New Collaboration: Somatic Scribing coming in August

Foundations in Cultural Somatics: applying the form and function of living systems to amplify cultural power with Cielo Morales and Larissa Kaul

Weekly August 19th-Nov 4th, Wednesdays 9amPT/12pmET-11amPT/2pmET

Deadline to apply is August 9th

Apply here

Most of this text is written by my collaborator Cielo, informed by their body of work in Somatic Scribing ❤️ Excited for our streams of practice to intermingle!

This course is for artists, facilitators, comms leaders, cultural strategists, and movement organizers who want to develop skills in cultural strategy, embodiment practices, and visual literacy who are asking:

- How can we design a campaign that shows, not just tells the future we envision? 

- How can my art contribute to the causes I care about? 

- How can I enliven and decolonize my/my team’s ways of making meaning and perceiving?

- What are signs of cultural inflammation and what can I do when I feel it in the room? 

- How do I help my team actually be about what we say we’re about? 

In this 12 week course, an intimate cohort will study the body and living systems together, practicing how to accurately depict the health of a social network in our art, narratives, and organizational design. 

Participants can expect to leave the course with:

- Insights into how to scale somatic practices to cultural interventions

- New somatic embodiment and creative practices that are resourcing and fun

- The ability to better “read the room” and know how to shift group dynamics with art or facilitation

- Confidence in applying cultural somatic skills to your work

For full details go to the webpage

Somatic Scribing is a contemporary social art with traditional roots that counters the monoculture of written English and its colonial stories of separation.  When we visualize information about a living system (like a team, group, project or organization), we tell our story in a way that is spatial and relational.  Laying out what we sense on paper helps us see patterns, habits, and cultural norms, how they shape us, and what we can do about it. 

What does writing and the body have to do with social change?

All political, economic and cultural institutions use the body metaphor as a blueprint for organizational design - we have heads of state, arms of the military, birth of the nation. Visual storytellers who understand how our bodies function and how power plays out in our own bodies know how to visualize power in the collective body, and show people what can be done to shift oppression, leverage power, and transform culture.  

In this Lab, we warmly welcome cultural practitioners in reclaiming the writing systems that documented our ancestors’ ways of knowing (epistemologies) through pictures, symbols, metaphors and myths that have been violently and systemically erased.  We use embodied practices to move us beyond the colonial imaginary and the (white supremacist) worship of the written word, enlivening our learning and nourishing our systems as we align ourselves with the tools that will draw up new worlds within the old. This course illuminates how a framework of language justice can incorporate Somatic Scribing into your praxis. 

Amidst global calls for artists to meet this moment with radical imagination, Somatic Scribing invites visual storytellers to ditch the master’s tools and instead craft visions of our culture with integrity to the balanced living systems we come from - systems that will guide what we imagine today for our shared future. 

Apply here

Resource Flow

The course fees are based on calculations of the team’s cost of labor for the organizing and coordinating of the course, valued at meeting our basic needs.  We are also in the practice of redistributing a portion of our income as reparations, mutual aid, and other acts within the solidarity economy.  (Please note that we will be discussing more transparently the topic of money as a case study in the flow of resources in our collective soma.)

Contributing $600 for participation would cover our costs at a living wage. We offer the following sliding scale for you to sit with and assess where you, your ancestors, and your current financial situation land: 

$0 / Non-Monetary Exchange for Black, Indigenous and People of Color who consider this work to be reclaiming ancestral lifeways stolen by colonization, enslavement & genocide.  This is not a scholarship.  We believe descendants of these atrocities should never have to pay to access what is rightfully theirs. You are invited to exchange medicine of any kind for the labor of organizing this course.  

$300 - $600 for folks from the global South, people from historically disenfranchised communities, low income/working class folks, people with less access to wealth (savings, investments, inheritance).  

$600 - $1000  for folks from the global North, folks who identify as middle or upper class, people who have access to savings, investments, or inheritance.  For people who have benefitted from wealth extraction, you might consider contributing generously at this level to support us in hosting cohort members reclaiming ancestral lifeways.  

We are always willing to discuss with accepted participants how to make resource exchange accessible, including payment plans. 

A note from Larissa

This collaboration is filling me with a lot of anticipatory gratitude. Now that we’ve done a few preliminaries (divining about the project, setting the dates amidst various hardships, and getting some of the ritual scaffolding together) it feels like I am easing my way into a dreamy bath. So there is water, nourishment, and reflection present. But I also have the sensation of Sky: wide open space and weightlessness. Sky bath anyone? For me this portends a somatic scribing space where we get to open to new and more liberated ways of understanding our collective situation while being held and sustained in the needs and intelligence of Presence (aka, embodiment).

Cielo and I have been in each other’s orbits for a number of years. They were one of the first people to join The Bleeding Circle, and I had the pleasure of helping them with the play they wrote about in that container at Atlanta Fringe Festival in 2024. They are a brilliant somatic scribe and I am stoked to get to I love getting to work with them because their way of embodying relationality is so adaptable, sparkly (celebratory!), and generous. I love the way they love.

As they relayed to me recently, they are able to flux and context switch endlessly, weaving metaphor and story to reach people in any given moment. And then there’s me, always steeping in essence, finding the primordial pulse at the center again and again. We are imagining our collaboration in cultural somatics and scribing to follow similar patterns. What might happen when we keep our finger on the pulse of Wisdom, or what is most beneficial, most loving, while opening the door to the infinite ways we can find our way through meaning making?

If you want to find out, join us in August. Deadline to apply is August 9th!

See you there,
L

Can’t make it to the course, but want to support the work? Want more folks from your community to develop these skills? We welcome sharing this info with those in your network who you feel would be a good fit. This cohort will by and large come together through the magic of word-of-mouth. Appreciate you!