a moment in the book?

[00:31:00] Prentis Hemphill:
I've been doing somatic work in social movement spaces for a long time. That's primarily been the place where I've worked with leaders there and, and organizations.

And a lot of what we responded to, especially, you know, 2014 and on, were instances of police violence. And so I have been present to a a lot of moments of collective pain, community pain, community grief. And I've seen, yeah, tremendous amounts of pain and tremendous amounts of beauty and care and love and ritual.

So yeah, I can think of the passing of a particular young person and the way their community came together with grief circles with, remember there were like tents where all different kinds of massage practitioners or counselors or acupuncturists that people could receive a lot of services. So, to me that is the way that a community is responsive to the pain that a community is feeling and creating what they need.

Now, it would be incredible if people had the resources to provide those kind of services ongoingly 'cause I think that's actually what a lot of people need. A lot of people are carrying around generational trauma, carrying around trauma from their own lives, but don't feel like they have the resources or support.

It's not easy for them to kind of just walk into a clinic and have a, a menu of options. So I, I have seen those sort of pop-ups spring up and they've been incredibly and deeply moving to me to witness and be a part of.

[00:32:42] Chris Duffy:
We touched on this before, but I think that, uh, one thing that's interesting in wellness or um, healing work is that it can sometimes get co-opted into either this kind of fringe overpromising, anti-scientific belief, right?

Like we can sure meditate your way to healing from a a tumor instead, you don't need surgery. That that can be one.

[00:33:08] Prentis Hemphill:
Yeah.

[00:33:08] Chris Duffy:
And then the other one is sometimes these really important practices with long histories. From queer people or people of color or indigenous communities, they can then get co-opted into becoming like a, a rich white woman thing where it's like you can buy your.

[00:33:25] Prentis Hemphill:
Yeah.

[00:33:25] Chris Duffy:
$1,000 meditation gong and like that's what meditation is.

[00:33:29] Prentis Hemphill:
Yeah.

[00:33:29] Chris Duffy:
As a person who thinks a lot about this and is an activist and cares about communities, how do you think about keeping these practices, even as you see something like embodiment starting to become maybe a buzzword and starting to get co-opted, how do you protect the part that is really valuable and important, and how do you push back against that, that force, that society sometimes brings to these types of, of things?

[00:33:51] Prentis Hemphill:
Woo. What a question. Um, with embodiment or somatics, I see it being used a lot as a kind of hack, which has a utility, like how can I quickly calm down, but I, for me, embodiment is sort of a way that I engage with my life and my being is through embodiment. It's not just about how do I quickly become more productive?

How do I quickly produce more? I'm having an emotion. How do I get rid of it? For me, it's an orientation to my life. It's something that I teach my child. It's a way of showing what it is that I value in my own life and experience and feeling my life. Because there's a, a, a limit to these lives that we have.

There's something finite to them, and I wanna be present and I wanna be feeling, and I wanna be myself, um, through the duration of this thing as much as I can. A lot of what I do is spend my time studying and attending to the quality of the offering that we make.

[00:34:46] Chris Duffy:
Mm-Hmm.

[00:34:47] Prentis Hemphill:
I'm not a magician at all. I'm a person who's trying to figure it out.

And all the people that come. Uh, work with us or practice with us are people that are trying to figure it out, and we come from that stance. We're not over promising, but we're saying there's something really powerful. I've seen people be able to make powerful shifts in their lives and in their relationships through practice, but it's not something that you can just buy.

It's not something that someone can hand to you. It requires commitment, work, and deep transformation. It requires community and authenticity and honesty. And with that kind of work you'll see changes. But that kind of work, the way you live your life will be different. And like you said, we come from all of our cultures.

Everybody's culture on earth really, culture is embodiment practices. That's the, that's the secret is that we've all come from societies that dance together, that sing together, that eat together, and we've gotten so kind of mesmerized by our individualism by becoming as optimized and machine-like as we can that we've forgotten that there is something useful.

There's something even scientific about dancing with your community about singing with your community, about hugging people when they need it, about holding someone when they cry, that there's something yes scientific about that. There's something deeply, deeply, deeply, deeply human that I think we have to recover before it's gone.

[00:36:14] Chris Duffy:
I. Well, Prentis. Hemphill, it has been such a pleasure talking to you. I cannot thank you enough for making the time. Thank you so much.

[00:36:20] Prentis Hemphill:
Thanks so much, Chris. It was great to talk to you.

[00:36:26] Chris Duffy:
That is it for today's episode of How to Be a Better Human. Thank you so much to today's guest, Prentis Hemphill. Prentis’ book is called What It Takes to Heal. I am your host, Chris Duffy, and you can find more from me, including my weekly newsletter and other projects at chrisduffycomedy.com. How to Be a Better Human is brought to you on the TED side by the community of Daniella Balarezo, Banban Cheng, Cloe Shasha Brooks and Joseph DeBrine.

This episode was fact checked by Julia Dickerson and Matheus Salles, who both feel a visceral reaction in their very bones when they hear a statistic stated inaccurately.

On the PRX side, our show is put together by a team who I largely interact with over the internet, but I trust our fully embodied corporeal forms, nonetheless, Morgan Flannery, Noor Gill, Patrick Grant, and Jocelyn Gonzales. And of course, thanks to you for listening to our show and making this all possible. If you are listening on Apple, please leave us a five star rating and review, and if you're listening on the Spotify app, answer the discussion question that we've put up there on mobile.

We'd love to hear your thoughts. It's so interesting every week reading your answers. We will be back next week with more How to Be a Better Human. Thanks again for listening and take care.