This post is written by teacher and co-director Emma Dines
Last year I read “What It Takes to Heal” by Prentiss Hemphill (they/them), and I found myself underlining entire passages, dog-earing page after page, and re-listening to passages in the audio book over and over. In it’s pages I found reflections and invitations to remake the world; to weave embodiment and personal healing into the yearning for justice and social change. I am still processing what I read, but one passage came back to me as I considered our upcoming Continuing Ed Module on Decolonizing Our Bodies:
We are sold an approach to healing that prioritizes reprieve and disengagement, retreat and solitude, peace and calm. Of course unplugging gives us the space we sometimes desperately need to reassess and listen, to hear ourselves, our own heartbeats in the silence. But if we believe our wholeness requires long-term disconnection from the world, we run the risk of mistaking what is comfortable for what is healing. A sense of control with safety, and reinforcing separation and isolation.
And later in the book:
We cannot change the world if we do not heal what has become embodied in us, and we cannot truly heal if the conditions that break and isolate us do not change too.
This passage goes to the core of what our Decolonizing Our Bodies module is about. It is about “healing what has become embodied within us” and working to understand and interrupt “the conditions that break and isolate us”.
Our yoga and embodiment practices could be a retreat from the world, but this module is an opportunity to re-engage with the world through the lens of our bodies. Three exceptional educators (Leslie, Carla and Nicole) will present frameworks and a range of practices to consider how systemic injustice, trauma and embodiment intersect. This module is appropriate for yoga teachers wanting to bring more trauma awareness on a range of levels into their teaching, and is also vital learning for anyone wanting to understand and learn more about embodiment and healing justice.
This module begins in January, with opportunities to attend some sessions in-person at The Branches. You can read more about it here.
And if you want to read that Prentiss Hemphill book, the Kitchener Public Library (Main Branch) has a copy. 😉
With care,
Emma
The Branches 