Unknown Speaker 0:00
We can do just one more thing Hello, everyone, welcome to living in this queer body, a podcast about barriers to embodiment, and how our collective body stories bring us back to ourselves. I'm Asher Pandjiris. And I appreciate you being here with me today. So I discovered the work of Prentice Hemphill on Instagram, through my connections to Adrienne Marie Brown. And one thing that friends have said, impacted me so much that I built a workshop around the theme several months ago, thanks to all who participated. They said something simple, but really profound. And here's the quote, “boundaries are the distance at which I can love you and me simultaneously”. And I think Prentis’s work is deeply informed by a kind of wisdom that exists in such an embodied way. And I think you'll find in our interview that this is truly a person who can speak about complex experiences in a really brilliant way. They are truly an honor to speak with, and I hope you enjoy this episode.
Unknown Speaker 1:49
I also hope that if you are listening to this before November 10, you consider signing up for a workshop with me, the workshop description is available on my website, and you can register on my website, which is living in this queer body.com or on Instagram at living in this queer body. And I'm also available for one on one sessions, and those can be booked on my website at living in this career. body.com So on November 10, I'm co hosting part one of a two part virtual workshop with Marielle Berg, who is a psychotherapist and podcaster trained in the Health at Every Size modality. She's the host of the skillful podcast in the it's just a cookie podcast. She's a white, queer cisgendered person who is in recovery from an eating disorder. She's the founder and director of Bay Area DBT, a couples counseling center in San Francisco. She also supports people worldwide and healing disordered eating and body hatred through online coaching. So our workshop is called Health ism and Nutritionism are not helping with your healing. And it's open to all people, including those in the health and healing professions as well as those like us, Mary Ellen, myself, who have been impacted by Healthism in our own relationship to our bodies will define these terms. Talk about how it is that these discourses interfere with our true healing. And in particular, we're going to talk a lot about what is considered to be the virtuousness of health, and wellness, which is a very big topic that I think impacts pretty much all of us whether or not we have had experiences with disordered eating, or orthorexia, or live in disabled bodies. Whatever the case may be, we have challenges figuring out how to nourish ourselves and feel as if there's a lot of judgment in our relationships or in the world around that. This is definitely the workshop for you. It's pertinent for folks who can relate to some of these questions that we generated. Do you find yourself choosing foods based on whether they're good, bad or clean? Do you inhabit a disabled fat or chronically ill body that is judged for being bad, weak or lacking discipline? Do you work with people in your professional life who negatively judge others who aren't healthy or themselves? Do you intellectually? disagree that health is not entirely in our own hands but find yourself making decisions in your life that are driven by an imperative to constantly improve your health and wellness? Do you develop health and wellness goals for yourself all the time? Okay, I could go on and on. But I really want to go to our interview. So I'll introduce Prentice. And then we will, we'll hear from them. So Prentis Hemphill is a movement facilitator, Somatics teacher and practitioner and a writer living and working at the convergence of healing, individual and collective transformation and political organizing practice spent many years working with powerful movements and organizations most recently as the Healing Justice director at Black Lives Matter global network. In 2016. Practice was awarded the Buddhist Peace Fellowship sama Award for Community Work inspired by Buddhist thought. Currently Prentice is a teacher of Somatics with generative somatics, which is focused on bringing a politicized somatics practice to movement building organizations and with black organizing for leadership and dignity, a training program for black organizers throughout the US
Unknown Speaker 6:04
and works as a facilitator and consultant for organizations and groups looking to center healing, justice and transformative justice into the very core of the work that they do to build more well and self determined communities. Apprentices served as a board member for the National queer and trans therapists of color network, a network for connecting communities with Representative mental health practitioners, and an effort at bringing frameworks for Healing Justice more soundly into our current mental health provision models, and black, emotional and mental health. An organization committed to removing the barriers for black people to receive mental and emotional care. Prentice is also a deeply committed practitioner and healer who utilizes somatics methodology, intuitive and ancestral practice into their work to heal trauma and unlock the unique brilliance and contribution of each person. Body and being that they work with. You can find out more about Prentice at their website, which is Prentice hemphill.com. So that's prentishemphill.com. And they are on Instagram. They are prentishemphill. . And let's get on to the interview.
Unknown Speaker 7:56
Prentis thank you so much for being here. Really appreciate it. Yeah. So I'd love to start with just a reflection on how you at an early age came to know about being in a body? Like what messages or what environment? Did you find yourself in that way?
Unknown Speaker 8:26
Yeah, I've heard you ask this question to other people on the podcast. And it's always an interesting one for me. And I think every time I hear it, I have a different answer for myself. The question to me, the body in itself is a distinction that we make as human beings. And I think the realization that you have a body or that you are a body. I think it happens in stages, obviously, moments, I still discover my body, often. But there's also a different question for me. And when did I first discover what my body could do? Or feel the wonder of my body? That would lead me down a different path? And I think when did I first discover that I had a body? Probably puberty in a way. I mean, you know, I think when you're a kid, it's like I'm a part of this whole thing, a part of this family. It's, you don't, you're not always thinking about what makes you distinct from the other people in your environment or in your family. Other than when you have moments of pain or you know, moments of joy, like okay, I'm experiencing something distinct. But for the most part, I think I felt really a part of actually this is interesting, I think when I was about 11 or 12. I used to walk around with my shirt off all the time. And I mean, honestly, I still do those Okay. But my mother said, You need to put your shirt on because you have a little brother, you need to make sure that you're covered up. So I think that's when I got the message that there was something about my body that needed to be covered. Yeah, probably 11 or 12, I got that message, I was pretty defiant against it, I still resisted it. I used to go to school, and I was really proud that I didn't need a bra. And there were so many people wearing bras, you know, to belong. I'm not doing that. I don't want to add something extra. So I used to be in the locker room basketball locker room, like, I don't need a bra. And it's awesome. So that's when I started feeling some like anticipation, anxiety, kind of the projection from others of shame onto my body. I think previous to that, you know, just to kind of roll back a little bit I felt a part of but I also you know, I've always been a dancer. Dance was a way that I really experienced my body, not so much experiencing it as a body, but as a way to kind of authentically express how I felt. I really use dance therapeutically, to help me process emotionally from when I was a young kid. So like, my body was able to express my emotional life. I was so connected to it through that. Yeah, I keep discovering my body, though. It's like a constant discovery.
Unknown Speaker 11:44
Yeah, absolutely. I like the way you kind of pointed out that. And as a therapist, this is something that I end as a human. But as a therapist, it's very poignant, this idea that we, we kind of keep discovering our bodies, and that it's such a, I think there's so much discourse and kind of the, you know, broad wellness community about this idea that you either are or aren't in your body, you know, you're kind of like meditate and you enter into your butt, you know, like you're embodied or you're not or, and, and I think that's a real, you know, certainly you're breaking down this idea that you can just always be discovering different aspects of what it means to be in your body, even making the distinction about, you know, the way dance function for you, possibly, and I wonder if it function differently than like, for instance, you mentioned basketball, you know, right like that basketball was maybe I don't know, if it was a way for you to kind of express aspects of your emotional life. But I imagine if it was then it was a, it was kind of a different aspect of your emotional life.
Unknown Speaker 12:54
Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I think dance has to go into that a little bit. I think dance to me has a wider kind of range of language. And it for me, I can express a lot of things through dance. And then I have other practices that feel more specific. I think like you're saying, I think basketball, I don't play basketball anymore. I was not a gifted basketball player. But I was the best defensive player, I think in the eighth grade, because I was so aggressively defended. I didn't understand anything about plays, or where I should be standing or who my person was, I was always like, just get the ball. Yeah, whatever that was, I was expressing through basketball. Yeah, and I think around the embodiment piece, you know, I was thinking about this earlier today. And I was like, Oh, I also discover my body through, you know, analysis, or what we call kind of political analysis, or when I'm able to understand more about how the world shapes itself or how the world shapes my body and my experience of the world. You know, if I, when I understand more about ableism, as an example than I, I actually, it's something I get to understand about my own body and the way the world has arranged itself around my body and therefore shaped my body. When I understand things like colorism, there's a way that I can, you know, then understand the way my body has been shaped by that in my life and experiences in the shape of colorism or anti-blackness, those things that we point to as political analysis. You know, I think in this era, we're able to talk more about they're actual embodied experiences. And we are shaped by them really deeply. So when I'm in community and folks reflect back to me a part of the world or the shaping that I haven't understood, and discover parts of my body there to also think as I age as my emotional life changes, I discover more about my body to my body is it? Is it changing? It's changing all the time. It's always changing. So there's so many bodies to discover inside of this one body that we sent around.
Unknown Speaker 15:22
Right? Yeah, like the universal, the body you're born with is the body, right? It's like, Yeah,
Unknown Speaker 15:29
I've had many bodies.
Unknown Speaker 15:32
Yeah, yeah. Where do you think you've got? I don't know if that's if it feels like it's came from your own discovery. But were there people around you? Are there things that have helped you to understand that notion of being many bodies within a body? You know, I mean, like, what do you what can you think of or point to that, or practices or things that you've involved yourself in that kind of helped you to understand the multiplicity of possibilities or, you know, just realities of, of who you are, what you contain within yourself.
Unknown Speaker 16:12
I can think of a few different lineages, I think, one, it's hard to know what you came in with. And to point to that, it's really hard to know. But I think that one of the things that if I didn't come in with a, it's been around for a while, is just, I feel really deeply committed to being myself. If nothing else, I feel very committed to being myself and, and exploring what, what life has to say to me. And that's always kind of been a central practice of mine is to get to know myself, to get to know life, to be up close to it, to be honest with myself to change. So that may have been influenced by people around me, I don't know that my parents would say the same thing about themselves or, yeah, so it feels something. Like, that's just always been with me. But I do think, you know, I grew up in the church, I grew up in the church, and we were kind of like, Polly around the denominations, we would go to my mom like to dabble. We were all we were, we always are in the Christian sphere, fear. But, you know, we went into the Catholic churches, we went to Baptist churches, we went to Presbyterian churches, I got a lot of different flavors. But I think especially in the kind of Pentecostal frame, the body is very much an actor in that lineage, or tradition. And transformation is very much a thing that happens. And it's very, very much a body transformation. And even the whole kind of Christian concept of, which isn't only Christian, but that concept of being born again, or born and new. And that can happen, you know, you can look the same and you can become a new person, I think that that is probably deeply ingrained in me. And then I think, discovering, you know, Somatics, when I was probably 2827 28, something like that, having a space to learn about the body to integrate what I've known about the body through, you know, my culture, my life, growing up all of that, to forward that knowing around the body as knowledge, to understand the way black people inhabit our bodies in particular. And what I've learned through that experience, I think, somatics gave me a space to, to know what I know, and a lot of ways
Unknown Speaker 18:52
Can we talk a little bit more about kind of where you were in your life, when you did discover somatics? Like, what was how you kind of came to be drawn to that practice that, that lineage and, and as especially, I mean, as a queer person, you know, what, what that has meant for you.
Unknown Speaker 19:16
Yeah, it was all accidental. To the degree that things are, I was working at an organization in the Bay Area, and generative Somatics, the organization I've been practicing Somatics with, since then, been been almost 10 years since I was introduced to it. I was working with an organization who was trying to bring somatic practices into the organizational culture, and partnered with generative somatics to do that, and the first training we had with Genesis and I was like, What the hell is this? This is not what I signed up for. I don't understand. But I remember being really struck by I think If there was a prompt to, like, feel the edge of your skin, feel the edges of your skin or something like that. And I realized that I had lived for a long time, very small in the center of my chest. And that was the kind of control room of my life that was a very small me kind of deep in there. And when they asked me to fill out and fill the edges of my scan, I was like, Whoa, I have not filled out in a long time. And I think in terms of where I was in my life, at that time, I've been in therapy for a while. I have a long history with everything. I am a therapist also. But I had gone to therapy, just sought it out. And I always had the curiosity about our spiritual lives. So, you know, I got a lot out of therapy, I was interested in becoming a therapist at the same time I started somatics, I think I went back to grad school to become a therapist. So everything was just like, kind of unfolding and alive and questions. Were there with me. So it was all kind of happening at once to me, trauma, you know, I've been organizing for some years, and especially around prisons, and jails and incarceration, and understanding the distinction around trauma, what it is how it impacts us our relationships, and then understanding that the trauma of oppression and persecution and incarceration, and seeing that those experiences showed up in people's lives and bodies, communities, families, kind of shook me to my core, and I wanted to figure out how to, I guess, help us heal, for lack of a better way of saying that helped us heal and therapy and somatics are some of the ways that the tools that I've picked up in that moment.
Unknown Speaker 21:56
Yeah, I mean, I can really relate to, in some ways that, that feeling that therapy is very helpful, or being a therapist and working with, you know, your clients is very helpful in terms of the really understanding the breadth of and depth of traumatic experience, and, and witnessing the way it it moves through communities and families and bodies. And yet, I think what I'm so curious about in terms of your work, and what you've, you've done and been doing is, is kind of how studying generative somatics and, you know, practicing along those lines has kind of opened up more, I mean, just even hearing you talk about the like, where the control system was in your life. And I understand that intellectually, but I think it's a really profound thing to experience that sense of constriction that exists in one place in our body, or like how we're operating from one place. And I don't know, I guess, I mean, that that feels very consistent with a, you know, a kind of a history of traumatic experience. Well, I guess what I'm asking is like, sort of, what do you think has opened up for you and the people you work with in studying somatics and generative somatics specifically,
Unknown Speaker 23:24
I'll start on what I think is the most fundamental level, I think that we can't underestimate the power and reclaiming our bodies. And that our psychobiology all of that, to me, is the fundamental building block of self determination and self determined community. And, you know, I've said for years that one of the things I'm very committed to, is, especially for black people that felt sense of liberation in our bodies now. And I think it's very important for folks who are committed to movement or to shifting the world in ways that feel more just that we have moments of being able to feel ourselves or feel something liberatory and our bodies as an indicator of where we're trying to go. And if we haven't felt that, or, you know, folks who are leading not from the place of having experienced that, that concerns me, I wonder where we're going. If we haven't experienced that, so I think you know, somatics work for me, has been, I think important not just for me, but for many people important place of practice and insights, experience of, you know, healing trauma, yes. And also experiencing, you know, embodied resilient, feeling themselves as creative beings again, and I am resilient beings, and rediscovering intimacy and connection with others. So I think that's what is really offered. And I'm coming off of a week of teaching with black organizing for leadership and dignity, or bold, which is a black leadership development space. But that feels so limiting in terms of what we do and what is offered in that space with embodied practice, embodied learning, embodied political education, embodied principles of transformative organizing, and rebuilding intimacy connection amongst black organizers. And I think that we just can't underestimate the power, the rippling power of syncing up with one another of feeling into our authentic selves. I just think it offers so much for kind of unlocking what justice can look like, and also unlocking the parts of our creativity parts of our generativity that get, you know, snatched up inside of trauma and oppression, and I think having spaces to settle and rediscover ourselves in that way, you know, the potential is just, it's really limitless and really exciting when I think about it. That I think it offers that, you know, obviously one of the things I've been thinking about lately, and this is in a semantic context, and also outside of just thinking about what is our authentic emotional expression? How does that relate to the creation of a just world? I think so much of what trauma has us do is suppress how we feel or try to shape ourselves into aligning with things that, you know, may make us happy to make all kinds of internal or, you know, conflict compromises in ourselves. And I just think there's something about letting ourselves be and feel, process and understand and just being alive, emotionally alive in our embodiment, that I think will have a lot to say about what it means to be in the right relationship, just relationship creating just world. And I think there's really this connection there.
Unknown Speaker 27:30
Yeah, yeah, absolutely. I mean, it kind of, I just made just had Adrian Marie brown on the podcast, and I think he does so much of what you two are, and many, many other people, but you know, are articulating is, is sort of a, it really is, I think, for many people, especially people who've experienced, you know, cumulative trauma is, is really reorienting around how we begin to how we begin to heal, I mean, that's a really basic way of saying it, but it's like how we begin to heal the starting point. And as therapists as both of us trained as therapists, that's not necessarily you know, kind of how at least I was training, right, you know, if we don't we don't start with kind of the body necessarily, we start with a sort of the, the impact on the body. But you know, we don't really start, we start with body and pain, you know, and all of that. But I think what you're talking about is like, really, it's so important that there's literally something generative about starting with an experience in the body and having that lead and direct us in making decisions aligning with certain communities. And, you know, it's, it just is, it is really different. I do think that there's something about at least my own relationship to broad queer community that feels like there's something that has been kind of articulated in some queer spaces along those lines, where there is a kind of a focus on pleasure or desire that is rooted in the body that directs or are some of our movements or our kind of community building. That's not always the case. But I think that there's something there. I don't know if you have experienced that for yourself or
Unknown Speaker 29:31
not. Yeah, that's really interesting. I mean, just to back up, I listened to the episode of Adrienne too, and Adrienne’s a homieI, I love her so much, and especially around this point that you're making. How do we let our experiences of pleasure or joy or whatever guide our actions I think is a very important point to make and I just appreciate that because it does center so much in, in the body and this, this, these experiences like validating our own experiences of our lives, like that's the actual, you know, it's hard to, you can't know what my experience is, but there's something to, you know, this, this experience or having a revised and watching more energy goes, or as James Baldwin said, you know, go the way your blood beat, and that's how I feel, wow, you know, queerness, and I'm gonna awkwardly move through this conversation. It feels very complicated to me. I think it's complicated. I think it's, it has been a complicated journey for me, not in my own kind of identity, or the, the formation of that, or who I know myself to be, but more and, you know, when you move into certain communities, longing for a safety that maybe you didn't feel like you had, and then you feel like, it's actually not there, either. I don't always know how to talk about the struggle of that experience, you think of a black, queer person, and the way that desire plays into that in particular, and, and the way that black bodies or black masculine bodies, or black, you know, masculine perceived bodies are often a kind of repository for others desire, but you know, aren't fully kind of seen for the complexity in the internal mess of themselves, I think, eat that even live in the queer community too. And that, in some of my experience there, from very honest, I feel shy about anything, I think it's the truth for me,
Unknown Speaker 31:58
if you feel shy, in part, because it doesn't feel like some kind of like betrayal, or, you know, that we're supposed to be had some kind of allegiance to, you know, like, the queer community, whatever that means, or Yeah, I don't know. Like, there's not that being critical of, you know, these kind of, broadly marginalized communities is, it's maybe difficult, but I think it actually I mean, in my experience, and I'm, I my experiences as, you know, as a white person, so it's, it's different, but it it, it is so important, I think, because there there is such a, there is such a like depth of longing, I think, for more genuine connection and more and deeper knowing that so many people queerly bodied people are, you know, kind of wrestling with in a solitary way, because of a difficulty in, in sort of speaking to ways in which queer communities leave certain people or feeling alienated or certain parts of your experience alien, I mean, I wonder if that's part of like, how we could enter into this is like, if you have a sense of what aspects of your, you know, broadly yourself had have experienced some alienation in your in the broadly speaking queer community, I mean, we have to talk about your whatever that means to you and your specific communities. But you know, just what parts of yourself feel like not able to kind of come forward as easily.
Unknown Speaker 33:48
Yeah, I think what first came to me when you said that one, I mean, I think actually this out myself in this way, and that I am not good at belonging to any thing. So everything should be listened to that kind of frame around. Blackness has always felt different to me, but I think otherwise, I can't, I just resist a lot of things. But, you know, I think for me, when I think about queerness in my life, I'm just gonna back out all the way up. I don't remember where it was, I was talking about this recently, but queerness before it, manifested in my sexuality, or in my what we call gender expression, whatever that is. It was just a way of looking at the world. slightly sideways, and being able to like, identify what felt aligned with me and what didn't, what felt like an authentic expression of me and what did not and like I said earlier, it felt very committed to authentically expressing myself and committed to the process of change and not resisting that. And I struggle with that. So I'm just gonna be clear about that. I struggle with that, but it's a commitment that I have. So I think that is actually the roots of my queerness. Or what we call queerness, is that, and I think, related to that is that I sometimes feel like, I don't want to impose this on others. But I feel like there's actually a spiritual task for queer folks or what I call spiritual. I'm not like, like I said, I'm not good at belonging to any set of things. But I think there's just a, there's something we have to offer. This moment, and all of us are very different, like you said, it's like such a broad swath of human beings that relate in this particular way, and sometimes end up relating around our gender expression, or how our sexuality has moved in and out of our lives. I actually relate to a lot of people. I think the people I relate most to inside of queer community are people that relate to that kind of before aspects of their queerness the way that it has some relate to life and existence. And, yeah, so that's how I find in queer community that are my people. Are the folks that still feel that questioning or that move towards authenticity that are rooted in them? Okay, yeah, okay. Those are my people. But I just feel like there's, there are things for us to do as queer people in ways. And I think we have done that over the years. I mean, I, you know, this, there's so many organizations, I think, especially historically, so many groupings of queer people, especially historically that have done that, that I feel like have risen to their kind of spiritual task and may shift and change. And in this moment, you know, this pride year, I was like, one, I live in Hawaii. So pride doesn't happen the same way or at the same time as it does everywhere else. But, you know, seeing T Mobile have the rainbow colors, I was just like, what, what, where are we? Where are we going? What is important to us? Are we, yeah, this club or not? Or do I want to be, I want to be and if I do want to be like, Who do I need to talk to about like, not being yet. Right, especially at this moment, I'm like, what, what, and I know that that's like, there's a difference between the more mainstream LGBT kind of thing. And, and I think what queerness has always troubled. And there's a lot of overlap, too. And I
Unknown Speaker 38:01
Yeah, yeah, I think you're talking about actually, it's interesting, because I think, you know, in some ways now queerness, that, that, that used to or has, in the past been a kind of an expression of troubling the, you know, literally troubling, the kind of troubling time troubling desire, troubling, all these these things, has become merged in many ways with the kind of more mainstream LGBT TQ you know, community right. And so, I think that is a really, I think, maybe that's part of what you're talking about. It's part of what I also am reacting to, and I also react to, and I don't, I don't know, my, it's funny that you mentioned, like, troubling things. I, my daughter was reading a really, you know, book from like, the 1920s, the other day, and it every other word was queer, you know, it was like, what a queer, you know, kind of party she was having, or what a queer world and my daughter as a child of me, you know, is kind of like, are they do they used to say, like, lesbian time or lesbian, you know, like, she just doesn't understand, but it was a cool in some ways, it was a cool reminder for me to just return to that. What I've always identified with, you know, which is is this kind of idea of queerness as something that is disruptive, but it's also generative. And I like the way you're talking about, and I'd love to hear a little bit more maybe about, you know, kind of this idea that we as queer people, you know, have work to do like we have, there's kind of a spiritual imperative in some ways are we No, that at least that resonates for you around what? What are the possibilities within that kind of disruption?
Unknown Speaker 40:11
Yeah, actually, that word possibility. When I talk about spirit of spirituality, I think I said something recently, spirit is just the place of big questions for me. I don't have any answers in the realm of spirit. It's where I keep all my questions. And it's a place of possibility to me. And I don't have any, I don't have much more information about it. So I'm holding it that way. But I do. I can't say or maybe I don't, I wouldn't venture to say in this moment, what I feel like our task is I feel like I've had a test as a queer person. And I think in many indigenous frameworks across the world, I think there's been ways of understanding queerness and the offering there, I have felt, I think this is as specific as I can probably get. But in my role, or my work of doing kind of healing justice work, or, yeah, that work, I felt that healing work has been very tied to queerness. In Me, of what we might call queerness. And me, there's actually a deep relationship between that ability to what I talked about is the roots of my queerness, to kind of the looking, or the feeling into or the, the authenticity, the, the Yeah, the kind of sideways looking, but being able to see very broad feeling, I feel very connected to people and my queerness, I feel connected to all kinds of people and my queerness, my queerness doesn't feel I don't know how to say it, it doesn't feel kind of like a protected experience or isolated experience, my queerness feels very connected to other people. When I am with other people, I feel connected, I feel like there's there's an affinity or something to discover about our connection, that's also my queerness, then I think that has really supported my healing work, and how I work with people. It's hard for me to ever be in a space with somebody doing healing work, where I can ever completely alter them. And I think that's an important skill for people who are doing healing work. It's gotta be hard for you. And people come in, I mean, you probably had this experience, people have done all kinds of things and thinking all kinds of things. And as a therapist, you have to be or as a healer broadly, or someone who steps into this space. You have to, I think, no, no, you don't have to, but I think it is really helpful. If you find it hard to other Do you find it hard to feel a part or unrelated? If you can't see the ways that we are in one another? I just feel like that's the great gift in that realm. And queerness and queerness, as a way I've experienced really helps you along the way. Maybe it's my task.
Unknown Speaker 43:34
Yeah, it reminds me I was reading your blog at some point and you're talking about I think it was on your blog, you were talking about, you know, something that happens with your leg when you are working with people's bodies. And if for some reason it makes me think about that, like the actual connectivity that you experience, both sort of spiritually or broadly, but also the physicality of it, you know that when you are maybe you could speak to that. I like that specific instant. But
Unknown Speaker 44:12
Yeah, that's what happens to me every time when I'm doing bodywork with somebody, or when I'm doing good counseling. You know, every time I don't know how it is with you, but every time I go into the body where I have anxiety, I'm like, You are not good at this. This is not gonna work out. What are you about to do this to be real, I go through that. My head starts to my brain starts to do its thing. And I know that I'm really starting to trust my body and connect with someone. When I feel my leg, it'll stiffen. It'll just stiff and I can't bend it at all and I have to kind of walk with it. If if I'm moving around someone on the table And when I have to root down, and usually let it run or shake, I think it means I don't really know what it means. Maybe someone can help me. But I, it's like life and connection and presence really is flowing through me on my leg is the one thing that is hanging on information. So I have to like, ground it so that it can like move and so that I can be impacted by what's happening and it can be released. But it all kind of gets stored in my leg. It's the funniest thing. I was like what is going on with my leg. But it happens now, every time we actually get into something, my leg, that thing, and it's kind of like a blessing when it happens. I can't force it, obviously. But when it happens, I'm like, oh, there we go. All right, we're in.
Unknown Speaker 45:53
Wow, that's cool. Yeah, it's, it's really, I just appreciate you speaking to that. Because it I think that it speaks so much to kind of the way in which you are, as you said, you're kind of, in working with people you're allowing or opening up to their experience flowing through you, you know, kind of irregardless of what you perceive as difference or you know, something you can't understand. It's it, opening yourself up in that way is really vulnerable and complicated. And it's interesting to hear that about your awareness of the part of yourself that is kind of like hanging on to your own groundedness. And we all have to do that as, as practitioners or healers or whatever, you know, we have to hang on in some way to our own sense of self or our ground. But yeah, it's, it's yeah, it's very interesting to hear that. So we're approaching our time, but I want to, I want you to just reflect back on, you know, the beginning of the conversation and think about that younger version of you, maybe like the one that was always walking around with your shirt off. And you know, and if there's anything you would want to convey to that younger version of yourself now knowing kind of what you know, about your body, your lived experience.
Unknown Speaker 47:25
Yeah, I think fundamentally, what you know, the real well, you know, is real, what your grandma knows is real. What the people before your grandmother knew Is real. There's a brilliance in these bodies, and the brilliance and how we communicate, isn't brilliant and how we sustained and, and remain creative. There's, there's a lot of knowing and that felt newness. And that felt newness that you were taught from the start. Yes, I think I think I just wasted some time in the middle there. Not realizing all that was transmitted to me because a broader world doesn't understand the knowledge of those folks in my lineage. I wasted a little bit of time, but I think I got back on track there. I think that would be my message.
Unknown Speaker 48:22
Yeah. Thank you. So how can people find out about the work you're doing and kind of follow along with what you're doing?
Unknown Speaker 48:31
Well, um, a lot of places these days. I think the best way is to follow along or to go on my website, Prentishemphill.com. Also, I'm a little bit on Instagram, I'm not great at social media. You can find me there. I'm doing work with an organization called resilience strategies where some organizational consultants work and I also teach regenerative Somatics and black organizing for leadership and dignity. And I may by the time this podcast comes out have my own podcast called finding our way oh my goodness. So now that I've said it, it has to happen.
Unknown Speaker 49:13
I cannot wait to listen. That's an amazing, amazing idea. I love that thank you for taking the time. I really appreciate it. It's a beautiful conversation. Fun thank you oh, all be free.