On Anaesthesia, Structural Violence, and Creating Structural Love

We must re-inhabit our social bodies; We must re-aesthetize.

When I was in training with Social Presencing Theater originator Arawana Hayashi, she often said that the Aesthetic is an antidote to the An-aesthetic, or numbing practices of our society.  Social Presencing Theater (SPT) is a set of techniques designed to help us rest our awareness in our bodies. With practice, this awareness extends to the “earth body” on which we exist, and the “social bodies” in which we relate. As I began to practice SPT in my cohort I felt a new sense of aliveness and community. It seemed the more I truly saw my colleagues, the more I felt truly seen. This feeling allowed me to blossom.  In life outside the cohort, I found myself more able to catch glimpses of the emerging future and lead into it. 

The Other “Social Distancing”

Fast forward to the present, when my journey of listening for the emerging future has brought me to the GAIA Initiative, an online community dedicated to leaning into our current moment of disruption and leveraging positive change. Within weeks of the arrival of the virus in the USA, GAIA had attracted tens of thousands of participants in multiple language cohorts around the globe. Many of us heard Dayna Cunningham, MIT Community Innovation Lab Executive Director’s talk on April 10.

She told of her long use of the term “Social Distancing” to describe a different phenomenon - the marginalization, the sense of holding at arm’s length and of estrangement that she as a Black woman often encounters when engaging with White people. She went on to call out “the Social Distance that is racialized in this country and that is resulting in all of the profound suffering in African American and other minority communities.”  

CC - BY - SA Presencing Institute - https://presencing.org/#/resource/permission

If the disproportionate suffering of marginalized communities is the visible tip of the iceberg, Cunningham stepped us down to the structural pattern of inattention to human needs and human suffering, and how that lands as violence in the body. She named this pattern Structural Violence. Clearly this pandemic is making the physical impact of it visible like never before. Then came her mic-drop moment, a drop that took us down another level from structure to thought paradigms: “I believe that Structural Violence is a series of human agreements that we will not pay attention to a set of humans that aren’t somehow as human as we are.”

“I believe that Structural Violence is a series of human agreements that we will not pay attention to a set of humans that aren’t somehow as human as we are”

— Dayna Cunningham

As a White woman this landed on me with the unmistakable impact of a truth long unsaid. That sense of being seen that supported my feelings of aliveness and community in my SPT cohort was something I was withholding from others; worse yet, from the very people who most need attention right now. Part of me wanted to find an anaesthetic for the pain and shame of it. Another part of me knew that this would be succumbing to what author Resmaa Menakim calls “dirty pain,” — that pain we look away from and bottle up, only to have it blow out of us with little warning, harming whoever happens to be in our path. Fortunately, my SPT awareness tools helped me to work toward “clean pain,” that pain that we feel, lean into, and make sense of. As Menakim puts it in My Grandmother’s Hands, metabolizing it in this way is the only way to ensure it won’t come out as more violence. 

Cultural Anaesthetizing & Re-Aesthetizing

But, those unspoken agreements Cunningham named are not just mine, they are normed across a whole culture. And they are much more than unspoken — they are unseen and un-sensed. Those of us who participate in these agreements have had them handed down to us over generations as a way of anesthetizing ourselves to the inequities around us. This fits with the writings of Cultural Somatics practitioner Tada Hozumi: “I have always thought of privilege as a collective dissociation process.” Hozumi argues that this collective dissociation is baked into the dominant norms of white culture, and that the key to undoing privilege is to re-inhabit ourselves by cultivating awareness of our entire bodies. Channeling Arawana, I say that we must also re-inhabit our social bodies by cultivating our awareness of our entire communities, including those at the margins. We must re-aesthetize. 

“I have always thought of privilege as a collective dissociation process.” — Tada Hozumi

The impact of the truth of Dayna Cunningham’s words on me was immediately followed by another truth: That we in the SPT community have the exact tools needed to re-inhabit our personal and social bodies. SPT practices are tools of knowing, and of knowing what to do next. This knowing doesn’t come from the grasping ego or fearful mind, but from the expansive intuition of the body. The S in SPT stands for Social - and this is what differentiates this discipline from others - it is a group practice that allows us to experiment with sensing the fullness of whatever social fields we find ourselves in. And, yes, we can learn to do this mediated by a screen in this quarantined time (see my prior post on building our Spidey Senses).

Toward Structural Love

I See You!

At the end of her talk Dayna Cunningham called us to “Structural Love,” starting with attentional focus, compassion and empathy. She envisioned “our world as a shimmering net of emotions and agreements and commitments.” The global SPT community stands ready to disseminate these practices in a network of practice groups that’s still expanding worldwide. Won’t you join us in the urgent quest to become more Socially Present and able to practice Structural Love? Browse these links to find a global practice group, head to my Classes & Events page to see my current offerings, or schedule a call with me to find out more.