Hemphill to discuss “What It Takes To Heal”
Prentis Hemphill ’04 will be at Ӱ̳ College to discuss their book “What It Takes To Heal.” The book poses the question: ““What would it do to movements, to our society and culture, to have the principles of healing at the very center?”
is a therapist, somatics teacher and facilitator, political organizer, writer and the founder of . They are also the author of “” in which they assert that the principles of embodiment — the recognition of our body’s sensations and habits and the beliefs that inform them — are critical to lasting healing and change.
In the book, Hemphill demonstrates a future in which healing is done in community. They ask the questions: “What would it do to movements, to our society and culture, to have the principles of healing at the very center? And what does it do to have healing at the center of every structure and everything we create?”
on Oct. 16 at 7 pm to talk about “What It Takes To Heal” with . The talk, which takes place in the Gamble Auditorium, is sponsored by the Office of Diversity, Equity and Inclusion, the Weissman Center for Leadership and the President’s Office. In advance of their talk, Hemphill discussed such topics as losing the skill of connecting, experiencing curiosity about ourselves and feeling it all.
The interview has been lightly edited and condensed for clarity.
One theme that keeps reappearing in your work is “connection” — connection to your body, connection to your emotions, connection to your values and connection to your community. Can you dive deeper into that?
Connection and relationships are so important. I feel like it's a capacity to be connected — a skill that we're losing in a lot of ways. I think, through the struggles that we're having as a society — the way that technology sort of trains us into particular ways of relating with each other or expressing ourselves or listening to the other — that the depth and the art of connection is in having us reignite our sense of connection as this incredible site of transformation.
Through connection, we get to be with the other, to encounter the other and to feel ourselves taking risks and change. We get to feel the support and the resource of being with others, and it helps us shed this idea that we are isolated beings that can do everything on our own; that we don't need each other, or it's a shame if we need each other; and that we should deal with our own problems and heal separately from everyone else.
It's vital for any healing and transformation that we be with others and that we be resourced by others. You won't even know that you've changed if you're not actually interacting with other beings; you have to know through relationships. So, for me, the primary site of transformation is relationships with each other — relationships inside of our ecosystem and even relationships with ourselves.
A lot of us really treat ourselves with a lack of curiosity, a lack of listening, a lack of honoring who it is that we are and what it is that we feel. We suppress that. We try to kind of construct ourselves into who we feel like we should be. And, for lots of reasons, we can easily get co-opted into a lot of agendas when we actually can't feel ourselves. So, to me, relationships all around are really where things change. And it's where we can experience our lives.
What has been really noticeable to you about how people react to the book?
What I find is that people are either interested in the healing work and the embodiment piece, or they're interested in my social justice movement work. And I think it's really hard sometimes for people's brains to understand how I'm actually saying that these processes are interdependent and weave together.
Whatever it is that is easier for you to pay attention to [in the book] — whether it's individual healing or social change — then I'm actually calling you to look at the other. The thing that you're less inclined to pay attention to, bring your curiosity there. With the book, I think people read it and say, “Oh, this is just about social movements,” or “Oh, this is just about individual healing.” But the point that I'm really trying to weave together is, it's actually all of it. And how you show up in one place is how you're going to show up in another place. You bring your patterns, you bring your behaviors everywhere you go, and you're also deeply shaped by the world around you. So, if we want to actually be liberated from some of the things that we do that are counter to what we believe, we also have to change the conditions that we live in. So, it's both. And it's a big call. It's a big ask.
What’s the one thing that you hope people take from the book or your work?
Feel it all. The work here is to feel it. Sometimes things are very hard to feel, and I understand that it means that we need more resources to feel it. We need more relationships to feel it. But it doesn't mean that we don't feel it. I think we have to feel it all. That is the opportunity of this life. That is the challenge of this life. I think it's honestly our responsibility in this life. Because feeling is how we learn. It's how we understand what has happened and what it meant to us. It helps us understand what to do differently.
Audre Lorde has really shaped my understanding of this; that feeling gives us access to a whole other dimension. It changes the quality of relationships; it changes the quality of our lives; it changes our relationship to time. I think the way we get out of some of these really entrenched, harmful patterns that we're in is actually not through trying to incessantly fix everything the way we end up doing but through feeling the things that we've avoided. It opens up a whole other trapdoor of possibilities.
So that's what I want to say. The book is trying to make that case, but also, I wrote it in a way that is trying not to leave you alone in your feelings [but] to say that I've been there. I'm there every day. I'm right here with you. I'm trying to accompany you through the work of feeling your share.
