The Politics of Trauma:

Embodied Transformation, Social Action and Love

Whether you've been involved in social and climate justice long term, or care deeply but are not sure how to get more involved, this course offers a place of community, collective practice, and transformation — inviting us to live more fully, lead more boldly, and love more deeply.

Facilitators and Teachers

Staci Haines

Erika Lyla

Brandon Sturdivant

Powerful Interviews with Movement Leaders

Alicia Garza

Deepak Bhargava

May Boeve

Malkia Cyril

Malcolm Amado Uno

Coming Again Fall 2024

Thank you for your interest in the online course The Politics of Trauma: Embodied Transformation, Social Action and Love. We appreciate you.  

The program will be offered again this fall. And there will be more live courses to come. To find out about programs as they are announced sign up below.

Want to learn more?

What do embodied transformation and social action have to do with each other? Why is healing essential as we organize for social and climate justice? Why is our joy so vital?

Our experiential 75m Virtual Open House explores these questions through somatic practices and embodied conversations. This can give you a taste of embodied transformation in service of social and climate justice. We also introduce our online program that launched October 10, 2023 and is full. So, you can skip that part.

So many of us committed to both personal and social transformation are sitting with a lot of questions these days.

The type of questions that have no single answer.

  • How can we both heal and strengthen our social change organizations?

  • How can we as people committed to social and climate justice keep learning and experimenting instead of rigidifying and ‘making wrong’? 

  • How can we love ourselves and each other well, in such pressured times? 

  • How do we create the systemic change we need, at the scale we need, in the timeframe we need?

Personal and social transformation are distinct but interdependent processes.

The impacts of social injustices, climate change, and the stresses within our progressive and Left social change movements, are taking their toll. These times are asking a lot of us. 

The Politics of Trauma Online Course offers embodied transformation, a pragmatic understanding of the impacts of personal and collective trauma, and ways to cultivate resilience and connection. Through embodied practices and processes, we delve into the path of transformative leadership, personal and collective healing, and ways to hold the contradictions and complexities we are asked to navigate—while deepening our capacity for loving and being loved. 

We’ll also hear from five movement leaders throughout the course - Alicia Garza, Malkia Cyril, Deepak Bhargava, May Boeve, and Amado Uno. They will help us better understand our times, strategies for change, and the connections between personal and systemic transformation as well as the limitations.

COMING AGAIN FALL 2024

This course is based on three decades of experiments at the intersection of somatics and social justice, through generationFIVE and transformative justice, generative somatics, and many partnerships with social and climate justice organizations and alliances.

The course is led by a diverse teaching team, all of whom have been experimenting at the intersection of embodied transformation and social justice for a decade or more.

Whether you are a long time social and climate justice activist, organizer, or movement leader—or care deeply but are not sure how to get more involved—this course offers a place of community, collective practice, and transformation. We encourage folks to join with a practice partner, team, or collective and go through the course together.

Grounded in somatic theory and practice, the 17-week Online Course offers a pathway of embodied transformation, inviting us to live more fully, lead more boldly, and love more deeply.

Through a series of pre-recorded and live sessions, small group coaching circles, daily practices, and interviews with social and climate justice movement leaders, you will:

  • Build a joyful and sustaining vision for your life, your leadership and your social justice work, while staying responsive to what is.

  • Discover the unavoidable embodied habits and reactions we take on to navigate our lives, trauma and oppression, and the challenges of social justice work…and how to transform those that don’t work anymore.

  • Learn to generate more trust and range in relationship, and cultivate our ability to learn and grow together, rather than taking each other down.

  • Explore limits and boundaries, when to stop and when to stretch, for yourself and for the collective.

  • Use transformative practice to strengthen our organizations and movements, not limit them. Cultivate embodied resilience, individually and collectively.

  • Chart a purposeful path of practice that nourishes vision, growth and our collective work. Bring a more whole and healed self to your life, loves and movement work.

The Politics of Trauma: Embodied Transformation, Social Action and Love consists of:

  • Six Modules, each with a 90-minute pre-recorded session and a 90- minute live session

  • Three live, small group coaching circles facilitated by experienced social justice somatic coaches

  • Interviews with movement leaders in social and climate justice

  • A live, 60-minute Opening session and live, 60-minute Celebration and Gratitude session

  • Access to an online learning platform with handouts, resources, recommended readings, and daily practice videos, more.

  • Personal somatic coaching sessions are available at a community rate.

COMING AGAIN FALL 2024

Module One: Joy & Justice in the Apocalypse

We begin by looking at our current conditions, and what it’s like to live individually and collectively under so much pressure. From there, we introduce a roadmap for embodied transformation and trauma healing that integrates an understanding of how we are shaped by our social conditions. We’ll start to get to know our embodied reactions and habits and how to work with them.

Module Two: Muscle of Imagination: Visions for Change

We will learn how declarations ask us to build our muscle for visioning and longing. We’ll hold imagination not as a fantasy, but a faculty of the soul which is necessary to navigate our times. We’ll learn how to be rooted in what is, while creating both personal and collective visions for change.

Module Three: Just Resilience & Regenerating Safety

From a justice perspective, we will learn what resilience is and what it is not, and how to cultivate resilience both individually and collectively. We’ll work with a somatic definition of safety and practice regenerating safety from the inside out. We will develop more relational skills like consent, boundaries, and requests while considering the I, you, and we. Lastly, we’ll deepen our ability to navigate the differences between triggers, challenging experiences, and conditions.

Module Four: Roots & Depth

We will delve into what ‘somatic opening’ is, why it’s necessary for sustained change, and how to work with our embodied survival strategies. Somatic opening helps us get to the roots of old embodied worldviews that don’t serve our lives and work to transform them from the body up. We’ll learn how expanding our capacity to sense and feel can expand our choices and skillfulness.

Module Five: Relationship & Complexity

We’ll explore relational skills, and how we can grow together. We’ll learn to expand, to be with complexity, and increase our emotional range. We’ll explore how we can, together, hold contradictions in our relationships and in our movement work. Somatics understands giving and receiving love as an embodied skill we can learn and cultivate.

Module Six: Path, Practice, & Embodying Our Visions

With embodied transformation as a path, we will unpack how you can use practices to help you embody your declaration and navigate the space between who you are now and who you are becoming.

The Politics of Trauma is a 15-week online course running from October 2024 - January 2025.

More to come soon.

About the Somatic Facilitators/ Teachers

Staci K. Haines

Staci has been experimenting at the intersections of personal and social transformation for the last 30 years through the work of somatics, trauma healing, embodied leadership, and transformative justice. Staci is the author of "The Politics of Trauma: Somatics, Healing and Social Justice" (North Atlantic Books 2019) and "Healing Sex: A Mind Body Approach to Healing Sexual Trauma" (Cleis 1999, 2007).

Staci is a leader in the field of Somatics, focusing on how it can bring transformative capacity to social and climate justice movements, and help to heal the impacts of trauma and oppression. She leads online and in-person programs and partners with social justice organizations, recently teaming up with Healing Justice London, Equality Lab, and Crenshaw Dairy Mart. She is the co-founder and prior executive director of generative somatics, a senior teacher at Strozzi Institute, and a core contributor to the Strozzi methodology. In 1999 Staci founded generationFIVE, a non-profit whose mission is to end the sexual abuse of children within five generations using transformative justice approaches.

Erika Lyla

Erika Lyla is a somatics coach + bodyworker + trainer + therapist + facilitator + activist + mother. Erika works with people to reveal their power, potential, and purpose. She guides with love and laughter towards life grounded in authenticity and shaped by dreams. She practices in unceded Ohlone land known as Oakland, CA and leads programs through generative somatics and Strozzi Institute. Erika is also a member of The Embodiment Institute’s Black Practitioner Cohort, an international group of Black transformational leaders.

Erika has been facilitating collective and personal transformation processes for over 15 years and holds a Master’s Degree in Social Welfare from UC Berkeley. She specializes in working with people facing psychiatric crises, survivors of sexual violence, and individuals healing from complex trauma. Prior to expanding her private practice, Erika supported individuals in navigating the medical industrial complex as a social worker, and also worked as a youth organizer and with school age children as an after school teacher and program director.

Brandon Sturdivant

Brandon Sturdivant helped build the capacity of East Bay organizations through co-founding the Justice Reinvestment Coalition, which secured half of state realignment funds in support of reducing probation terms and policies that expand opportunities for employment and access for community services for formerly incarcerated people. As co-founders of Mass Liberation Project, an abolitionist organization that works to train, coach, and develop black organizers who are directly impacted by incarceration, Brandon along with Alex Muhammad helped to seed the creation of four new femme-led abolitionist organizations: Mass Lib Arizona, Michigan Liberation, Mass Lib Nevada, and Life After Release (DMV).

In addition, working on the principle that transforming systems requires transforming ourselves, Mass Liberation Project has instituted “Return & Reclaim,” taking black formerly incarcerated organizers to Ghana to reclaim their ancestral heritage as an act of generational resistance. Lastly, Brandon has been studying and teaching somatics for 7 years through generative somatics, Black Organizing for Leadership and Dignity (BOLD), Strozzi Institute, and in programs and courses with Staci Haines.

About Movement Leaders

Alicia Garza

Alicia believes that Black communities deserve what all communities deserve -- to be powerful in every aspect of their lives. An author, political strategist, organizer, and cheeseburger enthusiast, Alicia founded the Black Futures Lab to make Black communities powerful in politics. She is the co-creator of #BlackLivesMatter and the Black Lives Matter Global Network, serves as the Strategy & Partnerships Director for the National Domestic Workers Alliance, and is a co-founder of Supermajority, a new home for women’s activism. Alicia has become a powerful voice in the media and frequently contributes thoughtful opinion pieces and expert commentary on politics, race and more to outlets such as MSNBC and The New York Times. She has received numerous accolades and recognitions, including being on the cover of TIME’s 100 Most Influential People in the World issue and being named to Bloomberg's 50 and Politico's 50 lists. She is the author of the critically acclaimed book, The Purpose of Power: How We Come Together When We Fall Apart (One World Penguin Random House), and she warns you: hashtags don’t start movements, people do.

Deepak Bhargava

Deepak Bhargava is a policy expert on issues of poverty, economic justice, racial equity, and immigration, and has extensive practical experience in community organizing, leadership development, social movements, progressive strategy, issue campaigns, coalition building and voter mobilization.

Prior to joining SLU, he was President and Executive Director of Community Change and Community Change Action for 16 years, two of the premier national organizations supporting grassroots community organizing in low-income communities of color in the United States. He has trained and mentored hundreds of leaders who play key roles in progressive organizations and social justice movements, and worked to establish important labor-community partnerships at the national level on issues such as immigration reform, health care, and fiscal policy.

May Boeve

May Boeve is a passionate climate activist, spurring campaigns and leading the climate movement in the US and on a global stage for almost two decades.

May is currently the Executive Director of 350.org, an international organization that she co-founded in 2008. Since then, the group has grown to over 160 staff members and mobilizes a network of more than 500 local groups spread around all continents. 350.org is an innovative movement building organization, which combines public pressure, campaigning, and organizing to stop the fossil fuel industry and foster a transition towards renewable energy that is rooted in justice and builds people power.

As a young female leader, May became 350's Executive Director when she was just 27. She has been a strong advocate for equity and diversity, working to build alliances across social movements. May is a co-author of Fight Global Warming Now, and was featured as a TIME Magazine next generation leader, a recipient of the John F. Kennedy New Frontier Award, and has been featured in numerous publications as a thought leader about movement building to fight the climate crisis. She lives in the San Francisco Bay Area with her husband and daughter.

Malkia Devich-Cyril

Malkia Devich-Cyril is an activist, writer and public speaker on issues of digital rights, narrative power, Black liberation, social movements and collective grief. Devich-Cyril is also the founding and former Executive Director of MediaJustice — a national hub boldly advancing racial justice, rights and dignity in a digital age. After more than 10 years of organizational leadership, Devich-Cyril now serves as a Senior Fellow at Media Justice, Leading Edge Fellow, in-Residence Strategist at the Narrative Initiative, and is a contributing writer to various publications including The Atlantic, Wired Magazine, TechCrunch, The Washington Post, Truthout, In These Times and We Will Not Cancel Us — a book by adrienne maree brown, among others.

In 2002, Malkia Devich Cyril helped coin the term “Media Justice”, and in 2019 declared that one significant goal of the Media Justice movement was to “fight for a future where we are all connected, represented and free.”

For more than 20 years, Devich-Cyril has championed the cultural and communication rights of communities of color and built the power of under-represented groups to demand and win equity in a digital age. Devich-Cyril remains a veteran leader in the movement for digital rights and freedom, and in the movement for Black lives.

Devich-Cyril is regularly a featured speaker on issues of media, technology, race, movement strategy and collective grief — and has appeared in publications like Politico, Motherboard, Essence Magazine, and three documentary films including the Oscar nominated 13TH, directed by Ava DuVernay. Devich-Cyril is a recipient of the 2012 Donald H. McGannon Award for work to advance the roles of women and people of color in the media reform movement, a 2013 Prime Movers fellow, winner of the 2015 Hugh Hefner 1st Amendment Award for framing net neutrality as a civil rights issue, winner of the 2016 Electronic Frontier Pioneer award, a YBCA 100 honoree, a 2017 Root 100 honoree, and a 2020 Good Morning America Black Inspiration honoree.

Malcolm Amado Uno

Malcolm Amado Uno brings over two decades of experience organizing, building multiracial coalitions and waging local and statewide campaigns to improve the lives of low income communities of color, including progressive revenue, minimum wage, workers’ rights, environmental justice and candidate campaigns.

Amado currently serves as the director of the Million Voters Project where he gets the opportunity to co-conspire with some of the state’s most brilliant movement leaders to expand the electorate and mobilize the rising California majority to the polls around a justice agenda. Prior to joining MVP, Amado served as the Political Director for the Asian Pacific Environmental Network (APEN) where he helped launch APEN Action and build one of the largest AAPI mass voter bases in the state and country. As the former Executive Director of the Asian Pacific American Labor Alliance, he created strong labor and community partnerships, advocated for multi-generational leadership in the labor movement, helped to train the next generation of AAPI union organizers and implemented APLALA’s Every Vote Counts political program.

Amado is an alumni of the Obama Administration where he served as Special Assistant to the U.S. Secretary of Labor, is a recipient of the Public Policy and International Affairs (PPIA) and Coro Fellowship and received his graduate degree in Public Policy from Carnegie Mellon University.

About the Somatic Coaching Circle Leads

During the Somatic Coaching Circles you'll be held and supported to explore and deepen the practices you're learning in the program, and get to build community with a smaller group of people. Seasoned somatic coaches will be holding the coaching circles, in a variety of timezones to meet your needs.

This course is in the Living Lineage of generative somatics and Strozzi Institute.

FAQ

  • All program content will be presented through Thinkific. This includes: pre-recorded sessions, recording of live sessions, practice videos, written materials and resources, etc. Live sessions and coaching circles will be held over Zoom.

  • Yes, all live sessions will be recorded and available within approximately 6 hours on the online learning platform.

  • During the course, content will be released weekly and then will be available to you on the online learning platform indefinitely. You will be able to go through the recordings of live sessions at your own pace and review the contents at any time.

  • We are exploring being able to have the program accessible in Spanish as well as English. We’ll let you know as soon as we do!

  • Yes, transcripts of pre-recorded sessions and recordings of live sessions will be provided.

  • We offer a full, no-questions asked refund until October 28 (two weeks after the program start date). After this time, partial refunds are offered proportionally to how much of the course has elapsed (for example, if you request a refund after the first 4 weeks, which is approximately 25% of the course, you’ll be offered a 75% refund).

  • Yes, we offer a 15% discount for groups of 20 or more. Contact support@stacihaines.com for more information.

  • Scholarship applications will open up once the course is offered again.

© Staci K. Haines. All Rights Reserved.