The Embodied Path to Healing Trauma with Resmaa Menakem

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Welcome to We Can Do Hard Things.

You're not going to want to miss this next hour because it is with Rezma Menekem, who is an author, agent of change, therapist, and licensed clinical worker specializing in racialized trauma, communal healing, and cultural first aid.

As the leading proponent of somatic abolitionism, an embodied anti-racist practice for living and culture building, Resma is the founder of Justice Leadership Solutions and the Cultural Somatics Institute.

Rezma is the author of the New York Times bestseller, My Grandmother's Hands, Racialized Trauma and the Pathway to Mending Our Hearts and Bodies, The Quaking of America, and Monsters in Love.

You can learn more about Rezma and his work at resma.com.

So, Rezma, we're just jumping right in with you.

That's it.

Let's crack.

Let's crack.

Let's do it.

I read My Grandmother's Hands a long time ago, and it blew my mind.

Which is, I think, was your point to be getting people out of their minds.

And now I understand it completely differently because

I have been in and out of recovery for 30 years.

It just becomes whack-a-mole for me.

It becomes something different every few years that I'm addicted to.

And I have tried to recover in my mind for 30 years.

So

I just keep thinking, okay, I got it now.

I know how I'm thinking about this.

It's just patriarchy.

It's diet culture.

It's big pharma.

It's wine culture.

I've got it.

And then I keep not getting cured.

This last round of recovery, I have finally,

through tons of therapy and whatever, allowed it to drop into my body, the recovery and understand that

I don't even know if it's an understanding, feel that

my problem is just in my past, in my parents, in their parents, in their parents, in the culture.

And it's like all living in my body.

So

your work, to me is like our world has all of these terrible symptoms, whack-a-mole symptoms.

Just what we see, the violence, the racism, the wars, the genocides, and we keep trying to solve it by making up new words

intellectually, like thinking our way out of it.

And

I know personally that that's not how it works, that we don't heal that way.

I feel like if we actually had a world that actually wanted to solve racism,

you would be the teacher that everybody would put everywhere.

Shit, I hope not.

God damn.

What is trauma resma?

Like, what just.

Well, you did a pretty good description of it.

I mean, so I have no interest in being anybody fucking guru.

I come from a people that every time we start to begin to talk about liberation and start to begin to talk about ushering in a living embodied anti-racist generative culture start to begin to talk about maybe maybe it's not the past that we need to be cultivating maybe it's the new futures that we need to be called like those people

coming from people that look like me, we get bullets in the fucking head.

They don't appreciate us until we're dead and then they can quantify us in terms of one speech we shall fucking overcome when you're the most revolutionary man on the planet at the time.

White folks love Dr.

King now.

He was the most hated man in America at the time.

And so I hope to God I don't, people don't start.

I got a grandbaby that's coming in June.

I'd really like to see him get to 30.

Yeah, I just need to start with that.

I find it more interesting

to have

people

begin to, just like you said,

you understand it differently now than you did when you first started reading it.

And I tell people all the time, my books are not books you read, they're books you do.

And it takes on average, nine to 13 months for people to get through my book in the first place.

If they're doing the practices, if they're just fucking around and just reading it as a reader's digest or something like that, then, you know, yeah, you get through it in a couple of days.

But if you're actually doing the practice, it takes you nine to 13 months.

and then when you go over it again

because you're not the same person when you started you actually pick up on so you're just like damn did resma come to my bedroom and write some new in this book because now i'm picking up on it right and that's because the practices are most important it's not even the reading

it's like how you experience revulsion at trying to do the practices and then throwing the book up against the wall.

What you do when you get to a certain part and you go, oh, that was nice.

I'm never fucking doing that practice again.

I'm not like, that's part of how this stuff works.

It's not, I'm giving you the secret or the five tips to giving to a beautiful relationship.

And that shit don't work because people are a part of creation.

We're not a part from creation.

And we're so busy trying to find the secret and the answer that we're missing the emergence.

What needs to happen in order for us to grow to fuck up ain't a tip.

That rarely ends up being a tip that we go, oh shit, I'm going to change my whole.

People know

that if you meet somebody in a fucking bar

and you take them home, you probably should put a condom on or you probably should have a dental dam or you probably should do fucking something, right?

Most people don't do that.

we all

like we got the knowledge like people have told us to do this shit right the same way with the cigarettes it says on the pack on the on the side of the cigarette but if you motherfuckers smoke this you are going to die and we're like not me

it is not and then you see a corrupt

that was that what that like

we all know

that there's certain shit the knowledge has never been a curative element for human beings.

Yes.

It's never, it's can they develop the capacity to tolerate what it takes to grow the fuck up.

And you have to temper and condition your body, especially when we're talking about race.

And especially when we're talking about white folks, white folks have, white bodies have no,

no communal efficacy.

when it comes to race.

None.

None.

I'm telling you two and all three of y'all, if you come up to me or send me a thing after this fucking thing and you say, well, well, Rasmus, you know, I had a friend and we used to do it and we marched in the shit.

Don't like your fucking racial resume is not communal tempering.

It's not conditioning.

What's happening to me and my people is not happening because individual white people are nice or not nice.

That is not what's happening.

It is because it is a structure, a philosophy that emerges and evolves, And most white folks benefit from it.

They're advantaged by it.

That's the piece.

So I'm sorry, what was your first question?

What is trauma?

It doesn't matter.

But yes, what is trauma?

And what do people need to do to grow the fuck up?

Like, what is the equivalent of wearing the condom

in life?

So the way that my brain works, My agent and friends always, those that know, supposedly, like when I first started writing my first book.

So the way that I write, so let me tell you the way that I write first off.

So the way that I write is that I'll usually go to his house or go to somebody else's house.

And I stumbled on this, is that what I do is we record it.

We record whatever I write or whatever I want to talk about.

And then we get enough of those together and then create the book.

So that's why my books sound like I'm talking, right?

It's because we do that and then we edit them.

that i get it back from the transcriptionist and then we add and we add other things in stuff like that so that's how i write all my books the only way that that was able to happen the reason why we we stumbled on that is because my agent calls me a polymath and what that means is that and this is the way that my brain is always when people are asking me things my brain is thinking about it in seven different levels i'm thinking about the sensory pieces i'm thinking about the vibratory piece my body is reacting to the meaning making of the urges.

So that's all happening for me at the same time.

And so when you ask me a question around what's trauma, so for me, basically trauma is what happens, and this is from Brother Gabor, is what happens inside of you when what happens happened.

Right.

And so it is a move that happens.

It's not conscious.

It's not a like, oh, I'm going to do that.

It's just your body says this particular thing is too much, too fast, too soon, or too long.

There wasn't enough reparative stuff that happens, which is mostly what fucks people.

And when that happened, your sense of yourself and your sense of yourself in the world shifted and got stuck.

That's trauma.

And so it can be anything that happens that's too much, too fast, too soon, or too long, along with something that reparative that should have happened that didn't.

And most people, when we talk about trauma, they can go into therapy and they can say, this happened.

My uncle did this.

My daddy did this.

My mom did this.

Right.

But what they can't usually articulate is what should have happened that didn't.

That's good.

Oof.

Repair.

Yeah.

So what is the significance of that that they can't actually say it?

Is that the equivalent of imagining the world?

differently well it's it's not even missing it it's how your body and how you position yourself once you can't get at that.

You start to organize yourself around

this should have happened, but it didn't.

You start to organize, well, fuck it then.

Fuck you.

Like, if that's the way it is, then this is how I'm going to get down.

And it's not conscious.

So here's one of the things that I say when I'm doing my practices and my workshop is I say that just the march of time, time

decontextualizes trauma, right?

Time, just time.

So if we're on a call right now, y'all, and somebody comes in and y'all see some shit go down and they put a gun to the back of my head and we start fighting.

They beat the fuck out of me, right?

And then something happened and y'all, you know, everything's happening and everything.

And then a month from now, y'all say, okay, we got to check back in with Resma, right?

And then we do a Zoom call and the Zoom call comes on and I'm on the call with y'all and I'm butt-ass naked, babbling.

Right.

I'm just, hello,

you know, I'm fucking crazy, right?

There's not one person on on this call that wouldn't say, Something happened to him.

I saw it.

We experienced it.

We got to get Rezma some help.

Do we have his wife's number?

We got it, right?

There would be no doubt in my mind that you would say, We know and we saw what happened to him.

You will contextualize it, right?

You'll say, This happened, and now he's acting in these particular ways, right?

What if you never saw it?

Whoa,

Then we just think you're crazy.

Right.

So here's what I always say.

When trauma happens in the person, decontextualize

and it goes unattended to, what happens is, is that the march of time can make that look like personality.

Trauma that happens in the body.

in a person over time can look like personality.

Trauma that happens in the family over time look like family traits.

Trauma that happens in the people can look like culture.

Trauma that in the culture can look intrinsic or natural.

So is this

why

when people, families, or cultures refuse

to

witness, have accountability, face the truth,

then all of our stories go haywire and we think everybody's crazy.

They collapse.

It collapses, right?

It collapses into personality.

It collapses into family traits.

It collapses into culture, right?

And then when we go to talk about it, all of the charge comes into the room before the resolution.

The resolution can't happen because people are contending with the charge in the body.

This is why when people say, well, we need to have an intervention, you know, when that happened and we need to sit there and talk.

And people go,

yeah, we may need to do that.

And you're probably right, but this is going to be some

why because it's 400 years of charge 500 years of charge 30 years of charge and nobody is tempered and conditioned to deal with the charge we think let's just talk about it

Let's just get together and do a reconciliation.

Let's get together and do, right?

And the charge burns.

So one of the contracts that I have is I'm working with the Meadows, right?

I do work with the Meadows, right?

Treatment Facility.

And one of the things I've been trying to get and working with the therapists on is that if you can't work with the charge first,

then when people come into the room and they tell you about their use, they tell you about the sexual stuff that happened to them, they tell you about all of this shit, right?

You give them advice about how to deal with it.

But you don't understand that the advice that you're giving them is not getting at the charge.

They're asking you a question.

Well, how do we do this?

How do we do it?

And you say, well, you do it like this and you do do it like that.

And they go, okay.

And then they say, yeah, I got, right?

And then that char, you can see the charge behind their eyes.

And we don't know how to address that.

We don't, as therapists, and I'm going to tell you this.

This is the silly little fucking joke.

Therapists are no more conditioned to deal with the charge than the people that they're talking to.

Wow.

They are not.

We don't go to school to learn how to deal with the charge.

Here's the thing.

I got my master's degree.

I learned more about charge being fucking married than I did getting my master's degree.

Right.

I learned more about the charge dealing with my drug-addicted daddy than I did in the master's degree.

Right.

Because I had to learn it and grow up and begin to work with the shit and nibble on it and use it as ways to condition.

Listen.

We're all friends.

Let's say we're all friends and I come to y'all and I say, check it out.

Hey, y'all, I'm thinking about playing piano.

The normal question would be, oh, that's really cool.

I'm thinking about running the marathon.

Y'all all go, yeah, that's cool.

It's cool.

You know, I knew a friend that actually ran a marathon.

I can get you hooked up with them so they can talk to you about it and da da da da, right?

And you'd give me resources, you tell, you know, and there's this, that, and the other, right?

And then if I said to you, and then if you got the right idea to ask me the question, when am I thinking about running this marathon?

You guys would go, and I looked at you and all straight, and I said, tomorrow.

Exactly.

Exactly.

You smiled, you giggled, you like, okay, I got to ask another fucking question now, right?

There's something else, right?

Because I wasn't prepared for that, right?

I wasn't.

And your question would be, well, Rasma, you know, I get it, but have you run a block for it first?

Do you understand that your fucking nipples are going to bleed?

Like, like your toenails are going to fall.

What's happening here?

And I said, no, no, no, no, no, no.

Don't worry about it.

I listened to a podcast

on running a marathon.

Yeah, I read it, like if I said that to you, every time I assured you that I got it handled, you would go, You don't have this handled, right?

Both things would be happening at the same time.

Because you know, I'm unconditioned and not tempered to be able to tolerate what I'm getting ready to go through.

And why do we think race is any fucking different?

Why do we think that your opinion or your understanding of that that's that's as important as temporary and conditioning?

And race in this structure is traumatizing to any visibly melanated body.

It is a traumatizing structure, experience, and philosophy.

And if you don't understand that,

you think your ideas and your opinion is as important as the temporary and conditioning that my body has had to go through in order to navigate this shit.

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I was going to do an interview.

last year or a couple years ago with a black woman and

she wrote to me and said,

we have all the same ideas.

I've listened to all of your things.

Like, yes, yes, yes.

I cannot do this interview with you because I cannot be my most vulnerable in the same room as a white woman who looks like you.

And at the time, I had bleach blonde hair.

I was a certain visually looking white woman.

And I think about that all the time.

And I thought it was so beautiful of her just to say it that way.

But I think what she's saying saying is what you're saying.

Our minds might have the same ideas, but our bodies are charged when we get into the room in a way that will make me unable to be vulnerable.

Yeah.

I am so glad she said that to you, not for you, but for her.

For her

to

understand

the texture

of what this was and not override it for you.

I think

whether you got something out of it or not, I think for her to recognize that

this had the potential to be extractive.

And she didn't wanna put herself in, you know, for most of our history, especially the black woman's body, for most of our, it's relatively new that a black woman can

say that to a white woman and be somewhat sure she's not going to get raped.

For most of our history, the white body has had full and unfettered access to every aspect of my body.

For most of our history, for most of our history, the white body has had full and unfettered access to every orifice, every idea,

every understanding of my body.

It is relatively, and this is an obvious, has been an obvious problem for visibly melanated bodies, but it's also a problem for white folks because white folks don't understand the urges around why they expect my deference

and that they're willing to murder me when I'm not deferential.

They're willing to limit and thwart access and opportunity when I'm not deferential, right?

White bodies, Dr.

King said that part of the problem is that white bodies have been put through a mass education around who the black person is and what the black body is.

They've been put through a mass education.

They refuse to develop a mass de-education and a mass re-education as it relates to the black body.

They refuse.

That's part of what the problem is.

They don't even, shit, they don't even know it's a thing.

Even good white folks have this recoil

when a black body says,

You don't have access to me.

I will not allow you access to me.

There's something that happens to white bodies where that happens.

I don't care how good you are.

I don't care how nice you are.

That is irrelevant to the level of florality

that black bodies and visibly melodied bodies have to contend with.

That is irrelevant.

Your niceness and your kindness is irrelevant.

It is not communal.

You have tempered this with other white bodies and you developed a sense of this communally.

Is there something about that

that is the heart of the millions of what we now call Karen moments, like when a white body sees bodies of culture?

And what the thing that seems to be the common denominator in those moments where a white person calls in the police is there seems to be a body of culture experiencing some sort of freedom or joy

in public that causes some kind of reaction in a white person's body

that is not happening in anyone's mind right like you can't think your way into that being logical

so explain to us body to body yeah so for me the karen and the kin moments people look at them as caring i mean you can go on instagram you can go on youtube and you can pull up hours and and hours of videos of white folks acting fucking bananas, right?

At barbecues, at churches, right, right.

And we look at those as events and incidences.

What if we didn't look at it like that?

What if we said this was structural?

Right.

That it is woven into the reflexive response in white bodies in general, not.

a Karen, but Karen's as philosophy, Karenism as a philosophy.

What if we did that?

What if we stopped looking at this as events and started looking at it as structure, as philosophy, as the, what I call it, plantation ethos, that the most enduring organizing structure in America is the plantation.

The plantation literally organized white people.

It organized their sense of relationships with each other.

It organized their sense of hierarchy.

It organized their sense of religion.

It organized their sense of pigmentocracy.

It organized their sense of sex roles.

It organized their sense.

Did you guys understand what I mean?

The plantation organized white people.

When the plantation came into existence, America was the 13 colonies.

Here's the thing that we forget.

Colonies are filled with colonized white people.

Colonized white folks that were fleeing something.

That has never been dealt with.

This is why the white woman is so fucking mad at the white man and doesn't understand why.

This is why I tell white men, I'm sorry, I can't do your interview.

I do what the woman did.

You're the second man we've had on in 300 episodes because I can't be in the same room.

I understand that.

Listen, let me say this.

When white women were walking around

their towns, their churches, and all of that, and every place that they could go, and they started walking around seeing little black children with their husbands' faces on them,

that never got dealt with.

Rape

is part

of

the way that this country got wealthy.

Yeah.

Land theft

is how this, when people say, well, how did America get so wealthy?

Free land and free labor.

And the philosophy is to try and get back to when we talk about conservative.

That's what they're saying.

They don't never say it because it ain't good to say.

But that's what they mean.

That's the again part.

That's the again part.

Yeah.

We want to get it back to free land and free labor.

And if we can't get it back to that, we want to get as close as fucking humanly possible.

We don't want to pay for your labor.

I'll give you another one.

I said this the other day.

Can you believe that we,

and this is why I believe that America doesn't, when it comes to race, doesn't have a liberatory bone in its fucking body,

is that

we allowed

people,

we allowed rich, permanently rich white men

to

at one point

pay us for at least as close to our labor as possible.

So

you paid me $20 an hour, but you take $25 an hour because you know my labor is actually worth $45 an hour.

You take 25 of that and you put it in a pension and hold it.

So when I'm old, I can actually do some other things.

That was the fucking deal, right?

And we allowed these motherfuckers to tell us about a 401k.

We allowed them to say, Now you get to contribute.

Well, motherfucker, I am contributing.

I gave you $45 worth of labor.

Your job was to take 25 of that and put it over here, right?

And we

say, Yeah, that sounds like a good idea.

Let's let me contribute of the 20,

let me contribute $5 of that.

And we took it.

That's what I mean by

free land by genociding the indigenous people and free labor by enslaving african people and black people and white women wearing pussy hats in washington dc ain't gonna do a damn thing about that

this whole thing

is

white folks refusal to deal and contemper themselves so they can actually begin to create create a living embodied anti-racist generative culture.

They have no appetite for what it takes to condition themselves and not condition themselves,

but condition

themselves so their babies can actually, so most of us, our kids don't learn.

from just our instruction.

They learn from what our bodies recoil from and lean into.

And conditioning ourselves to be able to say, I have to do some conditioning and tempering.

So my babies experience more room around race,

not just instruction around race.

But they actually experience, oh, mama can work with that.

Mamas can work with, they know, you know what I mean?

This is why the whole CRT and the reflexive stuff and the burning of the books and all of that shit is really about what they're telling you is that white folks have no appetite for conditioning when it comes to race.

None.

Tell us what you mean by conditioning.

When we don't have an appetite for conditioning, we don't have the appetite for

the discomfort of it settling in our bodies for the, what is the conditioning?

We don't have no appetite.

So Amanda, if I came to you, like I said earlier about the marathon,

it goes right to that.

That's it.

If I tell you that I'm going to run a marathon tomorrow, and then I convince you, I keep saying, no, I did everything that I'm supposed to do.

I read a book.

I did this.

Every time I say that, you go, I can't trust his judgment.

I don't trust his judgment.

So when I told you I read Rob and Angelou's white fragility, so I'm all set.

That's the equivalent of the.

I don't trust your fucking judgment.

Yeah.

Got it.

There's nothing about that that means anything.

Yeah.

I know you put it up there like it means.

And I'm me and me and Robin are tight.

Oh, I know.

I know.

I love Robin.

I'm just saying probably half the people that are listening to this read that.

That's what I'm saying.

They read it and they and it was good and they ain't read it again since.

Yeah.

They haven't grabbed another white body and said for the next 30 years, me and you gonna roll around race specifically.

And we are going to cultivate between ourselves a different way of understanding this.

And we may not be able to get to what we think we need to get to, but at least we're going to nibble on this.

At least we're going to put the road work in.

I'm not just going to read a book.

I'm not like, I am going to body to body.

We're going to raise babies in this shit, right?

We are going to get divorced in this shit.

Do you guys understand what I mean?

Like, this is my life.

This is how we get down.

Most white folks ain't talking about it like that most white folks is talking about it i read white fragility and it changed my life

i can't tell

i can only tell because you told me

right that's the only way i get to you said it and that's supposed to be enough if i put all of my stock in what white people say as opposed to what white people do

i'd be

up

like i I'd be really fucked up.

So that's what I mean.

When I say temper and conditioning, I'm saying if you're going to do anything that pushes you up against your adult developmental edges, if you're going to do something, you're going to experience it as a sensation piece.

You're going to experience it in terms of imagination.

You're going to experience it in terms of quaking and twisting and gnarliness and images that pop up that you've been trying to tamp down and get the fuck out of your head.

You're going to experience what it takes to metabolize that and use that shit as fuel for your growth as opposed to fuel that burns you the fuck up.

Right.

It's the same fuel.

It's the same fuel.

It's the same thing.

Like when people come into my office and they say, should you know, rest my, I really need to get this out of me.

And I said, if I was able to actually do that and remove that from you, what you would need in order to be the person that you think you want to be or get to, I'd just removed the fuel for that.

Does that have the connection to dirty pain and clean pain?

That's dirty pain and clean pain.

Most of us, let me ask y'all a question.

I'm gonna ask y'all a question.

I'm gonna, I'm gonna, y'all all adult people here.

So, right, so we're all adults.

Ish,

adult-ish.

Yeah, like we're adult-ish.

So, let me ask you: If I said,

have you ever been with somebody and you've been been with them and you and y'all are having

a good time

and you

good, you eating good, you're doing all of the things that you do,

but in your belly, something says,

God, I shouldn't be with this motherfucker.

God,

like.

Almost exclusively.

You know what I mean?

Like, God damn.

But I love these nasty draws, but God damn, I know they ain't good for me.

You know what it is?

And your boys and your friends and your girlfriends and your mama and your daddy and everybody are like, what the fuck you doing?

And you go,

I don't know,

but

I can't stop.

You are not what the fuck this is.

What I tell people is that we know dirty dirty pain.

We know

dirty.

And if you're lucky, after you do that for a while,

something

begins to move in the way that you go,

yeah,

I don't know what I'm going to do, but I know I can't do this no more.

I can't do this no more.

I need to block her.

I need to block her.

I got to block her.

I blocked her and everything says unblock her.

Just one more time.

Like, you know what I mean?

But that you're playing with clean and dirty.

There's a part of you that's tied to your integrity, that's part tied to creation itself that gnaws at you, that says.

If you go through this, it's going to be painful.

If you stay with this, it's going to be painful.

You get to choose which pain you want to contend with.

You as adults, we don't get the choice between pain and no pain most of the time.

as adults we get the choice between clean and dirty and most of us want a choice between pain and no pain you don't fucking get that as an adult

that's not what you get that's right you get to choose between am i going to do this clean and painful

and dirty and painful those are the choices resma i thought about that so much that yes when I was watching painfully watching the rebuttal to the State of the Union where katie britt came on and sat in a kitchen small white woman wearing a tiny cross close to fake tears crying about a fake threat in the form of these violent immigrant bodies just crying and lying that i just was like oh

dirty

dirty dirty

dirty

dirty dirty I don't watch that shit no more, honestly.

And I'm not saying, you know, the white folks that are listening to you, I'm not saying y'all shouldn't watch it.

I'm saying for me, I don't like, I'm not playing, I'm not asking you, I don't need to see your performative shit.

And I'm talking about liberals too.

Like, I'm writing a book right now.

And there's a chapter in it where I call the feckless and the fascist.

I think liberals are some of the most feckless.

They don't understand that these motherfuckers are not trying to reach across the aisle, that this shit ain't, this ain't that.

And you keep trying to find the middle road and the middle ground.

These motherfuckers tell you, we will murder your fucking children in Sandy Hook and you motherfuckers won't do a goddamn thing about it.

You won't do a fucking thing about it.

21 white babies were murdered and y'all didn't do a motherfucking thing about it.

You didn't bust a grape in the motherfucking food fight.

So if you ain't gonna do nothing about that, I know you ain't gonna do nothing about my babies.

That's the conditioning and the tempering that I'm talking about, right?

I read this thing one time.

You know, people said the idea right-wing and left-wing are all part of the same racist bird.

And if you don't understand that, you get confused about that type of shit.

It's like when white people are sitting up there crying, and then other white bodies, liberal white bodies, are just aghast at the lying and stuff like that, but you ain't gonna do nothing about it.

You're gonna be upset about it, but there is a thing around your own dirtiness that is dovetailing with that dirtiness

so it's like the thoughts and prayers this thoughts and prayer yeah that's exactly what it is and white folks are not interested in developing a living embodied anti-racist generative culture with each other they're so busy looking for the brown guru the black guru the indigenous guru like they're so busy looking for them that they don't realize they have to literally start with each other

and they have to do it and create a communal ethos around ushering in and emerging a different way of being

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This is the culture piece that is so strong.

This is why you talk about how alluring the

cultures are that are being created

in the hate world.

Talk about what they have and why our anemic

offering on the other side is not bringing anyone in.

No, and it ain't going to.

Yes.

Listen, listen.

Think about this.

Close your eyes.

Let me close your eyes.

White people, white bodies

started from nothing.

And they tilled the soil

and they were faithful to God.

And they were the chosen people.

And they spread the gospel of the one true God, Jesus Christ, across the world.

And they have created things that did not exist before

their purity and their whiteness came on the scene.

And it is their job to make sure that God exists on this planet.

And that anything that white people do, that's a mistake, it is already washed away by God and their dominion over everything in creation.

Now, keep your eyes closed.

That's the story.

That story, even if you don't like it, has a beginning, a middle, and the end.

It says what you should be doing and not doing.

It tells you your positioning.

Now, open your eyes.

Tell me an equivalent story from liberals.

The story is find the right words say them on instagram

that's it there is no

glue

so if i got symbols of the swastika if i got symbols of hoods if i got symbols that are a hundred years old hundreds of years old and you're going to come and talk to me about a bill You're going to come and talk to me about, you know, we need to get out and vote.

But if I'm a white person, that's already available.

The symbols of that are all, and it's got a whole story.

And it's steeped in hundreds of yeast.

But yet I'm trying to convince you of what's right and what's wrong.

There's no there.

Yeah.

And then you've got the hate groups with their uniforms and their rules of belonging and their offering of togetherness and their fucking uniforms and all the things.

This organizes organizes the body.

They also believe that they're great.

Yeah.

Liberals, we're always

wimpy.

It's like we don't believe that we are.

There's no there there.

There's no there there.

But that's because of the dirty pain.

We're apologetic and we're ashamed because we have the dirty pain.

White liberals are feckless as fuck.

I'll give you a quick example.

i'll give you a quick example this is why i talk about it as white bodies and not as particular identities right

so when i do my workshops and stuff like that inevitably i'll have a gay white woman that'll come up to me afterwards and say resma i know exactly what you're talking about because i'm a gay white woman and i've been right and they say that and i say hold on

Please don't compare yourself to me being a heterosexual Black.

Like, don't do that.

Here's what I want to ask you.

In the community of gay, let's say we say gay or lesbian women, in that community,

are Black lesbian women at the top or the bottom of that community?

And if you say we're all mixed in together, I'm going to say you're a fucking lie.

You have never talked to a lesbian black woman in your life if you say that to me.

So I'm not talking about your identity.

identity.

Your identity is important.

What I'm saying is there's another piece to that too.

And this pigmentocracy

is woven in and around and through every institution, every movement, everything that we are doing, how we interact, our positioning, our moorings, it's woven in and around and through that.

And most white folks, regardless of their identity, are unwilling to examine that.

And so for me,

when I'm talking about body,

the white body, visibly melanated body, the black body, I am talking about philosophy and structure and feral philosophy and structure.

And so, you know, it's important to understand that when you're talking about

what it takes in order for people to begin, white bodies, I'm talking about white bodies now, in order for white bodies to begin to work with and develop a story that

their white babies coming later on can have something that is left that will nourish them.

So the way that creation works is that if you just look at how creation functions is that something,

a structure or something has to die in order to create the nutrients for the new structure to emerge from.

White bodies don't understand that.

They want to think about, I think that the idea of God has fucked white people because they think about God as a bestowal entity.

They think about God as if I just am in alignment, if I just do this, if I just do that, then something will be bestowed on me because I've done that stuff.

That's usually not how it works.

It usually works because you do something or something happens and you get to the edges and you become and something emerges from the grind

and then something emerges through right that's not our understanding of creation what i just said is in alignment with creation not a bestowal

right

and so for me i think white bodies are not interested in going through the emergence.

The closest that they can get to it is fucking yoga, right?

Like white yoga, like like like white folks will yoga and sourdough bread and kale the fuck out of everything right like y'all can kale every

but that's because that's individual because we that's what i'm saying we want to purify ourselves but don't i understand that that's like anorexia defined right i want to purify myself i want to be better i just don't want to be involved with any other human beings doing it that's exactly right and then you run around and say well why can't we do this

like why can't we all get together

you have no interest when that damn 400 500 years of charge come spring-loaded charge the reason why you don't want to do it because you know it's spring-loaded right you know it's spring-loaded so you don't you know it right

that's why that's why because you know you are not conditioned to deal with that spring.

This is why I'm one of only two men that have been on this thing.

You don't want to deal with white men you ain't gonna

you i got my own

i got my own podcast if i don't want you on here i'm not gonna have you on here right

and by doing that you don't temper and condition yourself

and i'm not telling you to bring they asses on i'm not but i'm saying

not

doing it

is doing something.

That's right.

Fuck.

I'm not like, see y'all look at each other.

I'm not.

Look, this is your podcast.

Do what the fuck you want to do.

I'm not telling you what to do.

I'm saying there's a certain conditioning that you're doing, but by not doing it.

That's right.

Maybe you figure out ways to do it by not having them on the pod.

Maybe there's some way that you begin, but you're not conditioning yourself to deal with the 500 years of rage that you have that's been passed down through white, quote unquote, female bodies.

That shit, the spring load of that is still there.

The spring load is the charge.

And the charge is

the charge.

It's 400 years of charge.

This is why when I'm working with people who are addicted and they don't want to deal with race, I'm like, oh, you are in an environment in which the whole construct of this shit was predicated on pigmentocracy.

And you think that that's separate from your addiction?

You literally believe

that your unwillingness to work with race

is not fueling some, at least a little piece of your addiction.

The idea that this whole thing in America has been constructed on raping people that look like me for 250 years legally.

Legally.

Legally, legally could rape people that look like me for 250 years.

And you don't think that that's fucking with your sobriety?

You don't think what's happening in Palestine is fucking with your sobriety?

Like you don't want to get up out of bed and you just think it's your depression kicking up again, or you just need to put your fucking, you know, sunlight on your face more or take some more vitamin D.

That's what you think.

We are living on a living entity right this moment, connected to other living entities.

And we don't believe that our feet sloshing around in indigenous blood is impacting us.

You don't think that's having anything to do.

So whenever your urges to deal with your addiction start fucking popping up, you're only trying to find out what's happening in the personal realm.

That might be.

You have no interest in the the historical.

You have no interest in the intergenerational.

You have no interest in the personal, in the persistent institutional.

You just go right to what's happening between me and my meme, right?

And all of that shit is balled in.

And you have no way of pulling out a little bit, nibbling it, and working with it so you can get conditioned by it.

What's an example of clean pain?

Let me ask you this.

You said earlier, you said resmo i've started to begin to understand a little bit about how not just my head and thinking about this but my body i understand it differently now than i did even the first time i started to read the book okay

there's a part of that that when you say that to me that you experience as resource okay i got a little bit more room with it right there's more room to be able to kind of play with the idea that my body is engaged in this, right?

At the same time you say that, there's also a constriction that says I might use again too.

That fear of,

yeah, I got some of it,

but there's this other shoe that might drop.

Right.

And usually our interrogation is that, how do I make sure I'm not in this environment?

How do I make sure I'm not in?

I'm not around toxic people.

I'm not doing this, that and the other, right?

And in that,

you can begin to condition yourself so that piece becomes fuel for this piece.

That in that, you begin to understand the difference between clean and dirty, not by gorging on it, but by nibbling on it in little bits.

and then pulling out and going to do something and then come back and nibbling on it in little bits and then going out and nibbling.

And then over time, you notice, ooh, there's a little bit more room here.

That didn't go away.

And I'm not like busting open a chest and now I'm superwoman.

It's just, I got a little bit more room with it now than I did.

That's clean and dirty.

That's clean and dirty.

And most of us are not willing to do that.

Most of us want epiphanies.

We want something to be bestowed on us.

Not that constriction.

So one of the things I always say is that constriction, the constriction, the little constriction in the body the constriction the gnawing the constriction in the face the constriction whatever it is whatever how that constriction is that that's that gnawing that embodied gnawing can over time be cultivated into embodied not knowing

that's good

Most of us don't want to deal with the gnawing.

We want to get rid of the gnawing at any cost.

And the moment you get rid of it is that the moment you find yourself fucked up.

Yep.

Said addicts everywhere.

Yeah.

Yep.

Smart as fuck.

Yeah.

Smart as fuck.

And you like,

something seems off with you.

Something seems off.

You smart as fuck.

Something's off with you.

I don't know what it is.

You got the answer for everything.

Something's fucking off with you.

That's creation itself that's what i'm saying there are these intelligences that we have that have been crowded out by cognition

yeah that's what i mean by understanding it differently like i have found myself in situations where i i feel in my body oh this is the culture i'm being conditioned to so yeah for example resma i'll say something as a white public person, which people will bring to my attention is revealing a narrow vision.

What I have noticed in my body is that after that moment, I think I'm feeling clean pain in that moment.

But then this thing happens that I would not have understood unless I was paying more attention to my body, which is that behind the scenes, that thing will happen publicly.

And then behind the scenes, there will be a lot of white people, specifically men, who email me privately, nothing publicly.

And they'll say, we just saw that.

And that is so unfair.

And we're we're all talking about it, and you're here.

And Resma, I will feel in my body to me as a white woman, what dirty pain feels like, and why it's so hard to identify is because it feels like comfort.

Yes.

Yes.

It feels like.

So, can we do something right quick?

Let's do something.

Let's do something.

So

notice when you just told me that story.

Let's just pause for a second.

As you

notice that story again,

what

are

the images

that are popping through?

What are the images?

Okay, so what comes to my mind is the whole sleeping beauty thing.

Pause.

Stay with the sleeping beauty.

Stay with it.

What's the emotional content

as you notice the sleeping beauty images?

What's the emotional content?

I just keep.

Yeah, right there, right there.

I just

keep thinking of death and safety.

Pause.

When you notice the death.

and safety

where do you notice it in your body or outside of your body?

Where do you notice death first?

It's all chests for me.

Yeah, notice that.

Notice that.

Where do you notice the safety?

It's a little bit lower.

Yeah,

yeah.

So just land on the lower.

Just land on the lower.

As you notice the lower, the little bit of safety,

is there any meaning that shows up?

Any urges that show up?

I mean, Rezma, all I am feeling is the presence of this one picture of Sleeping Beauty, where the like man is over her.

Pause, pause, stop, stop.

You don't have to keep going into the narrative.

There is this man over her.

There's this man over her.

She's pure, sleeping beauty, white skin.

There's this man over her.

So at the same time, it's Prince Charming, as at the same time, he's got a fucking axe in his hand.

So both things are happening at the same time.

White women haven't dealt with that.

Open your eyes.

What we just did was play with the intelligences.

We played with the intelligence of image.

We played with the intelligence of sensation.

We played with the intelligence of meaning-making, urges, emotional,

vibe.

Do you guys understand what I mean?

That's all we did.

And all of that was happening at the same time.

time.

And all we did was just pull it out and nibble on pieces of it for itself, just not answer.

If you do that enough, something begins to move, begins to quake, begins to get worked with in ways that when you just try and deal with it all at the same time, it can't be worked with because it overwhelms.

It's too much.

So that image of having this man over this woman like that and there's been conflicting sensation that goes with it that never gets worked through

so when these white men email you and say you know we saw that and we just think that's unfair there's a part of you that goes oh a white man taking care of me and then there's part of you that goes what the is this

At the same time.

That's exactly right.

White women don't even know that that's something they should be working with.

Y'all don't even know y'all should be working with that.

Wow.

Rezma, every interview you do or talk you do, you just are so generous with yourself and your wisdom and your energy and your mind.

It's not me.

It's my people.

It's not me.

When you hear me talk, you hear my people.

You don't just hear me.

You hear Professor Michael Del Catti.

You hear James Baldwin.

You hear, because I'm part of them.

I'm not apart from them.

So that's what you hear is generosity.

What you hear is radical generosity is because of my people.

That's, I've been conditioned by that.

So this is not me myself.

I am my people.

Wow.

Thank you, Resma.

You're welcome.

Can I ask something, Brian?

Can I pull up something?

You can do whatever you want.

You can do a platform that's coming out called Black Octopus Society.

So it's blackoctopussociety.com.

And it's my online piece subscription and stuff like that workshops all that different type of stuff so if people go there they want to hook up with me we will do that black octopus yeah black octopus society society cool we'll put it in the show notes for sure black octopus society thank you resma thank you we appreciate you're awesome

awesome thank you oh that's the only time abby's ever said that okay bye bye bye y'all

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We Can Do Hard Things is created and hosted by Glennon Doyle, Abby Wombach, and Amanda Doyle in partnership with Odyssey.

Our executive producer is Jenna Wise-Berman, and this show is produced by Lauren Lograsso, Allison Schott, Dina Kleiner, and Bill Schultz.

I give you Tish Milton and Brandy Carlisle.

I walked through fire, I came out the other side.

I chased desire,

I made sure I got what's mine.

And I continue

to believe

that I'm the one for me.

And because I'm mine,

I walk the line.

Cause we're adventurers, and heartbreaks are map.

A final destination.

We've stopped asking directions

to places they've never been.

And to be loved, we need to belong.

We'll finally find our way back home.

And through the joy and pain

that our lives bring,

we can do a heart again.

I hit rock bottom, it felt like a brand new start.

I'm not the problem,

sometimes things fall apart.

And I continue

to believe

the best

people are free,

and it took some time.

But I'm finally fine

because we're adventurers, and heartbreaks are map.

Our final destination

directions

to places they've never been.

And to be loved, we need to be known.

We'll finally find our way back home.

And through the joy and pain

that our lives

bring,

we

can do a hard pain.

We're adventurers and heartbreaks on that.

We might get lost, but we're okay with that.

We've stopped asking directions

in some places they've never been.

And to be loved, we need to belong.

We'll finally find our way back home.

And through the joy and pain

that our lives bring,

we can do hard

things.

Yeah, we can do hard things

Yeah, we

can do hard

things