The Somatic Scribing Podcast: Recent Episodes
Somatic Scribing Lab
The Somatic Scribing Lab (Fall '21) brought together thirty facilitators, scribes, artists, bodyworkers, counselors, and teachers who are putting the sensing back into sensemaking. Our conversations build on the fields of cultural somatics and generative scribing, and re-connect to ancient practices for harvesting body wisdom, all in service of our collective liberation. Each episode features conversations between Labmates reflecting on what the fertile Lab container is teaching us. Sessions, and episodes, are organized by rhythms of the body - birth, breath, digestion, rest, eros and death.
Neith Sankofa is a sacred healing artist, dancer, African dance scholar, shamanic practitioner, sacred mama, warrior, artist, singer and more. We close this season with Neith (punctuated with drops of wisdom from her daughter) sharing about where art and embodiment intersect in her practices, and how movement is not only a language, but the origin of all life. We recorded this episode in the spring of 2023, a few weeks after the police murder of Tortuguita - member of our community and environmental activist - who was defending the Weelaunee forest from being bulldozed to build Cop City (an ongoing struggle as of this publishing). Our community was reeling and in deep need of space to be together and process what happened. Neith and I break down the ritual we held for community, and how we applied principles of cultural somatics to understand what was needed in a cultural body experiencing so much inflammation. The sound gets a little choppy at times, but stick with it because we close with some powerful reflections about how to be a ritualist, even if you are just beginning your journey, and how connecting to creative energy is a fundamental skill for holding ceremony.
Neith is currently offering monthly online Process Inquiry Sessions the 22nd of every month. Each session is a rotating medicine teaching including song, movement, visual art making, animal medicine, and more. You can learn more and register by emailing neithsankofa@gmail.com.
Thanks for listening. This is the last episode of the season! Upcoming announcements: the Fall Scribe Lab is going to be in person this yearrr. Registration opens in July and you can learn more about the Lab, other upcoming workshops and all things Somatic Scribing by subscribing to the newsletter on my website asthecrowfliesdesign.com or by following me on Instagram @crowcamino. Music for this podcast is from the album Black Shamxn by our labmate, multidisciplinary artist and healing practitioner, Neith Sankofa. If you’re at a different corner of the web singing the same song, come say hi. We’d love to hear from you.
Dreaming is a central practice to being symbolism literate, and the skill of symbol literacy is a core competency for reimagining our world. Dare Carrasquillo is a super smart colleague, host of the Underworld Party Podcast, and one half of the play-based collaboration Animist Arts. In our conversation from Fall 2022, we follow dream practice into death practice, contextualize somatics inside of our 300,000+ year old nervous systems, and we riff on putting our contemporary pop-psychology field into science fiction mode. Dare’s practice of polyphonic singing harmonizes with my practice of layering images, and we discuss resonance and the impacts of wave dynamics on bodies and other material. We wade into riskier waters of what liberation means inside of a non-dual framework, queering with a yes/and lens the dominant trauma narratives seeping into all aspects of how we understand ourselves. The theater backgrounds come out as we open the challenges of translating the map of a social field back into our bodies that have been trained out of our ability to express, and we close in speculation about how to get out of the police states of our internal landscapes and back into the play practices that allow us to make the new map together. Animist Arts is a space for priming the body for play without dominance, which is a foundation for pretty much anything you could be up to, so check them out at animistarts.art, they’re currently running several workshops and series. I recommend between sun and moon, all that in the show notes. Enjoy the convo!
Thanks for listening. You can learn more about upcoming workshops and all things Somatic Scribing on my website asthecrowfliesdesign.com or by following me on Instagram @crowcamino. Music for this podcast is from the album Black Shamxn by our labmate, multidisciplinary artist and healing practitioner, Neith Sankofa. You can check the show notes for all that info, and if you’re at a different corner of the web singing the same song, come say hi. We’d love to hear from you.
It’s the hustle episode with the brilliance of Tiaré Jung, two-spirit indigiqueer scribe baddie and my go to sounding board for all things related to the work of scribing. We open the taboo subject of money with some background about how we think about income and income sharing inside of our non-nuclear families and wider mutual aid networks. We touch on living anti-capitalist values in how we set prices, work with clients, and distribute resources, and Tiaré shares some really powerful stories in this episode about working with clients who step out of the mold and into collaboration, opening up conversations that lead to gifting resource and beauty and open possibilities for how to be in relationship. I gush about their style and portraiture and making people in the room feel seen - it’s beautiful and revolutionary to see trans, non-binary, disabled, erotic people in conference rooms y’all - so be sure to check out their work on their website and follow them on Insta.
Thanks for listening. You can learn more about upcoming workshops and all things Somatic Scribing on my website asthecrowfliesdesign.com or by following me on Instagram @crowcamino. Music for this podcast is from the album Black Shamxn by our labmate, multidisciplinary artist and healing practitioner, Neith Sankofa. If you’re at a different corner of the web singing the same song, come say hi. We’d love to hear from you.
Since meeting in 2018 through the GTDF collective, Sonali Balajee, Sarah Amsler, Dani D'Emilia and I have been rolling deep together. We’ve dubbed ourselves the Altared State collective, (that’s altared with an A) and apart from taking care of one another across multiple borders and oceans, we do work collectively that orbits around queer ecologies & decolonial embodiments. That is to say, we make experiments of our bodies and their metabolic entanglements, we play with relationality in an animist way that seeks textures of belonging and moves ritually with land and our non-human relatives, we imagine kin and kinship through all kinds of queer lenses and have a really expansive take on the erotic. In this conversation we talk about queerness as a placeholder for what contains the wholeness of us and our complexity, the path from queerness, wholeness, collective health, and what it means to aspire to be social naturopaths. We open the axis of the spiritual and the political and the artistic approaches to “social justice” in this moment of history, and why it’s most practical to make record of all these ways of being through visual writing systems.
Thanks for listening. You can learn more about upcoming workshops and all things Somatic Scribing on my website asthecrowfliesdesign.com or by following me on Instagram @crowcamino. Music for this podcast is from the album Black Shamxn by our labmate, multidisciplinary artist and healing practitioner, Neith Sankofa. You can check the show notes for all that info, and if you’re at a different corner of the web singing the same song, come say hi. We’d love to hear from you.
In 2019 Shiree Teng manifested a vision she had been carrying for years: Measuring Love, a brown paper, part manifesto part framework for infusing love as a practice into the hustle of the non-profit sector. She brought me in as a scribe to support the writing process and produce the artwork for the paper. We boldly declared love as a threat to systems of separation, the driving force of decolonizing and the essence of building real community power. This conversation spans the arc of this first gathering all the way to the 2022 publication of our follow-up paper, Healing Love: Into Balance. We talk about our non-linear process of writing and artmaking in dialogue with one another and with the land, why love requires us to embrace wholeness and wholeness requires healing, and what to do when you’re faced with having to love the monster.
Here are the links for Measuring Love, a Brown Paper and Healing Love: Into Balance. I’m so proud to share this collective work just infused with love. Enjoy the convo!
Thanks for listening. You can learn more about upcoming workshops and all things Somatic Scribing on my website asthecrowfliesdesign.com or by following me on Instagram @crowcamino. Music for this podcast is from the album Black Shamxn by our labmate, multidisciplinary artist and healing practitioner, Neith Sankofa. You can check the show notes for all that info, and if you’re in a different corner of the web singing the same song, come say hi. We’d love to hear from you.
Kelvy Bird and Reilly Dow are both brilliant scribes, facilitators and teachers. Kelvy is the author of Generative Scribing: A Social Art of the 21st Century and is one of my scribing elders, friendtors, and just general artist crushes. Both Kelvy and Reilly are co-facilitating the upcoming Scribing Essentials Course from April 24-28, so if by the end of this convo we have swooned you into wanting to become a scribe, you can find information about that course in the show notes, it’s going to be fabulous. In this conversation, we discuss the need for social art practitioners to advocate for group storytelling as an inseparable companion to the pieces we produce. I’m really interested in Kelvy’s take on scribing as a social art, and we discuss what conditions are necessary for groups to get creative together. Our conversation touches on hypervigilance as a cultural norm, fostering vulnerable heart space, and how power shapes everything as we ponder what’s possible in using our work to weave more connection. We close the conversation asking each other about how our work can be less meeting, more ritual, so be sure to stick around for that, and enjoy.
The link for Scribing Essentials is here via the Lark Collective.
Thanks for listening. You can learn more about upcoming workshops and all things Somatic Scribing on my website asthecrowfliesdesign.com or by following me on Instagram @crowcamino.
Music for this podcast is from the album Black Shamxn by our labmate, multidisciplinary artist and healing practitioner, Neith Sankofa.
Mari, Orion and Emma are friends from different corners of life who were the through lines between the 2021 Somatic Scribing Lab into it's next iteration in 2022, the Foundations in Somatic Scribing course. We check back in on how it's going with the ancestral research, recovering stories across generations and diasporas, we discuss how symbols live in our bodies, and we ask ‘what is the archetypal role of the scribe in this moment in history?” and “ if visual writing systems are new language systems, how do we intentionally weave in cosmologies of reverence, and can they break us out of the logics of domination that english was built around?’ Our conversation wanders into the territory of how scribing touches narrative strategy and cultural organizing, and we end by sharing lab practices that we are still finding useful.
Thanks for listening. You can learn more about upcoming workshops and all things Somatic Scribing on my website asthecrowfliesdesign.com or by following me on Instagram @crowcamino.
Music for this podcast is from the album Black Shamxn by our labmate, multidisciplinary artist and healing practitioner, Neith Sankofa.
We’ve encountered little deaths all throughout the Lab cycle - in the outbreath, the digestive release, what gets washed outand cleansed, and even how death attends birth. Today, with Aerin Dunford and Lyra Butler Denman, we pack our bags and journey out beyond the borders of our death-phobic culture into the primordial darkness beyond, the fertile void, to sit with humility at the feet of holy mother Death herself. We weave what we’ve been learning about grief and mother trees, how death isn’t an on/off state, its a process and sometimes a long one, and the importance of the death ritual.
As always, we jump scale and look at how death-phobia manifests in the systemic and cultural body: what got lost culturally when we stopped feeding our ancestors bones back to the earth; the lack of trust we’ve inherited that death is not final, but cyclical and regenerative. We look to examples of agroecological and economic resource redistribution as social technologies that are helping our death-phobic cultures remember that what we return to the soil can and will transmute into something nourishing. At the end you know we hook you up with some practices and suggestions to get cozier with holy mother Death. Buen provecho.
This is the last episode of this podcast! Thanks n praise. If you’ve enjoyed it and want to send us some financial love you can do so via Venmo, Cashapp or Paypal. Next up in Somatic Scribing will be a summer workshop series, so if you want to be in the know, you can visit my website asthecrowfliesdesign.com and subscribe, or you can follow me on Instagram @crowcamino. Music for this podcast is from our incredible, magical labmate, artist and healing practitioner, Neith Sankofa - go check out her work too, the album Black Shaman is the soundtrack for the healing you need, I promise. Alright y’all, Bless your life, may you be well, may our collective action be for the benefit of all beings. Peace.
Despite our title “graphic recorder,” (which is really, so unsexy, guys, can we talk about this after the show...), I am a hundred percent convinced that our work is in service to the erotic; for the parts of the whole that are longing for each other, we create visual pathways of reconnection. I love this topic and there are a hundred reasons why I love this session, and there’s so much joy and magic in this conversation: Holden Cession reminds us that the erotic is an ancient practice. Arielle Tonkin says our bodies both remind us how to be sensitive to thresholds and dare us to let go of control. Guangping Chu invites us to ask how we can be intentional about cultivating the qualities of a cultural body. We talk about mothering and queerness and the primordial ooze. We quote audre lorde’s Uses of the Erotic and feel for the postures of the cultural soma of “the movement,” noticing where there’s rigidity and wondering what queering and eroticizing our interactions might do to soften some of those edges. We speak to our spiritual traditions of touching the ecstatic divine and offer small ways to allow in the life-force energy that wants to animate us. When I say enjoy, I do mean enjoy.
Framed as a ritual in decolonizing epistemology, this session was a turning point for us in the lab. We have up until this point been doing ancestral research, uncovering and recovering our people’s ways of knowing and ardently tracking body wisdom through fine-tuned observation of our sounds and gestures: vocal inflections, shift of the gaze, what (or who) animates our hands and how. One this episode, Corrina Keeling and I wade back into the waters of this bathing session to retell the journey of our co-created grief ritual. Our water bodies, like all bodies of water, get funky when they’re stagnant, and the ritual came at a moment where we as a Lab body needed the wisdom of the water cycle to allow the sticky, griefy knowings of cultural loss that have arisen so far in us to distribute out into our wider web of relations and resources. Corrina shares about her process of reaching backwards into ancestral unknowns for cultural artifacts to pull forward and make sense of in the now context, and our discussion wanders through topics of regenerating tissue in places that have been scarred over, holding multi-racial ritual space over zoom, how to grieve big things a little bit at a time, and distinguishing cleansing and renewal as different from feeding desires for purity.
We don’t end the conversation with offerings as we have in other podcast episodes, but I’ll invite you here to lend your attention, perhaps in a meditation or journal reflection, to the medicinal qualities of water: the capacity to change state, to weather hard things, to navigate around obstacles, to hold memory. You could ask the water that makes up your body- how do you also carry these medicines?
You can learn more about upcoming workshops and all things Somatic Scribing on my website asthecrowfliesdesign.com or by following me on Instagram @crowcamino.
Music for this podcast is from the album Black Shamxn by our labmate, multidisciplinary artist and healing practitioner, Neith Sankofa.
In a cultural moment so sweeping you’ve definitely gotten an email this week with wishes for restfulness in the signoff, we ask: what are we resting for? Tai Davis is back for her second episode and we’re joined by Orion Camero this week as we talk about napping on zoom, adrenal fatigue as psychic warfare, how we’re exorcising grind culture out of our bodies, the impacts of misreading social cues when our nervous systems are on hypervigilance overdrive and what resting has to do with imagination. We ground this convo in gratitude for the vision our Black feminist teachers are dreaming for us in which we repair the harm caused by the longstanding theft of Black and feminized labor. Make sure you’re not working hard to get some rest! We strongly advise you listen to this episode while laying down.
Blessings to you and all your relations. Today, Tai Davis, Emma Dulski and I savor a slow-cooked conversation as we come fresh out of a Lab session that imagines words as nourishment. We find digestion metaphors baked into the way we understand ourselves - from chewing on an idea or something that doesn’t ‘sit right,” to creepier metaphors that structure systems like social media feeds or how capitalism imagines us only as consumers. We ask: if the attention economy grooms us for overconsumption and indigestion, how do we maintain digestive sovereignty over what goes in and at what pace? And of course, it wouldn’t be a digestive episode without talking about the shit and how to return to the fertility of compost out from under the shadow of a culture who doesn’t want to talk about the extent of our deplorable pooping practices. Enjoy!
You can learn more about upcoming workshops and all things Somatic Scribing on my website asthecrowfliesdesign.com or by following me on Instagram @crowcamino.
Music for this podcast is from the album Black Shamxn by our labmate, multidisciplinary artist and healing practitioner, Neith Sankofa.
Today I’m talking to my wise elder Ella Johannaber about how language isn’t separate from the body, but rather how it emerges from the body through sound and breath. We connect how words can support healing, both in our individual and cultural bodies - shifts in narrative from fixing broken things to asking what we need in a given moment. We ask about the conditions that make it possible for us to feel at home with one another, one woven nest of softness and curiosity. We invite you at the end to ditch the question “does that makes sense?” for a more enlivening one: “did you catch that buzz?”
Thanks for listening. You can learn more about upcoming workshops and all things Somatic Scribing on my website asthecrowfliesdesign.com or by following me on Instagram @crowcamino.
Music for this podcast is from the album Black Shamxn by our labmate, multidisciplinary artist and healing practitioner, Neith Sankofa.
Today in convo with Tiaré Jung, Omni Kitts Ferrara and the kids in the background, we talk about treating knowledge like they are spirits; the risks inherent in birthing; how to facilitate in ways that reflect not only what is, but also what is possible; orienting differently around time, and how the mind/body or humans/nature disconnection never really happened. A little nudge for when you get to the end where we offer a practice - you might try adding this little game to your morning practice, or setting an alarm during the day to pause for some noticing. We noticed that a daily rhythm of a few minutes of reflection over the course of a week has already started to decenter our thinking brains and open space for more body wisdom to be heard.
You can learn more about upcoming workshops and all things Somatic Scribing on my website asthecrowfliesdesign.com or by following me on Instagram @crowcamino.
Music for this podcast is from the album Black Shamxn by our labmate, multidisciplinary artist and healing practitioner, Neith Sankofa.
Today, in the week leading up to our very first Lab session, I’m sitting down over zoom with Robin Crane, for this, an episode zero of sorts. Robin has been helping me through the gestation period of the Lab creation story and neither of us have ever produced a podcast so what follows is a humble and sometimes awkward intro of Somatic Scribing, and what we’ll get up to in the Lab. For this conversation, I’m calling from Maskoke territory and Robin is on Huichin Ohlone land.
You can learn more about upcoming workshops and all things Somatic Scribing on my website asthecrowfliesdesign.com or by following me on Instagram @crowcamino.
Music for this podcast is from the album Black Shamxn by our labmate, multidisciplinary artist and healing practitioner, Neith Sankofa.