Embodied Transformation: Shaping Social Change with Staci Haines

What does it mean to engage in embodied transformation and social change simultaneously? Our hopes and fears, our longings and struggles, are never separate from the social conditions in which we live. Somatics understands that all people need safety, belonging and dignity. We are wired for it. Yet, our social rules of engagement, and the flow of money and decision making, center on power-over and separation. How do we navigate this when we are also built for cooperation, interdependence and love?

In this experiential session we’ll explore why it is vital for embodied transformation to look from the personal to the social and back again. We’ll explore our visions for change, as well as the understandable shaping and survival strategies that can be counter-productive to these visions. We’ll practice holding complexity and contradiction, as a deep resource for our times.

Staci Haines has been experimenting at the intersections of personal and social transformation for the last 30 years through the work of politicized somatics, trauma healing, embodied leadership, and transformative justice. Her work brings transformative capacity building social and climate justice leaders, organizations and alliances. She is currently the co-lead of The Outer Work Project, an initiative partnering with internationally known trauma healing and embodiment leaders, and their communities, to mobilize thousands of new people into progressive social movements.

Staci is the author of The Politics of Trauma: Somatics, Healing and Social Justice (2019) and Healing Sex: A Mind Body Approach to Healing Sexual Trauma. She co-founded generative somatics and founded generationFIVE, committed to ending child sexual abuse within five generations.