Feminist Founders Subscriber-Only Podcast

Welcome to the Feminist Founders audio series event. This is a bonus for paid subscribers of the feminist Founders's newsletter. So if you're here, thank you so much for your support. I am so excited to bring to you in this series, some incredible thought leaders who are going to share insights about doing business differently in a way that honors equity and social justice. I hope that you learned so much from this. Let's dig in.

Becky Mollenkamp: Hey there. Thanks for being here. I'm so thrilled to introduce you today to Kelsey Blackwell of The Drinking Gourd, that is the name of her Substack newsletter, and you can find it in the show notes, could be that you're already a subscriber to her and I'm new to you. If that's the case, hi, and thanks for being here. But if you haven't yet gotten to know about Kelsey, I hope you'll go and take a look at The Drinking Gourd and subscribe, and learn more about what we're gonna talk about today, which is how to decolonize the body. This is something I'm excited to learn more about, the work that I'm actively doing, which is about how to practice liberation to trust it's the wisdom of your body to deepen your connection with the natural world. She talks about ancestral healing as well and and the guidance of spirit and so this is such a beautiful conversations so knowledgeable and gave so freely, and I'm so grateful for time, and for the work that she has expended on this, and I hope that you enjoy it as well and take a listen and subscribe to her newsletter as well.
Becky Mollenkamp: Hi, Kelsey. Thank you for participating in this.
Hi, Kelsey. Thank you for participating in this. I'm really excited for people to learn from you and for me to learn from you. You talk about decolonizing the body, and that is an area where I have my own growth edges for sure. So I'm really excited to learn more from you and have this conversation. I think it's good for us to start by getting to a shared vocabulary. So if you don't mind, start off by just telling us what you mean by decolonization in general and specifically as it relates to the body.
Kelsey Blackwell: Happy to be part of this conversation with you. Decolonization is such a big word, and I think we're seeing that a lot in various areas of study and different focuses. When I'm talking about decolonization, I like to frame it really as a journey of reclamation. So we're reclaiming what has been lost due to the impacts of the colonial project and we're thinking about what are the aspects of our humanity, what it means to be human, what it means to be moving as a collective that get buried, covered over, disenfranchised due to the values of the colonial project, which I'd like to think about not just as the colonial project, but all of these systems of oppression that are inherently folded into colonization. So in my book decolonizing the body, I call this The Program, and it includes the patriarchy, white supremacy, capitalism—those are the big three, but we could go on, I mean, all these systems that we're currently living in. And I like to envision this as this multi-headed hydra, this sort of mythic Greek monster with multiple heads. And you really can't just end one of those systems because they inherently inform and support and prop each other up. So we're looking at all of this, the impacts of colonization, our journey of decolonization is really how do we unhook from systems of supremacy. So what does it mean to decolonize the body? Colonization is inherently an assault on the body. It's a dominating power, asserting dominion over land and bodies, and saying this land is to be wielded to my specific use, and these bodies are to be used in a way that propagates and supports my well-being. In the case of the colonial project, it was around capitalism. So, if your body, if you're a native body, a Black or Brown body that's been colonized, then your value is inherently tied to how you can be of service to the dominating power in order to enrich that power and or to uphold their position. So, when we are impacted by the colonial project, as all of our bodies are, we lose a relationship to what it means to be human bodies that are inherently in relationship with the Earth. There's a way that this program gets into us and we start to internalize the values of the program as our own values. So we can see that so clearly in the United States around hustle culture and the pressures of capitalism how we are so busy and overextended and rushing to check things off our to-do list. How many of us have a relationship to our body that's really about trying to amend or fix it? For many women, it's to be thinner, then there's this real emphasis on discounting the body because it gets in the way of the speed of the mind. So we've been really encouraged to minimize our bodily needs in favor of keeping pace with the pressures of society or keeping pace with our peers, and we learned that so early, you know, in school, I remember just being aghast that we had to sit in these desks under fluorescent lights and raise our hand if we had to go to the bathroom. I was like, what? And then they took away recess and I was like, there was something in my body that was like this is inhumane. So we're all, I mean, I won't say we're all, but many of us in the Western world are conditioned by these systems that we are thrust into and what gets lost is this more organic, more connected way of navigating our lives where our mind and body aren't fighting each other, but really working together to help us attune to our own well-being and what's needed to support our well-being. And also how we can from that internal listening also be attuned to what's happening in our environment and recognize the natural world itself as a source of wisdom and information that we are inherently in relationship with and that we um have a moral responsibility to not take advantage of.
Becky Mollenkamp: Thank you so much for giving me that shared definition of how you think about decolonization. I just think it's so helpful for people to make sure we're on the same page, and I think this naturally leads to a question that people are probably thinking, which is how do we do that, especially related to the body.
Kelsey Blackwell: It's really this process of coming home to ourselves on 3 levels. We are making space to just start to feel our body at the, on the level of sensation, and build trust that our bodies are sources of wisdom, and we can actually learn how to be in relationship with our body so that it's no longer an adversary, but actually a place that we attune to for guidance. And that's where somatics comes in. Somatic practices are really supported also by a mindfulness practice, because our minds are these wild horses that run away with our lives and our days and having a practice that helps us work the muscle of slowing the mind down and making choices or having awareness around where, where our thoughts are taking us and bringing them towards something intentionally is really a helpful ground for being able to attune to the body. And there's really this sense that nothing that our body is presenting even if it's aching and painting or navigating illness is a problem in the sense that we're not broken. There's nothing that needs to be fixed. My approach to this work really comes from a trauma-informed lens in the sense that we're all impacted by the trauma of the colonial project and the traumas of systemic oppression. So our bodies are kind of responding to the unhealthy environments that we're in, and they're doing it in wise ways to get our attention so that we can attune and take care. So that's the first piece is um coming to understand that our bodies are a source of wisdom. And then the next piece is how do we contend or where do we find resourcing when we're swimming in the waters that are so toxic and it can feel overwhelming to try to confront these massive forces and systems on our own? So we need to take refuge in something larger than the systems themselves, and this is where we start to connect with the practices of our ancestors before colonization, which many of us are like, well, what were those practices? So these are earth-honoring practices, and it could be, you know, a spiritual practice. Anything that someone has a relationship with that feels life supporting. So it could be to God or the goddess or ancestors or the Universe, the cosmos, it could be to love itself, it could be to experiences of feeling held in community, you know. It doesn't have to be something that someone cooks up, it should be something that's authentic to them, butI believe that if we are drawn to this work, we're able to turn our attention toward that question of well, where, where do I find resourcing? What does give me life? And then that becomes a place that we intentionally cultivate a relationship with. And then the last piece is um opening up to the intelligence of the natural world and really seeing that we are interconnected and that humans are not the protagonists of this story as much as we like to believe that we are. And instead, we are one of many beings that are part of an intelligent world with lots of different forms of intelligence and we can learn how to be in right relationship with our living world≥ All of this is radical work because it is a departure from the narrative of the program.
Becky Mollenkamp: I love everything you shared, and I kind of want to explore just slightly more in-depth, those three components that you mentioned, but before we get to that I have a thought that comes up, which is, how is this work, specifically around the body, different or is it different when you are someone who has an oppressor identity versus when you are someone who has been historically colonized? Are there differences for white folks approaching this work and for Black folks and for anyone in the global majority, are there differences in what this looks like? Because when I think about some of the things you talked about, I immediately start to think, hm, as someone who's white, I don't know what that means to connect with my ancestors in ways that feel healthy since they are the ones who have been colonizing. And so I'm just curious when you think about this work, are you really specifically focused on folks of the global majority, or is this also work that white folks can and should be participating in?
Kelsey Blackwell: This is such a rich question and I'll just answer it first with a personal story. So, I started engaging in ancestral healing practices through Daniel Foor's work, which I really recommend anyone who's feeling intrigued or curious about the work of ancestral healing to check out that community and when I entered that space, started doing that work, I really had the intention of healing or addressing the line of people, my ancestral line that comes from West Africa. That's the line where I don't have a lot of information, and I do feel like a lot of the intergenerational wounds that I'm walking with, trying to metabolize really come from the violence and horror of chattel slavery. So, I was like, OK, let me, let me try to get in there and see what I can do on a healing level in relationship to ancestral work, and as I engaged in that work, it became really clear that it was actually my white ancestors, so my father's Black, my mom is white, her people come from Germany and Scandinavia and England. And it became really clear that those were the ancestors that were stepping forward to do this work and I remember feeling a littledisillusioned by that, but you're guided through, you know, a series of different types of practices and, and it's really, as I mentioned before, this practice of listening and seeing what, what comes forward where the energy is, and it was just so undeniable that it was with my white-bodied ancestors. So I stepped into doing the ancestral healing work with those folks, and I have to tell you, it has been incredibly rich and incredibly informative and I feel so much more connected to that line and I had to go back pretty far to connect with ancestors. So, the idea behind this is that we all are impacted by systems of domination, on some level, we all are colonized and gow recent that is in our history is determined by where our people come from. So for my Black ancestors, I only have to look back 200 years. But for my white ancestors, I'm looking back to the Roman Empire and the conquest of the Celtic people by Romans. But the truth is, is that we all have ancestors who at some point, engaged in earth-honoring practices, had a relationship with their own ancestors, had a sense of belonging, a sense of place, and then something comes in and disrupts that or disconnects our people from those more animist practices, and then those wounds get passed down and carried on and then reenacted in our life. So if we're willing to imagine that for all of our ancestral lines, which, you know, there are several ancestors that comprise who we are today. But if we were to trace all of them back, we would come in contact at some point with some ancestors who, you know lived in a more harmonious way with each other and with the land. And in my own experience, I had to go back pretty far on that white line. I was OK with the Germanic folks, but then it quickly switched to being English folks and I was like, oh God, really. So I had to go back pretty far to I think I went back to 400 AD. So then the work is OK, how do I, um, from this place of listening and trusting, start to weave in what has been lost. And this is a really tender process. It brings up a lot of emotion and there's ways in which our mind our analytical minds naturally try to discount what we're doing and say we're making it up or you know, what are we doing and nothing's really happening, nothing's really working. And I, I often will just tell folks if they could rather than trying to know if they're making it up or not making it up, if they could, we could just live in the in the in-between of maybe I'm making it up or maybe I'm not, I don't know, but I'm open and I'm curious, and in that place of being open and curious. It's actually quite profound the kinds of connections that we start to make. So if we fast forward to today and we're looking at the impacts of this history, how those impacts show up. There is, you know, sort of generally a fundamental disconnection from these earth-honoring practices, but then what are the categories or, or how has society hierarchically ranked our bodies based on race, based on class, based on sexual orientation. etc. So, one of the reasons I work predominantly with folks of color, is because that's the lens that I'm navigating the world from so I can speak to those pain points because I've lived them. It doesn't mean, though, that this work isn't applicable to white bodies. In fact, I really, really think that it's necessary for white bodies or even, you know, bodies who quote unquote are winning inside of capitalism and patriarchy to examine and see how even though these systems supposedly support the ways they're genderized and racialized, they also have been conditioned and colonized, and there's a lack of freedom even inside that, and we can see that when we look at the rates of depression in white male male bodies, you know, the suicide rates for that particular demographic are much higher than any other demographic. So, you know, I think there's clearly something that's not working, given the society we've created and it's an examining of all, what has been lost and how do I engage in practices that helped me connect with something fundamental and intrinsic to being human that get squashed, gets dismissed, gets subdued inside of the pressures of capitalism and the patriarchy and heteronormativity, etc. etc. So, are there practitioners doing decolonizing the body for white-bodied folks? Not that I know of, but there are other ways to engage through, for example, Daniel Foor's work, through doing, you know, racial justice work, looking at, you know, one's privilege, looking at exploring like where do my people come from, what were some of the practices. Since they might have engaged in looking at more animist ways of relating to the world. All of these contribute to that kind of breaking up of the colonial narrative. And in my own work, I predominantly work with folks of color, especially in groups. I only work with folks of color in groups, but I do some one on one work with white body folks, and that's really a case by case exploration based on alignment, so I hope that helps to answer your question.
Becky Mollenkamp: That was a lovely and thoughtful response, and thank you. My goal is not to center whiteness or make this all about whiteness, so I apologize if it has started to go that way. I want to bring it back out beyond that. I just felt like hearing what you're saying and certainly it's because I'm white bodied that that's what came up for me is like, is this my work to do as well. But now hearing you say like this is work for all of us to do, for everyone, because ultimately if we go back far enough, we've all experienced this kind of trauma. I want to take that back out for everyone then. And I know you cannot give us everything, and I would encourage people to read your book. Also, it makes me think of the work of Resmaa Menakem and “My Grandmother's Hands” reading that book was really helpful for me as well around understanding the embodied somatic trauma that I and all folks experience, especially as we're doing some of this work of trying to become anti-racist and, and undoing a lot of the oppressive systems that we all live under. So my question for you is even though we definitely can't get into everything. People need to read your book to really learn more. Are there some sort of high level or quick-hit kind of tips that you can offer for people who are interested in the work you're talking about of just sort of how to get started or because everything you've talked about is beautiful, and I can still feel myself at least and maybe other people listening will feel the same thing of that all sounds amazing and I just don't even know how to begin that. I don't know how to begin to have conversations with or connect to my ancestors. I don't know how to know or go back far enough to understand where these trauma where this trauma lies or where it began, or how to begin to feel that embodied response to ending that. Resmaa's book helped me with sort of the in the moment feelings of navigating the stuff that comes up as I'm doing anti-racism work, but you're talking about is so much more it has so much more depth, which I think is beautiful, and it leaves me saying it's like how? And again, I know you can't share everything, but I wonder if you could just give us a little taste or a little starting point for that journey.
Kelsey Blackwell: Such a good question. Where to begin, I think a lot of it has to do with where folks are entering in. So let's say somebody is curious and interested but doesn't have experience doing somatic practice or relating to the body then that's the place to begin, I think. Because all of this healing work requires some capacity to listen at more and more subtle levels and is you start to build a relationship to your body. You are learning how to trust and attune to the part of our knowing that is shaped by context and place and time and landscape and not fully dependent on the rationa, intellectual analytical part of our thinking. What happens, what can happen as we start to begin to trust our body wisdom is that that part of our brain shows up and says, this isn't valid, or this is a waste of time or I'm not doing it right or nothing is happening. So, somatic practice really invites us to slowly begin to build trust with the ways that our bodies know. And then as we are in relationship with other ways of knowing, you might step into other ways of knowing that or even, even more subtle, which is where we're connecting with more of the ancestral healing and ancestral practices work. So, how do we begin a process of reconnecting with the body? You know, I often will give folks just a simple practice which you can also see in my book of taking a deep breath and letting it out with an audible exhale. So I'll do that right now. You can join me if you like. [Breathes] And then on the other side of that breath, I'm taking a moment to notice what I'm sensing in my body and also in my book, I have languaging around how to name sensation because for many of us, that's not a language that we uh learned how to speak. So, even if we can't name a particular sensation, we might just say, oh, I feel something in my shoulders or I feel something in my neck or I feel something in my jaw. I feel something in my belly. Oftentimes the places that we notice first are the places that feel uncomfortable or that are in pain so it's natural to notice those, but alongside the places that might feel uncomfortable, I'll often also ask, where do you feel settled in your body? And with that question, we're starting to tune to something a little more subtle because oftentimes the places that feel settled, we're not really paying attention to. So I might have folks check in with their legs or check in with their hands or um the top of their head or their ears. And as we're noticing those parts of the body, oftentimes what we might say is like, I don't do anything. And another way to relate to those places that feel kind of blank is that they're available and they're settled. There's no activity there. All right. I'm noticing that my legs feel kinda neutral, kind of, you know, available. And then I may ask, OK, can you hold awareness of both one of the places that you first named, which may be a place that was paining, like your shoulders or your neck. Can you hold awareness of that alongside awareness of what's happening in your legs? And that's an invitation to recognizing complexity that we are very rarely all one way. And we actually, as we're relating to our body we can start to understand that even the places that feel uncomfortable or unrounded or anxious aren't the full story, like those places are present alongside places that are feeling rested or resilient or strong or available. So that's one practice for starting to attune to the listening of the body. And as we feel for what's happening on the level of sensation in the body. I think of this like body data. Or another way that I sometimes speak you speak about this is thinking about these points of information like stars in the night sky and we just look up at the night sky for the first time ever we're perceiving all the different points of light. It can feel kind of overwhelming. We're not really sure how to make sense of it. But as we look up at that night sky over and over again, or in this case as we feel what's happening in our body over and over again. They start to be able to connect the dots between sensations and make a constellation and that constellation gives us access to body knowledge. From the data that I've gathered from connecting with sensation over and over again. I'm now able to start to see a pattern, and that pattern helps, helps me navigate my life in a different way because I know now that when I take the time to close my phone by 8 o'clock or when I make a point of starting the day with some movement or I before I answer a request, I make a pause and notice sensations in my body and those are and those can indicate whether I'm a yes or a no or maybe. So as I'm bringing more of this body data or these sensations along, I arrive at body wisdom, which is like this information now is integrated with my knowing. It's a different way of knowing. So that's just the body piece, which is why there's a whole school of somatics that can teach us how to do this. But hopefully that practice gives folks a way to start to enter in to feeling and feeling is another way of listening to the body and through that listening starting to connect and make constellations of knowledge that paved the way to wisdom. One of the things that I really love about somatics, at least in the way that I practice it, is that there's a recognition that we are more than our body. The soma is layers of are what it means to be alive, our humanness. So our so includes our body, but it also includes our energetic body, our emotional body, our relational body. So as we start to connect with the visceral self, we open up more interest and more trust in these more subtle layers of our embodiment, which are the more energetic, the more intuitive ways of knowing and that capacity is so important as we turn toward ancestral healing work because, so, so many of us don't know the practices of our people, and it feels like they're lost. And I could tell a story about an example of someone who someone famous who was doing ancestral practices without even knowing they were connected to her people and then later got that information by doing some research. But I see that happening over and over again. I mean, there's even a section in Robin Wall Kimmerer's book, “Braiding Sweetgrass,” she talks about this, about a practice being lost, but engaging from a place that felt good, that felt right in in the body opened up some kind of knowingness that isn't conceptually known but is known in more of a felt way. And we aren't really taught how to trust that kind of felt knowing. In fact, we're, we're taught to discount it to minimize it, to distrust it. And so we really need support and affirmation and reflections from our community that that way of organizing our life based on what feels right or feels intuitive is valid. So connecting with the ancestral piece I think really starts with having the capacity to trust that part of ourselves, which happens through somatics as we engage in this work. One of the things that I often will say is that we find that what we're reaching toward is reaching back toward us. So we're reaching toward these memories. We're reaching toward these practices. And it can feel like I've gotta dig something up or do a bunch of research. And, you know, if that calls to people, certainly engage in it, but I don't think that's required. We can reach toward those practices by engaging or opening into a ritual space and then trusting that how we hold that space or what we call into that space is it good enough place to begin. And that more information will be revealed as we engage with it. So in the book, I offer some general suggestions around how to structure a ritual practice, and oftentimes when I'm working with a client who wants to do this kind of ancestral healing. We start really simple by creating an altar and this is they're also instructions for this in the book, like how do I create an altar.It doesn't have to be an altar that's specific to a particular ancestral line. It could just be an altar that's dedicated to knowing the ways of your people before the impacts of colonization and dominating powers coming in and severing your ancestors from there, historic practices that they organized around. And then placing some objects, oftentimes from nature, but it doesn't have to be that you already have a relationship with could be a rock, it could be a stone, it could be a precious stone of some kind. I often suggest folks think about putting objects on their altar that engage the senses. So, what are you drawn toward naturally? And then speaking to the altar and you might imagine speaking to some kind of entity that you already have trust in that's larger than you. So that could be to an ancestor, it could be to a landscape like the ocean or the mountains, it could be to love itself for goodness itself, and offering gratitude and saying your prayer, ‘please show me how I can be in right relationship with the earth, please show me how to honor those who have passed, please show me the life-giving practices of my ancestors.’ And then again, we're in this process of listening. And you can see why it's so important to have some some capacity to trust in a knowing that is beyond the linear way, because when we put out prayers like this, information comes. I've seen that in my own life over and over again. I've seen it in my clients' lives over and over again, but if we don't already have some ground um that respects the mystery, then we just count the information that comes. We think it's a coincidence, we think it's a fluke, we think it's irrelevant. Hopefully it gives folks some idea of how to enter in. The one piece I didn't mention is that oftentimes when folks are starting to build a relationship with their body it's overwhelming because our minds are really in this power over capacity internally. They hold dominion over our bodies. So, when we connect with the body, the power over your mind is often in revolt. And it speeds up and it challenges it questions, it diminishes and it criticizes, it does all the things that we would expect a power over a system to do when its authority is being challenged. And so, not to say that our minds are bad, but you know, they're shaped by the systems that we live in, which are unhealthy. So having some practice that helps settle the mind. Oftentimes I recommend meditation. I have been a long time meditator. And was a meditator long before I came to somatics, and I think that that foundation was really helpful in being able to feel my body because I knew how to direct my mind and the relationship our minds and our bodies are meant to have is one of power with structure. So working together. And I think Einstein has a really beautiful quote about this, like, ‘the mind is meant to be in service to the body, but we flipped it around and the the mind is running the show and the the more intelligent part of ourselves has been banished.’
Becky Mollenkamp: Wow, thank you so much for that. It was so helpful and detailed and I hope people come back and listen to it over and over again because there's so much there to help people get started on this important work. So thank you, thank you, thank you. You have given me so much time already and so I want to wrap things up here by having you tell everyone where they can connect with you and learn more about you. I will obviously share your Substack and so these people go there, but if there's anywhere else that you like to connect or anything else you want to let us know about your work, please tell us.
Kelsey Blackwell: So, Substack is a great place for people to find me, The Drinking Gourd. Also, my website, which is kelseyblackwell.com. You can see what I'm offering, I will launch my program, Decolonizing the Body for Women of Color this fall, so the best way to hear about when registration opens, will be to either follow me on Substack or my newsletter, which folks can find at Kelseyblackwell.com. Yeah, thanks for asking and thanks for doing this. This was awesome.
Becky Mollenkamp: Thank you, thank you, thank you to Kelsey. I hope you really loved that conversation. It was a long and depth one that I think was worth listening to every minute of it and coming back and listening again. Thank you again to Kelsey. Please make sure you go subscribe to her subst newsletter, The Drinking Gourd. Again, the link is in show notes, and I will be back with another transformative liberatory healing, amazing conversation tomorrow.