The Soul Nerve: Healing White Supremacy in Your Body

Resmaa Menakem, author of My Grandmother’s Hands: Racialized Trauma and the Pathway to Mending Our Hearts and Bodies, writes, “White-body supremacy doesn’t just live in our thinking brains. It lives and breathes in our bodies. As a result, we will never outgrow white-body supremacy just through discussion, training, or anything else that’s mostly cognitive. Instead we need to look at the body—and to the embodied experience of trauma.”

Our bodies are wired for survival, and respond in specific ways to perceived threats. We can learn to recognize these patterns, whether momentary or deeply rooted in intergenerational trauma, and work with them to help heal ourselves and others.

Longtime Groundwork Somerville board member Nancy Bernhard is an RYT-500 yoga teacher with training in yoga for trauma. This will not be a movement practice, but will involve breath work and an option to work lying down.  After an introduction to the vagus nerve, this workshop will teach many skills for self-regulation, with attention to the rhythm, location, and musculature of breath, and the broader biomechanics of fear and safety.