What I Love About Embodied Facilitation: Integrating the Fragmented Pieces
Photo Credit: Pornpak Khunatorn iStock Photo
As a facilitator myself, I don’t often get to be a participant in others’ facilitation. When I do, it’s a learning experience that I love. Since I left Courageous Conversation, a company that prides itself on its highly skilled facilitators, I’ve not had the chance to observe others as often. So I was excited to settle in and participate with a group whose dialogue was being shaped by other facilitators at this year’s Overcoming Racism conference. It was the first time back in person after two years of Zoom, and I was excited to see how the event would translate back into the in-person experience.
The Zoom years in fact fueled the organizers’ growth, because they understood that as a group of volunteers, they didn’t know how to run a virtual conference. So, they leaned into this gap, hired an expert and set out to learn best practices for virtual environments. They passed this spirit of learning on to their facilitators - requiring session facilitators to take a 2-hour online best practices course. It taught me a lot that I’ve incorporated into my virtual sessions ever since.
So I’ve grown to have high expectations of facilitation at Overcoming Racism.
These include listening well and holding space for active participation by all, modeling and monitoring conversation norms, and being aware enough of one’s own triggers not to exacerbate others’ traumas. Facilitation done well is at least trauma-sensitive in Thomas Hübl’s definition below. Facilitation at its best can be trauma-healing.
Levels of Trauma Consciousness:
Trauma-Informed: I am/we are aware of trauma and its effects.
Trauma-Sensitive: I/we have developed embodied skills to deal with our own & others’ triggered-ness.
Trauma-Healing: I am/we are skilled at integrating fragmented places; difficulties become fertilizer for my/our growth.
–Thomas Hübl, The Future of Collective Healing, online seminar 2021
A Master Class in Listening & Holding Space
This year started out with excellent facilitation by Mala Thao, Vice President of Individual Philanthropy at Greater Twin Cities United Way. Her role was to interview keynote speaker Kao Kalia Yang after her presentation, and then to moderate a panel discussion that ended with audience questions. Through it all, Mala demonstrated the most important skills of a facilitator: listening and holding space. Her deep listening allowed her to ask intuitive questions - so much so that Kalia described them as “delicious.” As she listened from her whole self, she delicately bridged Hmong culture for a largely non-Hmong audience. For instance she started one question by noting that she, like Kalia, had grown up in a traditional Hmong household, one where as a daughter she had little interaction with her father. She noted that Kalia’s writing shows a deep relationship with her father, and asked her to comment on how this developed in her traditional Hmong home. This question was not about inserting herself or her beliefs into the conversation. It was asked with an open mind and an empathetic heart, and the question itself created a cultural bridge that revealed to me a deeper layer of richness in Kalia’s writing.
When it came to the panel and audience questions, Mala showed her skill at holding space. Again, she only spoke up to clarify a question or comment, or to add context. She thoughtfully tossed audience questions to one of the four panelists to start the response, and allowed the conversation to build organically. There were some tough subjects broached, from environmental racism to how to cope with righteous anger in the workplace, yet Mala’s calm and settled physical demeanor telegraphed the message that this was a supportive space to speak. People might take issue with your question, but not with you or your presence in the room. As Resmaa Menakem says, "Settled bodies settle other bodies."
“Settled bodies settle other bodies.” –Resmaa Menakem, Body Blows, Convo's and Art, 2019
I left the session feeling a sense of unity with my fellow participants, and a sense of possibility for us to collectively make a difference. Fragmented places seemed a little more integrated, and difficulties felt more like fertilizer for our growth - the definition of Trauma-healing. I was eager to experience the rest of the conference that lay before me. Lunch followed the morning conversation, and I could sense in the energy and conversation of the dining room that I wasn’t the only one feeling heartened for the journey. I loved that.
And, indeed, that positive energy came with us into the afternoon session I co-facilitated. The Freeing Stuck Refrains: A Reflective Storytelling Space for “What Binds Us? What Liberates Us?” session included one participant who hadn’t read the description that included participatory singing and movement, two things that made her terribly uncomfortable. She was honest with the rest of the group, who were graciously welcoming of her at whatever level of participation she chose, even affirming that her honesty was an example of the “speaking to the extent to which we have lived or experienced” that was stated in our group norms. They themselves embodied our second norm of curiosity, “to watch with wonder.” My co-facilitator, Conie Borchardt, and I had designed our session to engender a brave space for honest and vulnerable conversation. The morning’s session had primed us all to enact it. And this is an important point - facilitators can create the container for dialogue, but participants each bring their experiences, with the recent ones often the most palpable. We have the morning’s skillful facilitator to thank for providing a positive experience for participants to bring forward into their learning experiences.
We have the morning’s skillful facilitator to thank for providing a positive experience for participants to bring forward into their learning experiences.
A Counter-Example
The second day of Overcoming Racism always features an artistic performance, allowing us to get out of our logical brains and access the creativity that will help us build a new future. This year’s artists were Joe Davis and David Scherer of JustMove, a Black man and a White man who use hip hop, spoken word poetry and storytelling to open their audiences up to interracial conversation. In addition to performing, they weave these artistic moments into the facilitation of their own antiracism courses. Joe and David had the entire audience up on our feet as we sang The Power Dance: “Step back, Step up/Yield, Disrupt.” This wasn’t only fun, it was an important exercise in feeling the body make space and take space. Both men referred to Resmaa Menakem’s work and often called attention to the body’s role in coherent antiracist action. I couldn’t have asked for a better setup for my own afternoon session on Hearing the Body’s Told Truth.
Needless to say, the audience was in high spirits as we transitioned into the interview and audience question section. This was moderated by an older Black gentleman whose name I’ll not use, as I don’t have the relationship with him for a call-in. He almost immediately demonstrated that he either didn’t understand, or perhaps didn’t possess the skills to accomplish the role of facilitator. When a White woman began to ask a question before he had started the interview portion with JustMove, rather than calmly redirecting her he barked that it wasn’t her time, “This is MY time! Take her mic away!” A wave of unsettledness moved through the audience.. A White woman later told me that she felt the situation was one of privilege that the facilitator was trying to check; a Black woman said she interpreted it as “Patriarchy, pure and simple.” Either way, shouting down the questioner from your seat on the stage signals that there may not be supportive space for challenging questions to come.
When the Q & A section began, things really fell apart. Joe, the Black artist/panelist, used the word “multiracial” in one of his answers - something to the effect of working toward a multiracial society. The unfortunate facilitator replied that as an antiracist he didn’t like the word, “multiracial,” because race was a concept that had been created to keep him and his ancestors down. He wanted to work toward a multicultural society. This spurred another Black man in the audience to stand up and explain how “multiculturalism” was a buzzword of the 1980’s that had allowed those in the dominant to ignore race and engage in a shallow investigation of cultures other than their own; he further outlined the evolution of the preferred terms from multiculturalism, to diversity, to inclusion, to DEI, to the current antiracism as each was inevitably co-opted by those in power to serve their needs; finally he asked for clarification. What had the facilitator truly meant?
Shouting down the questioner from your seat on the stage signals that there may not be supportive space for challenging questions to come.
Rather than tossing the question back to the featured artists we were all there to hear, the inept facilitator became defensive, rattling off a diatribe about how he was raised, etc. Things continued in this vein, with audience members weighing in and the unskilled facilitator continuing to insert himself into the conversation. The original audience member who had outlined multiculturalism spoke again, then left the auditorium. The situation continued in his absence. A younger Black man toward the front stood up and made a “why can’t we all just get along” type comment about us all being the same underneath the skin. A Black woman eventually responded that she was baffled that she was hearing so much colorblind language at a conference about Overcoming Racism. She went on to state that she and others had come to this conference to talk about something more substantial, and to outline the danger of operating from a place of colorblindness.
All of this was even worse when you consider that Joe and David are expert facilitators who, when they could finally get a word in edgewise, had great answers that showed that they anticipated typical misunderstandings of antiracist work. For instance, after the colorblind comment from the young Black man, David, the White artist/panelist, responded that as much as we’d like to operate that way, we live in a world where race is put on us whether we like it or not. He gave an example of him entering a room and trying to pretend he wasn’t white. It just wouldn’t work. He and Joe spontaneously quoted a line from one of their songs, “Race: a biological fallacy/but a social reality.”
In the end, the person assigned to facilitate slipped out of that role and enacted the sage on the stage, literally.
Worst of all was the irony of this incompetent facilitator refusing to step back, make space, and yield to a pair of presenters who had just finished a performance about that very “power dance.” Joe had also spoken of the necessity of facilitators to move beyond a “sage on the stage” lecturing role to a “guide on the side” mentoring stance. In the end, the person assigned to facilitate slipped out of that role and instead enacted the sage on the stage, literally. He didn't demonstrate an open mind, neither seeking to clarify audience comments nor tossing them to the artists to see how they would answer. More and more people of all races left the auditorium, which seemed less and less like a supportive space. The facilitator had failed to demonstrate even the Trauma-informed level of awareness: “I am/we are aware of trauma and its effects.”
Not Inconsequential: The Ripples and How they Spread
The energy in the dining room afterward was subdued compared to the day before, and the room was not nearly as full as it had been the day before. The conversations I heard and had while going through the buffet line could be summed up as “What just happened?” There was a general tone of shock and an acknowledgement that we were all going to be processing this for a long while.
I facilitated two sessions that afternoon. The first was the embodiment session, Hearing the Body’s Told Truth: Tools for Courageous Dialogue. It was well attended, and people showed up ready to move. In fact, after the first exercise, the “5-minute dance” of resting our attention on what the body is asking us to do, people expressed how much they had needed to move after the morning’s session. In response to the debriefing question, “What did you do, notice or feel; what surprised you?” one woman said that she realized that she had a lot of activation in her body and strongly felt the need to shake it out during that 5 minute period. A tall man said that he was surprised that he wanted to bend at the waist and let his neck lengthen, and that in that gesture he realized that, during the morning session, he had found himself cringing more and more, sinking into his seat and compressing his neck further with each successive wave of unease.
What did you do, notice or feel; what surprised you?
These participants trusted their bodies enough to engage in all the session’s movement activities - I did not have a single person who appeared hesitant. The group included people of many races, all of whom expressed their appreciation for the chance to move and process verbally together. Several said it was “better than therapy.” One even called it “life changing.” Now, I don’t want to sell myself short as a facilitator, but having 100% gratitude at the end of a session is unusual. My sense is that they came in still feeling unsettled from the morning and were able to settle their nervous systems in our first exercise. That built trust on a physical level, both between the participants and me, and among the group members. They were then willing to be playful in one exercise, to connect nonverbally in another, and to move beyond respectful listening into watching one another’s stories and movements “with wonder” by the end. Oddly, I have the morning’s inept facilitator to thank for providing a stimulus that we all shared, and all needed to work through.
I have the embodied awareness practices of Social Presencing Theater to thank for the means of working through it.
My second, co-facilitated session, Our Earliest Narratives: Talking to Young Children About Race, a Design Process had had a healthy pre-registration of 20 or more participants. We ended up with just three people. Those three said that they had heard a lot of people at lunch and during their first afternoon session expressing the need to go home early. The morning had led to a different consequence for this session, and possibly others in the late afternoon. My co-facilitator, Christy Spencer, and I had presented the same conversation norms in this session as I had in the other two. This time everyone was certainly respectful, but more hesitant to be vulnerable, even in pair-share conversations.
This time everyone was certainly respectful, but more hesitant to be vulnerable, even in pair-share conversations.
Though the session included some embodiment exercises, it was not billed as an experiential workshop - even comparing the titles, you can tell that this one was more of a cognitive exercise, and one with the high stakes of our children’s futures. My sense is that the audience simply did not have mental, emotional nor physical bandwidth left for this at the end of a trying day.
Seeds of the Embodied Facilitation Future
Several things I observed give me hope that the ecosystem of antiracism is embracing embodied facilitation practices. When I first attended Overcoming Racism 5 years ago in 2018, there were zero sessions offered on embodiment, despite local author Resmaa Menakem having published the seminal work on the topic, My Grandmother’s Hands: Racialized Trauma and the Pathway to Mending our Hearts and Bodies, the year before. I have submitted multiple workshop proposals each year since, one on embodied antiracism and the other on cultural norms. For two years, only the cultural norms sessions were accepted. Last year and this year, both my proposals were accepted, with the number of participants in embodiment sessions growing steadily. My colleague, Conie Borchardt also had two embodied vocal sessions, one of which was scheduled up against mine, and both were well attended. The audience for this work is growing in size.
The ecosystem of antiracism is embracing embodied facilitation practices.
It’s also growing in sophistication. Last year, the willingness of participants to engage was uneven. This year it was strong, with really only one person unable to participate. Many more people seemed familiar with basic tenets of bodywork including breath work, scanning the body, and mindfulness practices. Most people had read My Grandmother’s Hands, and some mentioned other seminal works including Bessel Van der Kolk’s The Body Keeps the Score: Brain, Mind, and Body in the Healing of Trauma. Everyone was willing to stand up and move publicly in the JustMove session. The artists themselves referenced the importance of including the body in antiracist work, by physically stepping up and back both to yield or disrupt, and also to regulate our nervous systems. Are you comfortable? Step up! Are you on the edge of fight or flight? Step back!
“The success of an intervention depends on the interior condition of the intervener.” –Bill O’Brien
All of this gives me hope, both for the continued spread of embodied antiracist work, and for its effectiveness. This includes the continued development of embodied facilitators. Because, in the words of Bill O’Brien, contributor to Otto Scharmer’s Theory U change-making process, “The success of an intervention depends on the interior condition of the intervener.” When we’re grounded, we can stay curious enough to keep listening. We can respond rather than react defensively. We can hold empathy for questioners and panelists. And all of this allows us to create the kind of space that allows participants to take what they have experienced out into their own lives. We become at least trauma-sensitive, and at best, great facilitators can be trauma-healing.
And I love that.
Looking for an embodied facilitator for your next meeting or workshop? Or curious about how to get more embodied yourself? Let’s chat.