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Hi, it s Elise Lunen, host of Pulling the Thread.
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Today is the third part of a four-part series on tools for transforming trauma.
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I m joined today by somatic abolitionist Resmaa Menakem, author of My Grandmother s Hands.
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Hi, it s Elise Lunen, host of Pulling the Thread.
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On this show, we pull apart the web in which we all live to understand who we are and why we re here.
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Pulling the Thread is about big questions.
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Why we do what we do, how we can understand our own experiences within a larger spiritual and historical context,
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the ways in which we might begin to understand ourselves and each other better, and what s required to heal ourselves and our world.
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I ll be joined in conversation by luminaries and wise elders, those who have laid tracks on their work and lives to help us bring meaning and understanding to a world that often feels chaotic and overwhelming.
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My hope is that these conversations spark moments of resonance and plant tiny seeds of awareness so that we might all collectively learn and grow.
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Here s what I would say.
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Peace will happen when people invest in cultivating peace as opposed to war.
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Peace will happen.
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And one thing I know for me, I know peace.
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I know I will never see it, but maybe I can put something in place to where I leave something here.
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And my children s children s children s grandchildren
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and nibble off of and feed on what I ve left here the same way I feed off of Frederick Douglass  stuff.
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So says therapist and social worker Resmaa Menakem, author of the New York Times bestseller, My Grandmother s Hands, racialized trauma and the pathway to mending our hearts and bodies.
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Resmaa is also the originator of the somatic abolitionist movement.
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I met Resmaa many years ago when he was one of the few voices in this space.
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Resmaa calls himself a communal provocateur and this is true as his work challenges all of us to recognize and acknowledge that we re scared and that much of this fear is ancient.
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We were supposed to talk today about trauma and relationships but our time together took a different turn.
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Resmaa jumped at the opportunity to put me in my familial and familiar
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fear.
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It s hard, or at least it was for me, but hopefully you ll stick with us to see how this works.
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This is the third part of a series on trauma, and it won t surprise you to hear that Resmaa also trained with Peter Levine, who we heard from last week.
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Okay, let s get to our conversation.
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I want to talk to you about sort of everything, but maybe we start with My Grandmother s Hands and then we move to sort of monsters and law and relationship and how so many of these things intersect.
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I feel like the last time we spoke was, I don t even know if we were staring at each other on Zoom, but it was years ago when your book, My Grandmother s Hands, was establishing an entire
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space that s now been joined by many others.
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It s always great to be first, right?
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But it was a different time and yet it s still the same time, right?
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What s changed for you?
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I m older.
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I m getting ready to be a grandpa.
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Oh my God.
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Yeah, yeah.
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My daughter is two in June.
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I m a little bit wiser.
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and a little bit more in my understanding of what we re up against.
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Both my own being in the Black body in this country, and then watching what s happening in the Congo, watching what s happening in Palestine, and watching all this.
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It s like the same imperial bullshit over and over and over and over again.
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And so I m understanding myself differently now in terms of the collective,
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in ways that even when I wrote my grandmother s hands that I didn t.
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And so, yeah, that s changed.
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You might disagree with me on this, but I feel like when My Grandmother s Hands came out, there weren t that many books like it, and this wasn t a conversation that was being had.
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I mean, your book hit many bestseller lists and stayed there, but it wasn t a conversation that was culture-wide.
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That s right.
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It feels like it is more so, maybe not at the level at which it needs to be.
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But as you watch that happen, how does that feel?
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Do you feel like is it making you more optimistic?
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Sibling, the next thing I say, I don t want you to take it as me coming at you, okay?
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I m not coming at you.
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This shit is fucked up.
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Like what s happening and has happened for the last four or 500 years is crazy.
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The same people that were doing it to my people in the 1600s are the same people as their descendants are the same people that s doing it now.
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and getting filthy rich off of what they call free labor and free land and extraction.
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I have what I call a charred pessimism, right?
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And what I mean by that is that there is quality of my pessimism that I think is instructive.
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And the charredness of my pessimism is really because of what I see across time has happened to people who don t have a military.
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who don t have a nuclear arsenal and who don t have access to water.
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My pessimism comes from watching and seeing fire burn across people s bodies.
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And when people ask me the question about optimism, it always churns up the energetic load for me.
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It just, it makes things spin for me because I m not sure what people are looking at.
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My book, I believe, stood in a long line of books.
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I actually think that with Giovanni s book, my book, I think what James Baldwin wrote
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You know what I mean?
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Like my book built on that.
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It took the embodiment and made and used that lens.
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But my ancestors, you know, Grace Boggs, like, you know, all of my ancestors were in my grandmother s hands.
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And so what happens for me, was the book was successful, and I believe it into a field that hadn t been really tapped into.
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But what I found started to happen was that people started to co-opt it and use it for whatever fuckery they wanted to use it for.
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You know what I mean?
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It took embodiment and made it something that the people that I intended it for couldn t use.
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It s the same way that they did intersectionality, right?
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And made it into something that was specific about the condition, black women in a particular field, black and women.
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When Sis came up with that, that s what she was trying to discuss.
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And now it means everything.
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And now people use it to actually hurt people.
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And so there s a capture component that modernity in this system always adapts to.
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So yes, my book was a book that opened up the field, but it s also what I see is I m constantly trying to fight the capture of it, the co-option of it.
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I m noticing I m having to do it.
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I m noticing that I m having to correct people a lot.
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about how to use the work and what it means.
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And maybe optimism isn t the right word, because you talked about sort of using a metaphor of like a washing machine.
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As all of this stuff gets reactivated in the culture, and I think for many white people like me, it was like, oh, I had no idea that this sediment was in this washing machine.
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Where did it come from?
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Yeah.
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So in that sense, at least it feels like it s becoming more and more conscious for people, not that they necessarily know how to attend to it or process it or be with it, but it feels like at least people have some idea of what this is and some attachment.
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I do think that, in general, you mentioned the word embodiment, and I want to talk about that because obviously it s so core to your work, but that so many people in general are just disembodied, right?
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Exactly.
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Exactly.
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I interviewed Peter Levine for this series, too, because when we don t have that core connection, for whatever reason, people are like, I don t know what you re talking about.
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Exactly.
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Exactly.
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So can you talk about embodiment in the context of your work and what you re talking about?
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It s interesting, you know, the word soma, like somatic.
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That word comes from a number of different places.
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One of the meanings of the word comes from a Swahili word.
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meaning to educate and to learn.
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It also comes from a Latin word which means body and nucleus and all this different type of stuff.
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My idea of really soma or somatic is really around how do we begin to create a living embodied anti-racist generative culture by which we use the body as a mechanism to learn and stoke the intelligences, right?
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And part of what happens for me when it comes to race
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is that I m not opposed to things gnawing at people, right?
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My work is not to try and necessarily get to resolve or get to fixing things, right?
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My idea is that there is an emergent process that we have been divorced from primarily as human beings, and especially as human beings who have been subjected to imperialism
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enslavement, land theft, colonization.
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We really want to avoid any type of gnawing, right?
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And what I believe is that we have to begin to get more familiar with the gnawing because the gnawing tells us where the edges are at.
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The gnawing tells us where are the possibilities, the old ways that we ve been captured, that we ve been trying to find the answer to things.
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We ve tried to traverse that.
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And the only place to find the more emergent ways, the ways through something, is through the places we have yet to traverse.
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The places, the things that we normally would say, it s off the table.
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That is absolutely off the table.
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Those are the places now, when it comes to liberation, that you re finding
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that people are now willing to say, well, maybe that s not off the table.
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Maybe when I m watching my babies being murdered with white phosphorus, that s no longer off the table.
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Maybe when my children are put in cages like we did here in America just a couple of years ago, maybe certain things are no longer off the table.
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Maybe when in Michigan, people don t have access to clean water,
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Maybe we need to actually move in a direction where we can actually investigate and interrogate and inquire into things because the structure says it is not possible that we absolutely start to interrogate those things.
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And so for me, my work really is about getting conditioned so we can actually deal with the 400 years of charge
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that comes up when we try and deal with race.
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Deal with the gnawing that won t let us sleep, that works it up, and stop trying to find the off ramps.
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One of the things I say about white bodies is that white bodies can yoga the hell out of anything.
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Say more.
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You give white bodies a kale salad and everything s good.
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Or some sourdough bread toast and a yoga mat, and the world is a good thing.
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Leave white bodies no leisure.
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What I ve been trying to say is that that s exactly what white bodies need to stop going.
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They need to stop trying to sue the things down that don t need to be sued.
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When you can t sleep at night and you feel and you have a sense that there s this added weight in the world and your antidepressants are no longer getting at it, that s where you start.
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That your feet are walking around in America and sloshing in indigenous blood.
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Maybe the fact that you are connected through creation itself is why you can t sleep.
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That something needs to be done and that the world is calling you to begin to do something with other bodies to make sure that this particular thing would heal and don t continue to happen.
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Maybe the reason why you re experiencing what you re experiencing is that we are literally killing the planet.
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And that impact, because we are part of creation, not apart from creation, the impact of that shows up as depression, shows up as melancholy, shows up as rage, shows up as terror.
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Maybe that s what that is.
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And your attempt, and you ll get a shit out of it, really is a warning mechanism, not a healing mechanism.
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I love that so much of your work, I know we re going to get to monsters in law, which is more couples based, but that it s group work.
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And how important is it when you go into a police force, or when you re working in a cultural institution, or when you re working with groups, is this
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sense this trauma field or the way that all of this is held, how much of it do you feel like is localized and responsible to specific lineages versus just something that s felt by everyone regardless?
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Like you might have moved from Sweden 10 years ago and you are living in it, right?
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Or you just moved here from Japan.
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It s present to you even if you might not have a direct relationship with it.
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Or do you feel like it s more directly in our family or ancestral lines and that s what we re contending with?
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So I don t work with police departments anymore.
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It was too much terror on my body to work with them.
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There are many police departments and many of the leadership in police department is very invested in this kind of warrior mentality towards communities.
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especially communities that look like mine.
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I had to get to a point to where that had to be off the table for me now.
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It is a brutal endeavor to work with a system that from its inception, especially here in America, has been to control bodies that look like mine.
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And so I m saying that to say that the way that I
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think about that question is all of those pieces are always happening all at the same time.
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So especially when it comes to trauma or brutalization or victimization, we re always dealing with the historical, the load, the spring loadedness of it.
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We re always dealing with it.
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We re always dealing with the intergenerational pieces.
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We re always dealing with the persistent institutional pieces.
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And we re always dealing with the personal pieces,
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all balled up in like one of those rubber band balls, right?
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And it becomes so overwhelming that people are willing to just say, if I have to contend with all of that, I probably won t survive.
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So I m just going to stay from here up.
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I m just going to try and intellectualize that the only intelligence that I m willing to give any type of freedom to is intellectual intelligence.
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But my body and my whole body
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is experiencing the vibes of what s happening, the images and the cadence of those images, the meaning making and the shifts between those meanings.
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the behavior and urges that I want or that I allow to be present, the sensation, what s on my tongue, what s in my throat, what s in my belly, what s in my chest, what s behind my eyes, what s the temperature that moves up and down, the texture, the pressure, all of that stuff.
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And the imagination, all of those intelligences.
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never get any room to practice because we think everything is about cognition.
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Everything is about the way that I think.
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And if I could just think about something correctly, then I can figure out how to feel better, how to do better, how to be better.
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In that process, we become divorced from creation.
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And so I think that part of the problem is that people think that if I could just figure this out on a personal realm, in the personal field,
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then I ll be good.
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But when the load comes in from the historical, because I have not, and because this world says you shouldn t pay attention to those pieces, I don t know what to do with that.
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When it comes in from the intergenerational, I don t know what to do with that.
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When the persistent institutional stuff is wearing and withering my body,
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I don t know what to do.
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So I look for the nearest thing to try and get rid of it, to try and rage against it, to try and subdue it.
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And the beginning, it may work.
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And then over time, it loses its efficacy because I have to begin to develop ways of not just doing it individually, but also do it with others.
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Because what s happening to me is not just individual, it s communal.
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Horrors that we re experiencing aren t just individual, also communal.
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So only developing individual responses to a communal horror is inadequate.
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And yet we keep reaching for that source.
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dough bread.
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And yet we keep reaching for the things that help to kind of soothe us, but they don t help to condition and temper us.
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When you can get a group together, what s the effect?
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Is it that people start to understand what it looks like, like to have a container?
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Well, what happens is what I tell people is that it s going to take at least nine to 13 generations before particularly white bodies know what the hell race is.
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One of the things that Dr. King said is that
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He fears, and this was shortly before he was murdered, he fears that he has led his people into a burning building.
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And what he was talking about was that white people have been mass educated as it relates, in his vernacular at the time, as it relates to the Negro and who the Negro is, white people have been mass educated in the realm of who I am, right?
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D.O.
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Hughley said, one of the most dangerous places for a black man is in the mind of white folks, right?
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And what Dr. King was talking about was that because of this mass education over hundreds of years, white bodies think that they know who the Negro is, and because they do not, they have a skewed understanding of who the Negro is, but they also have a skewed understanding because of that of who they are.
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And until white bodies start to begin to engage in a mass re-education, until they begin to do that, it s clear that America is on death s door, right?
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And so when I m doing my work with bodies, I am slowing it down and doing work with those particular bodies, not to get to some place that gets fixed, but for them to begin to play with and get conditioned by and tempered by
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the 400 years of charge of race, so they can be better prepared and understand what space is, understand what resource is, understand what discernment is, as it relates to race specifically.
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So when I m working with bodies, every emotion, every sensation,
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Every vibe is medicine.
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People begin to work with it with like bodies.
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They begin to work with it with each other, not just in my workshops, but when they leave each other, when they reach out to each other, when they re scribing, when they re working with these intelligences, they have some place to go and continue to practice.
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And over time, they can begin to develop room around race and pigmentocracy specifically, not around book clubs.
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not around reading a book, but around what shows up when a particular somatic elicitation occurs, and how do you begin both individually and together and communally nibble on it, as opposed to trying to gorge on it and fix it.
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When you re working with groups, is everyone s own familial history part of the conversation, or is that too intellectual?
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You did it.
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You re right there.
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Right there.
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Okay.
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Right there.
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Right there.
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Like what you just did.
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That s what we start to interrogate right there.
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We stay there.
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We go with that.
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There was a hitch there.
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There was this thing that you were saying, and then you hitched.
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We d stay there, investigate there.
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We say, okay, what was the vibe quality of that?
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What was the quality of that?
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Because what happens is, is if you stay there, what begins to happen is something starts to move and shape
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and quick if you stay there.
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Now, if I let you continue to like go on, like I tell people all the time, we use verbalness to get us out of our bodies most of the time, right?
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I relate.
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Yes.
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You know what I mean?
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Like, let me explain.
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And what you re watching when that happens is that people are leaving.
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At the same time that they re talking, it looks like they re explaining, but they re really embodied.
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That s what it looks like.
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They re embodied.
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And what I try and do in my practice and in my training and with bodies is I try and get them to pause.
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Wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, just wait.
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As you starting to begin to tell me about all of the stories and all of that type of stuff, what is the sensation content?
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What s the intelligence?
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What s the urgings?
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That because you re telling the story, you can t work with the urging.
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What?
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You drop in to urging for a moment.
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Now you might not be able to stay there, but let s, right?
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And then what you start to notice is that things start to begin to unwind in this kind of spiral stuff.
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That s why you have to have a container, because as it starts to unwind, all the people s bullshit and the ways that they do it, the way that they blow it through each other,
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starts to begin to also make itself known.
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And so that s why I say the thing around nibbling and not gorging.
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I remember, this is now years ago, but just having you talk me through a process.
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And I ve thought not a fraction as deeply as you about this, but trying to understand in myself, where s my fear?
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Who am I afraid of?
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I ve done the Harvard, the implicit bias test and stuff like that.
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That s right.
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And one thing I will say is, and obviously you mentioned intersectionality, and we think about these Venn diagrams of race, gender, and class.
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I m a half Jew from Montana, and my fear is highly localized around class.
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men and there s like a hotbed of white supremacy in Montana and Idaho and that s my thematic like I will run if I m in an alley with a white man who appears poor.
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That s right.
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That s right.
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But can we do that?
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Because this is pretty juicy.
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You see how big my eyes got?
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You see how big my eyes got?
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I m finding my running shoes right now.
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Okay.
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That s right.
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So let s just take one little nip.
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We don t have to do the whole thing.
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Just one little nip.
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You said something.
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You said, I m a half Jew from Montana.
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Just want to just stay there and do nothing else.
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I m here with you.
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I m right here with you.
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I m a half Jew.
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You re a half Jew from Montana.
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You don t have to report.
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You don t have to say anything.
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I m here with you.
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Yeah, right there, right there, right there.
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Just notice that right there.
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You don t have to stay there.
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don t have to hold it.
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You don t have to namaste it.
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I m holding this.
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I m holding it with you, right?
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Yes.
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I m a half Jew from Montana.
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Now, if I would imagine, you don t have to report, I would imagine that when you say that you re a half Jew from Montana, there is a part of that, even if it s really tangential,
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is a part of that that you experience as historical.
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Goes beyond Montana.
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Notice that load.
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Notice that load.
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You said big time.
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I m here with you.
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I m here with you.
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Notice that load.
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Yeah, good breath.
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Good breath.
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Good breath.
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Just notice.
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When you say big time, I want you to notice where do you notice the big time?
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Is it in you?
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Outside of you?
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In your chest?
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In your face?
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in your belly, how do you notice big time?
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It s in my chest, it s in my jaw, in my eyes.
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Yeah, notice your jaw.
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As you notice your jaw, is there an urge that comes along as you notice your jaw?
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Any urge, is there anything that wants to be done?
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Yeah, is there anything that wants to be, yeah, yeah.
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I just wanna smile and laugh at it.
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Yeah, yeah.
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Yeah, right?
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Notice that laughter, notice that laughter, notice that laughter and smile and do it, just notice that.
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And I want you to notice as you do that, is there any emotional quality with that laughter?
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It s an interesting question.
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Is there any emotional, I m gonna say this a number of times,
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Is there any emotional quality to the laughter?
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Is there any emotional quality to the smile?
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Is there any emotional quality to the laughter?
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Being a Jew from Montana, half Jew from Montana, what do you notice?
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A desire to make it light, friendly, non-threatening.
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Conciliatory.
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Pause, pause.
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Now open your eyes, slowly open your eyes.
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Good breath.
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Now look around and you should look around the room, look behind you, raise your hips, look up, look down, find a way that you can leave that room, ways that you can escape.
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That piece was always there, uninterrogated,
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and look wired into.
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And so these conciliatory pieces, these pieces to tamp it down, these pieces to be a good, laugh Jew, to be acceptable, to be right, all of those pieces are historical
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intergenerational, institutional, and personal.
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And many times, you know, bodies that have been marginalized, that have been brutalized, that have been victimized, those pieces don t get worked with, intended to.
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The narrative takes the place of that.
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And so what happens is that over time, when people have been victimized, this is what I call the victim-perpetrator interaction pattern, that when you are brutalized,
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and you are victimized, you learn both the victimized pieces and the perpetrator pieces at the same time.
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You learn what it s like to be brutalized, but you also learn what it s like to brutalize.
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That s the very little secret that people miss.
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And that what happens when a people are brutalized, their limitations and the brutalization gets lined up with their virtue, right?
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Yeah, right there.
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And if that is not tended to, no matter which way they turn their heads, they can t see the limitations of their virtuous understanding.
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They can t see it because it s lined up with the victimization and the perpetration.
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And if they don t tend to that, what happens is, is that that particular alignment turns into righteous fury.
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then they can t get at it.
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No matter how much people say, you re doing this to me, you re doing that to me, you re doing this, they can t get at it because everything is lined up.
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That piece that you just touched on is both historical, intergenerational, persistent institutional, and personal.
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It is not just about you.
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It is how your people and how half of your people
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what happened to half of your people and what tended to and did not get tended to.
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And so that terror and that horror that comes up with white men who seem poor, that terror that comes up.
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It s a pretty good.
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Terror is what s bubbling and green underneath.
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When people are unwilling to do the work to deal with the bubbling of that,
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with the creaking of that.
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And when you don t, it comes off as righteousness and fury.
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And in reference to your question earlier around, is it happening, is it localized and all that, that s how we get at it.
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What I just took you through is just a little bit of how you begin to get at this and how it s so spring loaded, right?
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Rather than
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It s only historical, it s only this.
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No, it s all of that.
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The load of it is all of that.
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Yeah.
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And I would imagine that, I mean, not to go too deep into my family history, but that then it gets compounded by anxiety now of saying, OK, well, my family sort of managed to escape in this refugee status by way of South Africa, where they were accepting white people.
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Yeah, to Montana, where there s a large indigenous population.
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And, you know, so all of it starts to sort of like, where did I come from?
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And where am I allowed to be?
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And where am I not being harmful?
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That s it.
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That s it.
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Yeah.
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You know what I mean?
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What you just described, white bodies don t have any efficacy with that.
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No, you don t even know how to go into that.
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Yeah, I don t know how to resolve that at all.
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You can t resolve it by yourself.
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So what s the next best thing?
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Shoulders up.
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Intellectual.
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Narrative.
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Because you even know it s something that needs to be tended to.
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You say your people landed in South Africa after genocide.
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Just that, just that.
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There s so much that does not get tended to when you re running and coming out of genocide.
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Things don t get tended to.
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And so now you re smack in a place to where your white skin has currency in ways that it... For me, for all of us, how do we come to peace?
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There ain t no peace.
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There ain t no fucking peace.
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Listen, let me say it.
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If I don t get peace in my black body, walking around in this pigmentocracy that white bodies created, if I don t get peace,
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What makes you think you gonna get peace?
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We keep looking for peace where all around it, children are working in diamond mines in the Congo.
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People are working to get shit so I can work my cell phone.
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We want this peace that cannot happen.
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Here s what I would say.
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Peace will happen when people invest in cultivating peace as opposed to war.
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Peace will happen, and one thing I know, for me, I know peace.
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I know I will never see it, but maybe I can put something in place to where I leave something here, and my children s children s children s grandchildren
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and nibble off of and feed on what I ve left here the same way I feed off of Frederick Douglass  stuff or Fannie Lou Hamer s stuff.
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And I m fed because of them, right?
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That s peace for me, right?
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I have an elder, Elder Mahmoud El-Khati.
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who, whenever I talk to him, I m fed, and I have a sense of peace because I know I m in right alignment with him, in right alignment with my ancestors, in right alignment with my children s children s children.
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That s peace.
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It s because of what I do.
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It s because of how I cultivate.
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It s because of who I m with.
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It s because we understand that there is something liberatory that must be done
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in order for this quote unquote sense of peace to at some point, look, listen, we re never gonna have peace if we keep killing the planet.
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But if the planet, this entity, this living entity that we re on, if we re killing it and it s shrieking and screaming and at this moment trying to burn us off of it, what makes you think there s some peace for you?
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And I m not saying you.
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No, I know, I know, I know.
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I know you have a dirty pain, clean plane idea.
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And so what is the work for us who, at least we don t want to make more pain, right?
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Like we want to lower the dial on the projections, lower the dial on finger pointing, right?
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Starting to learn how to take responsibility for our own washing machines.
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So dirty pain and clean pain is not a fixing.
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Dirty pain and clean pain is a temporary, right?
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Let me ask you something.
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This is a funny thing that I m going to ask you.
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Have you ever been
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in a relationship with someone, and you re in this relationship, and y all are doing whatever it is that you re doing, in your belly, something says, you should not be with this person.
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Of course.
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Have you ever been in a relationship where all your friends say, why are you still dealing with this person?
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And something in you goes, which I can let them go, but God damn, I just can t.
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You ever been in that position?
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Oh, 100%, 100%, yes.
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I ve done ridiculous things.
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Yes.
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You know dirty pain.
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You know what it s like to do dirty shit when you can t educate yourself on it, right?
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And then as you do it, and over time, maybe if you re lucky, something shifts and you go, I don t know what I m gonna do.
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No, I can t do this shit.
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That s clean.
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They re both painful.
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They re both painful.
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And as adults, most of the time, when it comes to the hard shit, to the stuff that is non-negotiable, most of the time, we don t get a choice between pain and no pain.
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Most of the time, we get a choice between clean and dirty.
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And then what comes next, after we make a choice on that, then something else we get to make choices on.
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When you do clean shit, you re dealing with clean pain.
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You re dealing with the pain of holding on to yourself.
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You re dealing with the pain of growing the fuck up.
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You re dealing with.
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pain of it.
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That s not no pain or no discomfort.
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We ve been conditioned to believe that when it comes to healing, that there should be no pain if we re doing it right.
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That s not true.
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There is no peace in the final thing.
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I did an interview about three weeks ago and a person asked me, and he thought it was smart, right?
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He goes, well, Resmaa, you re always talking about liberation and freedom and liberatory practices and stuff like that.
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Define for me what liberation is.
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Liberation is different for everybody and different.
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I want you to define for me what liberation is.
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I said, first of all, liberation is not a human invention.
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It is not a human endeavor only.
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It is part of creation.
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And I said, let me tell you a story.
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Imagine 600.
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500, 1000 years from now, after we have gone through our sixth extinction level event, our sixth time
4
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on this planet of a reset, right?
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Five of the times on this planet, natural resets.
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Something happened, wipes off most of the things on this planet.
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That s happened five times, right?
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We re on our way to our sixth, but we re promoting.
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We re the ones that s doing it, and we re doing it in such an exponential way, right?
4
SPEAKER_00
After this happens, something else is going to come about, right?
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Like, after it happens, I said, imagine
4
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The thing that comes about is this predator that looks like a lion that s walking around.
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And it sees this prey.
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And this prey is drinking water.
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And this prey has this fur, these things all across it that looks like fur.
4
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And this lion sees it.
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This lion-like creature sees it.
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And it begins to stalk it.
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And it s going very slow, very quiet.
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And this creature doesn t hear it.
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All of a sudden, this lion reaches out and smacks it with this big, huge paw on the back of his thing.
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And as it does it, this animal has 12-inch spikes on its back that shoots through the lion s paw.
4
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and the lion in reflex with the other one to try and get away from it.
4
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And those things shoot through the lion s paw.
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SPEAKER_00
And then the lion grabs his hind legs to try and push it off, and the thing shoots through the lion s paw.
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SPEAKER_00
And then the lion tries to bite it, and those things shoot through its mouth and almost touch his eye.
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In that moment, of those who know what liberation might look like.
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knows what might be.
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And what I say is that most of us only know liberation and freedom of that type based on the story that you just heard me say, not the experience of those two.
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Do you understand what I mean?
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When I m talking about these pieces, I am talking about it s a way of experiencing things in a liberated way
4
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So you have room to be able to nibble on what liberation might be, nibble on what freedom might be, not based on my story, not based on the narrative.
4
SPEAKER_01
Thank you for sticking with us.
4
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We went off script, but this is Resmaa.
4
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This has been every conversation I ve ever had with him has typically been experiential, always deeply uncomfortable, which is his point is to hold all of us and whomever he s working with.
4
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In this case, it s always been one-on-one, but to hold me in the discomfort and make me stay there.
4
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No yoga mats, no sourdough bread, no smiles, no laughs.
4
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So thank you for sticking with us.
4
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His work gives me always a lot to think about.
4
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If you ve never read My Grandmother s Hands, it s a beautiful book.
4
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And he will be back to talk about monsters and love, which is his book about
4
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couples therapy and it s related.
4
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It s essentially about the stories that we have and how we bring them into relationship and sort of knowing the animal that you re with.
4
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If you liked today s episode, please rate and review and tell a friend.
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You can find show notes and full transcripts of the episodes at EliseLoonan.com.
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While there, please sign up for my sub stack.
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I send a short note every Wednesday about topics that are aligned with this show and a deeper dive most Sundays.
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SPEAKER_01
Or follow me on Instagram at EliseLoonan.
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SPEAKER_01
And finally, if you haven t already, please consider picking up a copy of my New York Times bestselling book, On Our Best Behavior, The Seven Deadly Sins and the Price Women Pay to be Good, available wherever you get your books.
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SPEAKER_01
It s an exploration of how women have been conditioned for goodness, men for power, and all the ways we ve been programmed to police ourselves and each other according to these cultural ideas of what it is to be a good woman.
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I d also like to give a huge thank you to my sponsors who make this show possible.
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Please support them the way they support this podcast.
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This has been a presentation of Cadence 13 Studio.
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If you enjoyed this episode, please listen, rate, review, and follow Pulling the Thread.
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Available now for free on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Odyssey, or wherever you get your podcasts.
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I want to give a shout out to Phil Svitek, Lauren Legroso, Mary-Kate McDonough, Allie Brockman, and the entire Kedans13 team for producing these episodes, and to Valero Daval for my key art.
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Take care of yourselves.
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I ll see you next time.