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Transcript of Edited Interview with Rae Johnson

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Christine:

Could you give me a brief sense of your identity as an educator, a therapist, and an artist? How would you describe what you do?

Rae:

I mostly describe myself as a scholar/activist. I also identify as a therapist and as an artist but my therapy work is mostly behind me. I still do some supervision, and I still do some coaching. My artist identity is becoming more active, so there might be a point at which I will describe myself as an artist/activist.

 

Christine:

Could you briefly describe embodied activism and how it might assist people in moving consciously?

Rae:

Embodied activism is a form of social action that changes the world by shifting the power dynamics inherent in our everyday experience and by recognizing the role of the body in those change efforts. It often takes the form of micro-activism, which looks at the ways in which we use power as embedded in our everyday small interactions with other people. At heart, embodied activism is about interrogating, with curiosity, how we experience power in and through our bodies, and by extension, how we can learn to use power differently, more ethically, more responsibly, more consciously to change the world.

 

Christine:

In these micro-activisms, could you say that you're waking up to more of the details of an interaction and working to navigate them more consciously?

Rae:

Embodied activism is about becoming more conscious about our interactions, but I wouldn't want to suggest that it's just about how we interact with other people. It's also how we relate to ourselves – how we relate to our own body image, how we think we look, the efforts that we make to look a certain way, how we read other people's bodies in terms of how they look, the judgments and assumptions that we make about them. Embodied activism encourages us to interrogate how being socialized into oppressive social structures shapes our bodies. These social systems and inherited patterns of behavior get inside us - colonize our bodies - so that we begin to relate to our bodies as if they were ornaments, as if they were texts, or objects to display social status or identity, rather than thinking of and experiencing our bodies as our selves.

But to come closer to the topic of your book, there's a whole set of ways in which our socialization shapes how we move. Some of those movements are environmentally directed and relationally directed. But it also shapes our movement, including our micro-movements, when we're not intentionally interacting with anyone or anything. We're just sitting in a chair or making dinner, or just minding our own business. So there's this relational, dynamic, interactional dimension of embodied activism. But I think the work of transforming social systems by transforming our bodies actually starts with how I am with my embodied self.

 

Christine:

Do you feel like you have specific practices that strengthen that ability to either work very consciously with your own inner experience or that work very consciously with interactions with others?

 

Rae:

Absolutely. I'll describe this in sort of a sequence that is not prescriptive, but is one that I've found a lot of people intuitively follow. We start with getting curious about and actually paying attention to our own embodied histories, our own body stories. Where are we coming from? We tend to be able to describe the narrative of our lives in terms of where we grew up and who we were raised by, and where we went to school. But we don't have a similar narrative thread about the experiences our bodies have gone through unless there was a bodily experience that was so dramatic that it changed the trajectory of our lives. I'd like to make an argument for the importance of cultivating the narrative of our own bodies, because stories help us make sense of ourselves and sense of what's happened to us. I think there's a way in which a body narrative helps us feel more connected to who we are on a body level, helps to make more sense of those various identities that we carry with us and what's shaped and formed those identities. Crafting our own body story also becomes diagnostic – a way to identify where in our lives our bodies have profoundly shaped us. It's as if we're mapping a territory, so that when you've got a relationship with your own body story, it’s living inside you and you realize your body's been talking to you all these years, and it's had experiences that you have not necessarily been paying attention to. 

Knowing our body story makes it possible to go, ‘Oh, I'm not in touch with my digestive system at all, because I have a long history of gastrointestinal complaints that I haven't been paying attention to’. Or ‘I kept getting injured because my tendons and ligaments tended to not be very flexible. And so there was this history of injuries and feeling tight. Once we've got that story underneath us, then I think it becomes possible to do the next step more strategically. And the next step for me is cultivating our sensuality. Just return to our senses, get back to our interoceptive, proprioceptive, exteroceptive capacities, whatever they are. And I don't mean to suggest this as a project of self-improvement.

 

Christine:

Yes. I think that's an important point.

Rae:

I don't want to suggest that there's an end goal. One might infer that there's an ideal – more interceptive awareness, for instance. I think it's important to not get ableist about cultivating our sensuality: it’s about reconnecting, appreciating, and mobilizing our senses, not about improving them.

 

Christine:

This feels important in terms of not colonizing or ‘sedimenting’ the body, as Behnke would say.

 

Rae:

Yes. We’re not only talking about what we find when we turn toward our own embodied histories and our own body narratives, but also what do we do with that information. Really common in a lot of health and wellness circles is the idea that you want to use body awareness to improve your health in a particular way, or to get fit, or to eat better. I'm not suggesting there's anything inherently wrong with that, except that this modernist idea that we are somehow in charge of and responsible for our bodies, and we are charged with improving them, keeping them clean, healthy, and in line is really destructive. I mean, it's just a really toxic attitude to have towards ourselves. There is a master/slave dynamic that can happen when we think of our bodies as this ornery, difficult animal that we're in charge of taming. I mean, you can see the oppressive dynamics in that last statement. The mind/body dynamic can have that colonizing attitude baked into it – that implicit notion that somehow our bodies are this slightly less civilized part of self that needs governing.

 

Christine:

So it feels like we're back again to our relationship to power. There's this body that needs governing. And so I have this power to control or alter or shape my body so that it is behaving itself.

 

Rae:

So it's as much as possible conforming to social norms and ideals. Even though in Western culture, writ large, there is a tendency to blatantly ignore the body; don't think about it till it breaks. And if it ain't broke, don't fix it. Just use the body as a vehicle for toting our brains around. But in some subcultures, particularly the subcultures that often will describe themselves as valuing embodiment or might describe themselves as somatic, there's a way in which I suspect that a lot of these efforts to become more embodied are actually driven in some significant degree by a desire to conform to the norms of this subculture that says one must eat whole foods and align your chakras, etc. And it can be a toxic dynamic. Clearly, none of these health practices are bad. But I would encourage us to be suspicious of our motives just because that consumerist, capitalist, Western notion of the body is so baked in that it’s hard to get away from.

 

Christine:

So when you were talking before about this practice of changing how you inquire into your physical state, it feels like you might also be saying that there's an inquiry out into social systems as well, a kind of critical inquiry about what is going on in terms of consumer culture or social oppression.

 

Rae:

I would call it an introject – an unconscious belief that ‘I should be doing this. It would be good if I did that’. I think it behooves us to ask, ‘where did that come from?’ Introjects always point to the source – a norm or expectation or value. Be curious about them. We can learn how to tell the difference, viscerally, between something feeling great and something that just feels virtuous. Both are experiences of pleasure, but they're very different in terms of where they're coming from. And I think cultivating sensuality really has to recognize the wildness underneath the layers of civilization that our bodies contain. How do I negotiate between wild impulses toward pleasure my body might lead me into, and what's socially acceptable, or safe, or fair. I can't just do whatever I want. I can't indulge every impulse.

 

Christine:

That's an abuse of power, whether it's abusing power towards someone else or abusing power toward my own inner experience.

 

Rae:

Addiction is a case in point. I might be craving something that's really bad for me, and how do I acknowledge and not shut down or manage that sensation, that craving, while holding in mind the consequences of acting on that impulse.

 

Christine:

So we come back to conscious being or conscious moving. You had talked before about cultivating sensuality. Is there anything beyond that in terms of practices? 

 

Rae:

The next practice is about liberating movement. And after that is interrogating our non-verbal communication. After that is reclaiming body image. And the thing after that is something that I call cultivating an intercorporeal ethos. So that's the sequence of embodied activism as I talk about it.

 

Christine:

Let’s keep weaving those ideas into the conversation. This might also lead us to the notion of ongoing identity. Do you think that moving consciously relates to our ongoing sense of identity and how we can support our multiple and fluid identities by moving consciously?

 

Rae:

That’s the next step of embodied activism, which is liberate your movement. There are two things going on that function to constrain us. First is our own movement patterns or habits. We're all raised in particular ways. We grow into bodies that have unique characteristics and movement patterns that are comfortable for us, anatomically and physiologically. But we're also socialized into particular movement patterns, often quite violently. As children, we’re punished for squirming in our seats at school, or touching things that we're not supposed to touch or grabbing or falling down when we're supposed to be standing. All of these are injunctions about how we're supposed to manage our own movement.

 

Christine:

Including something like gender.

 

Rae:

Absolutely. Don't sit like that, don't walk that way, don't look like that. All these injunctions around how we're supposed to move. We're taught how to move, shown how to move. We role model how to move in ways that are not necessarily comfortable for us in our bodies, not actually expressive of who we are. That don't give us a wide enough range of options to express our identities, to change our identities and get what we want to interact in the world in ways that are satisfying. 

But there's also the trauma response – the ways in which trauma shapes our movement and constricts the range of motion that we have available to us. So there's this socialization process and then the trauma piece gets laid on top of that. And a lot of the socialization processes are, to some extent, traumatic because they're violently enforced; not necessarily physically violent, but relationally violent. So there are these factors that shape what's possible for us in terms of our movement. And I think it's important to peel away some of those layers, some of movement limitations and really look at them and ask, is this serving me? Is there another way of moving that would serve me better or would feel freer or more authentic?

And so by actually paying attention to how am I moving, and asking whether there are other ways of moving, ideally being in a space where you can explore other ways of moving, or noticing someone on the street who moves in a way that you say ‘Wow, that's luscious. I wish I could move that way. What does that feel like’. Trying on other people's movements, trying on other people's bodily expressions. Does that feel comfortable, uncomfortable, exciting, arousing, disgusting? Finding out what kind of movement we might generate and enjoy. 

But you know, you and I are both really taken with the notion that if we listen to our bodies, that there will emerge organically from our bodies a movement impulse that's worth considering, and that we need to be patient, open-minded, and curious enough to allow those organic impulses to emerge without too much interference and without too much judgment or analysis.

 

Christine:

Which speaks to how we pay attention, how we inquire. If we inquire with a kind of finger pointing critical view, still colonized from various cultures, we're not going to get good information out of any kind of inquiry. And so we open it up. Then this inquiry can expand identity.

 

Rae:

When I move in a different way, when I let go of a particular constriction, a particular socially mandated movement constriction, I feel different. And that set of sensations about how I feel differently in my body does a couple of things. One, because interoception and emotion are so closely related (in fact, I'm going to argue that emotions are just a different category of sensations and that interoception is the substrate of our emotional lives) when we feel differently emotionally in particular ways, I would say that's a different sense of self. Just imagine being able to let go of hunched shoulders and take a full deep breath, because I'm allowing my spine to lengthen and my ribcage to expand. I feel like a different person. We even talk about it in terms of identity. I would argue that how we are in our bodies is the foundation of our identity.

 

Christine:

So how do you think bodily actions and activism relate? How do we get from one to the other and back again? 

 

Rae:

When we inhabit ourselves differently, we are showing up in the world in a way that other people respond to. Even the most subtle micro-movements make a difference in how other people take us up. I think those organic shifts rooted in interoceptive awareness liberate our movement and can occur in a very small, subtle micro-movement kind of way. Other people notice. They might not notice it consciously but they respond to it. We're socialized to not notice what's going on the body. But we read one another's bodies all the time. So it's this weird complex paradox about how we read one another's bodies, but at the same time we have no idea that that's what we're doing. But it makes a difference. When I'm in a room with someone, let's imagine we're doing something I hate, like milling around with relative strangers at a reception or some other horrible kind of event. If I'm standing next to someone who's really got their feet on the ground and who's breathing fully and who's in touch with their own guts and spine, whose legs are connected to their feet, connected to their pelvis, connected all the way up, someone who's actually comfortable in their own skin, I respond to that and I respond to that almost as if it were an invitation. I sometimes talk about it as a catalyst, but here's the micro-activism piece - that just showing up in the world, comfortable in my own skin, invites the people that are with me to show up in their own skins, in their own bodies, in a way that's freer, more liberated, more authentic, more empowered; and it's a ripple effect. It changes the nature of the intercorporeal (body-to-body) field.

And there's your embodied activism right there. I would argue activism that happens without that is unsustainable. It’s not just, oh, here's a cute little variation of activism that us introverts can do, because we don't want to get tear-gassed or be in large groups. I think the goal of a just, free, equitable, liberated world is for everyone to be in their bodies, to fully occupy their bodies just the way they are, to feel comfortable in that, and know that everyone around them will support them in it.

Are there legal, structural, institutional changes that would also need to happen in order for that to be possible? Yeah. I'm not saying that large-scale activism isn’t also necessary, but my goal is a somatic one. I'd like us all to be somatic mutants. I think it's where we as a species need to go next, because the failure to feel into the sensitivity and vulnerability and interconnectedness of our own bodies as a species has led us to be both suicidal and homicidal on a grand scale. I actually think it's the source of the mess that we're in.

 

Christine:

When we are carefully attending to our sensations, our inner experiences, and our large and small movements, what do you think might be going on there? How is attention influencing those experiences?

 

Rae:

I guess off the top of my head, the answer to that question is attention supports more choices.

I think that's in some ways, an apt definition of liberation means having choices. If I'm free, I not only have a wide range of choices, but I have as wide a range of choices as the people around me.

 

Christine:

One distinction that could be made is when we are immersed in an experience and when we are thinking about an experience. Could you comment on how your work holds that difference and possibly uses those two states in different ways? 

 

Rae:

I think one of the art forms available to us through somatic work is the capacity to pay attention to what's happening without messing about with it, without sitting on it, or squashing it, or inhibiting it, or otherwise interfering with it. I think typically in that process of learning how to do that, it makes sense to start with the fullness of the experience without necessarily reflecting on it, making meaning of it, thinking about it.

 

Christine:

Philosophy would call it pre-reflective experience.

 

Rae:

Yes. To just have the fullness of the experience without words, without thoughts, just following a sensation, without worrying too much about what's going on. I think there's something that can happen when we are both following the flow of a movement and allowing the movement to emerge, to change, to morph. There's a movement impulse, a whole sequence of movement impulses, and we're just fully immersed in that sequence. There's something that happens when we are fully immersed in that sequence, but also have the bandwidth to notice what's happening. In a way, it's kind of like lucid dreaming. You're having a dream, and then when you have a lucid dream all of a sudden you are a bit awake to it. There's a different quality of attention that's available than when you are in the dream, and you have more choices when you're lucid dreaming. So we might call this lucid movement.

Typically that's not possible. You kind of need to suspend your thinking process to let yourself actually have the lucid movement. Impulses have sensations on their own, without being monitored. But there's something lovely about doing both at once. I would say that's almost necessary at some level in terms of really being responsive on a body level. Let's take the example of a micro-aggression, somebody pats me on the shoulder in a subtly patronizing way, and it's all smiles and friendly, and they haven't hurt me. We're colleagues, so it ought to be fine, but I know it's not. First off, there is a level of attentiveness that is needed in order for me to go, ‘Something's happening right now and it’s not okay; this feels patronizing’. I mean, that already requires a level of attentiveness, as opposed to somebody pats me on the shoulder in a patronizing way and I go away feeling kind of shitty about myself and I'm not quite sure why. But if I can notice my own emotional response and responsive movement impulse in the moment – maybe it's to shrug it off, maybe it's to put a hand on top of that person's hand, maybe it's to frown at them – then I've got a whole range of options available to me.

 

Christine:

Sounds like you are describing choice again.

 

Rae:

At first this is not conscious; it's just listening to my body because my body's actually in some ways faster than my conscious awareness. My body comes up with what feels right, but I also need to think about it and ask, what might happen if I did that? Would that be okay? And this is all happening very fast, but if I can feel the movement impulse, ride it, and pay attention to it, then I can direct it and I can do this without abandoning myself. 

This is not a mechanical action/reaction. This is a really creative, dynamic, spontaneous experience where something happens to me in the environment, and I'm listening with my body. There's a natural movement impulse emerging. I'm paying attention to that. I'm thinking about it enough to be able to go, ‘Nope, that's going to get you fired.’ So that I can have some direction over it, some in increased level of conscious choice about it. But it's not mentally directed. It's bodily directed and mentally attended to.

 

Christine:

So it feels like you've just deliciously described micro activism.

 

Rae:

Exactly. When people are really in their own bodies – really listening, paying attention to what movement and micro-movement impulses are being generated responsive to one another – they are then in possession of a degree of somatic bandwidth, so that they're not pushed into overreacting or constrained to underreacting. And I know that the idea of overreacting and underreacting is subjective, but here's where the intercorporeal ethos comes in. Part of what I'm paying attention to is that movement impulse is emerging in response to someone's actions towards me, something they said or something they did, and as my response is emerging, part of my attentiveness is about asking the question, ‘What will be the impact of this, of me following this impulse and actually enacting this impulse in the relationship? And is that okay with me? And does my response treat them as a human being worthy of respect’? Because I have to say that there can be a way in which activism can fall into a pattern of pushing back and punishing people who have done us wrong. It doesn't actually pay sufficient attention to the relational consequences of those activist actions and doesn't move us forward into a world where every single person is worthy of dignity and respect.

So I think it's important as I learn how to use power in my body in ways that are in line with my values of social justice, I need to be asking myself, ‘How am I using this power’? Because an action is power, it has an impact. Is my response in line with my values? Is there a way that I can respond that prevents harm, or doesn't perpetuate it?

 

Christine:

In your work, what are the essential ingredients of using conscious movement effectively? 

 

Rae:

If I had to distill it down to a sentence, I guess I'd say, pay attention. Just pay attention and remember that the body is not the object of the attention, it's the attender.