In need of a recharge? Perhaps a new approach to working through change? We're joined by Tabitha Thomas — a longtime crisis counselor and centering practitioner — who guides us through a ~12 minute centering practice. Following the meditation, Tabitha unpacks some of her learnings as a student of Emergent Strategy, a book written by social justice facilitator and fellow somatics practitioner, Adrienne Maree Brown. Tabitha threads those lessons with that of human-centered design, namely from CCI's Catalyst program, and she shares guiding principles that inspire us to navigate through this pandemic with intention.
In need of a recharge? Perhaps a new approach to working through change? We're joined by Tabitha Thomas — a longtime crisis counselor and centering practitioner — who guides us through a ~12 minute centering practice.
Following the meditation, Tabitha unpacks some of her learnings as a student of Emergent Strategy, a book written by social justice facilitator and fellow somatics practitioner, Adrienne Maree Brown. Tabitha threads those lessons with that of human-centered design, namely from CCI's Catalyst program, and she shares guiding principles that inspire us to navigate through this pandemic with intention.
Here’s where you can learn more about the people, places, and ideas in this episode:
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*This is a partially automated transcript. Please excuse any errors or hilarious mistakes.
Laura, CCI (host):
Good afternoon, everyone. Thank you so much for joining us for this CCI Academy peer workshop with Tabitha Thomas.
Tabitha has supported people, managing crisis, including survivors of domestic violence and human trafficking for many years and among her many skills, she's a practitioner of somatics, Emergent Strategy and human centered design.
And we met Tabitha when she participated in our catalyst program in human centered design while working at WEAVE, a crisis intervention services agency, agency for survivors of domestic violence and sexual assault, and they're based in Sacramento. Now Tabitha is a coach for our Catalyst program. She's also a practicing licensed marriage and family therapist, and also wear some other hats. So with that, I just want to give a really warm welcome to Tabitha, as she shares a bit more about herself, leads us through a centering practice, and also we get to a little bit of a taste about Emergent Strategy and why it's important to her. So, Tabitha, I'll leave it to you to share.
Tabitha Thomas:
Thank you so much, Laura. I'm super excited to be here and to see so many folks on this call. We just have 30 minutes. It's really quick. So, I want to jump right into the centering activity. Like Laura said, I practice somatics and I'm a therapist. And, I started gaining interest early on in my career as a peer counselor at a rape crisis center when my mentor started studying with generative somatics. And I was fortunate to start studying with generative somatics in 2013. So this centering practice is one of the like fundamental core practices that generative somatics teaches and offers, and one of the core pieces to our work. I won't say too much more about it for the sake of time - I could go on forever about it, but I hope that this will be an offering for you that you can take forward into your daily practice or weekly practice, or however it works for you.
I will lead us somewhat [in a] maybe 10 or 15 minute-long practice here. So just know that this is something that you can do really quickly on your own. Basically, in short, we center in, in four directions - in length, width, and depth, and then also back to our center. So I'll lead that, but that's the short of it. And so honestly, if you don't have much time in your day and you're busy in between, you know, appointments or work or all the responsibilities that we have, um, you can just take a moment to see where you are in your length, in your width, in your depth, and then come back to your center.
So as we get started, go ahead and be, um, place yourself in a comfortable position. You can be standing, you can be sitting. You can be lying down.
And go ahead and take a couple deep breaths on your own time.
...On your next inhale, go ahead and take a nice deep inhale - deepest inhale of the day, in through your nose. Hold up for a second - and then exhale out your mouth.
Then again, nice deep inhale through your nose.
Exhale.
And go ahead, wherever you are, place a couple of hands, about a hand or two, about an inch below your belly button. For most of our bodies, that's about our center - and just see if you can drop in a bit. Drop into felt, sensation there at your core, noticing what you do, how you organize in order to do that.
You might use your breath.
You might even jiggle your belly. And we'll begin centering from this place called “center.” In the first direction, we will extend in length. So from your center, feel free to drop your arms if you're ready to. Just notice your breath and let your breath run the course of the length of your body.
Let yourself lift up from center with a straight back, extending up to the top of your head, letting your head reach for the sky. And at the same time, in opposition from the waist down - let some energy run the course of your legs down to your feet, and then extend beyond your feet.
Imagine you have roots growing in the bottom of your feet, rooting into earth, continuing to breathe, letting anything that you're ready to let go of, anything that you're ready to release, just let that kind of move down and out your feet. Moving through that root system into the earth, where it would become posted. You don't have to deal with it anymore. In your length, let your shoulders drop away from your ears - feeling a little more space between each vertebrae - a little more space from the bottom of your ribs to the top of your hip bones - feeling the full length of the long bones of your legs.
Our length is in connection to our dignity. So as you extend in length, just to feel that connection to your own dignity, as well as the dignity of others. Noticing what it's like for you to be in your full length. You might notice new aches and pains. That's okay.
Continuing to extend and length, we'll move into width. So imagine the center line of your body, top to bottom, and then unfurling into width. Widening between your ears, widening in your neck, widening in your shoulders, and your ribs.
Noticing as you breathe the expansion of your ribs in width and the contraction as you exhale, widening in your hips.
And see if you can just drop a little bit more weight, like 2% more weight, into your pelvic bowl. Feeling the width there, supporting you. Feeling the width of your legs, lower legs, ankles.
Paying attention to the inside edges of your feet and the outside edges of your feet - and see if you can widen each foot, feel a little bit more the ground. It might even move down into that root structure and envision its width and its span. Taking a couple of breaths here on width, noticing where your edges are in space. Noticing how it feels to connect from your center out to your edges, noticing where your are.
And then gently extend beyond those edges. Feel for the space and the room around you and notice what shifts for you as you do so. Notice how you stay connected to your center.
And coming back to our personal center. And in the next direction, we will extend in depth.
This is the backside of our body, the front side of our body and all the space in between.
So starting at the backside from the top of your body, just noticing if you can feel any sensation on the back of your head - might be the hair on your head, quality of air around you. Feeling that extension of the back of the neck. Noticing the weight of your clothes on your back, where your body comes into contact with the chair you might be sitting on, or where your feet come into contact with the ground.
Scanning down your spine and coming to your tailbone. And dropping into that tailbone, imagine it's going to grow and extend behind you into this great big dinosaur tail - that was just kind of plopped down on the ground weighted.
And the weight of that great dinosaur tail behind you is going to allow you to shift a little bit back, feel what it's like to just rest on that dinosaur tail a little bit, resting into your back. Tapping into the wisdom behind you, wisdom in your personal history, your past, your ancestors. In current day, the support of those around you. Notice what it's like to rest.
Then, we'll begin to shift to the front by moving through the body from back to front.
So gently begin to shift forward, moving through muscles, tissues, bones, organs, until you come to the front side of your body. Take a breath, noticing that shift, what that did for you.
And starting at your face, see if you can relax the muscles of your face a little more. Let your eyes drop back into the eye sockets, let your cheeks soften. Let your jaw unhinge, let your tongue lie weighted in your lower jaw.
Noticing as you soften your face - what else might relax, noticing what that does for your neck and your throat, the back of your neck.
Noticing as we move down, scanning down the body, the rise and fall of your chest and belly as you breathe. And what it's like to just gently shift into that front, maybe energetically shift forward - at our front is anticipation, goals, vision, tomorrow, plans. There can be a lot of excitement there, there can also be a lot of anxiety - noticing all of that. Just accepting what “is” currently and gently shifting back to center - noticing what happens for you when you do so. Coming back to our core, to that spot, for those of you who joined us a little later, right below your belly button, bring your energy there and let come to mind what's important to you - how recentering might serve you throughout your day.
And then gently we'll bring our attention back to this call, do whatever you need to do to shift gears, hopefully staying present to this - this feeling of being centered.
So if anyone has any questions or thoughts on the centering piece, I welcome anyone to just chime in. I'm curious to know how that was for folks. If you noticed anything in that practice for you.
Audience Member:
I was feeling rather vacant before and now in busy in tasks. And I really feel full now. I do feel like, “Oh, this is it.” I'm so grateful for the direction and the imagery, and the language that I'm staying with the dignity of length right now and the dinosaur tail. All of that was really, you know, I feel it also just a bit of a layer of buffer around me as well, which, I'm grateful for today. Thank you.
Tabitha Thomas:
Thank you. Thank you for sharing. It's also something that I offer weekly to service providers and folks, particularly during this time while we're dealing with COVID-19.
So we're gonna shift gears a little bit and move into Emergent Strategy. We don't have much time here, so this is a little teaser. Emergent Strategy is a concept and a book by Adrienne Maree Brown. I love this book. It's like tattered and torn and, and it's got like dog-eared pages and markers throughout.
But I'm really revisiting this book now, as I feel like it is so timely as we navigate this pandemic together. Emergent Strategy, hopefully I can do it justice in my summary here. Oh, here comes up. There's a little link there with, uh, for the book. Um, so Adrienne Maree Brown is actually a teacher and practitioner of somatics. And, so that's how I first learned about the book. And I was fortunate enough to go out to Detroit in October of 2019 to attend her Emergent Strategy Ideation Institute where we, I mean, honestly it had a very Catalyst feel to it, for those of you who have participated in CCI’s Catalyst program. A lot of innovation, a lot of ideating, a lot of exploration of different concepts and how to apply them to challenges and situations and scenarios. And, yeah, so hence, it's pretty inspiring.
So these are the principles, so she maps out in the book - principles and elements. So these are the principles that are kind of like guiding principles for this practice of emergent strategy. And, as you read over them, there are so many here that I think apply to how we navigate and adapt to this present moment and in general challenges that we face in life. Recognizing like our desire for some of us, not everyone overextends, I might be speaking for myself here, but for some of us in a time of need to overextend and want to have this great reach and support the masses, right? And so, I fall back to this reminder that “small is good, small is all,” which I find really inspiring and also recentering.
So these are just some of the guiding principles here, and then I'm going to move over to the elements and just share with you briefly what some of these are. Fractals also relates to “small is good, small is all” that's looking at repeating patterns that we have and how they contribute to the bigger picture. So she uses a lot of reference to nature, looking at like the leaves of the fern and how that pattern repeats and how that pattern then like creates this glorious, larger fern and plant. Adaptation - how we change and adjust. Interdependence and decentralization is about how we share and practice with one another. Nonlinear and iterative is about - this one I feel like really does apply to some of that ideation. You know, “how might we like reiterate and reiterate?” We hear this so often in Catalyst as well. To kind of throw out those ideas and feel those ideas, and feel them out to see how they might contribute to the problem at hand - which can also be a very nonlinear process, right?
Resilience and creating more possibilities - this is looking at the strength behind our resilience, our inherent resilience, and also looking at how might we create more possibilities. I remember sharing this with another group, and this woman kind of having an “a-ha” moment around creating more possibilities. Because she recognized in her own life the ways in which she kind of did things as they were done before her. And this idea that there's more possibility that can be had, and that we can explore was just like maybe a little bit overwhelming at the moment for her, but also exciting and promising. So, obviously, we're not going to have time to explore much today with this, but I am open to hearing some questions or curiosities, or if anyone here is familiar with Emergent Strategy and they want to chime in about how it's been inspiring to them – I'm open to that.
Laura, CCI:
Thanks so much, Tabitha. Is there anyone else who's read Emergent Strategy or heard about it before?
I have heard some folks and you might've met them Catalyst last year, Civic Makers, Judy Brown, who did like a panel thing at the end. She, when they teach human centered, like engagement, like community engagement, she referenced Emergent Strategy, too. Even in terms of like strategic planning, people use it in really practical ways - like it can support life and it can support work. So yeah, I've been hearing about it for years, but I haven't yet read it. I wish there was an audio book.
Tabitha Thomas:
Well, she just did an audio recording for her other book, Pleasure Activism, which is also awesome. I'm not sure if one's coming out for Emergent Strategy. That would be great. I see a question that was just shared with me about how has this been applied to organizations. It is kind of a “far out there” concept for some folks, but it's absolutely possible to bring in facilitators through the Emergent Strategy
Network. They're based out of Detroit and they have facilitators that have been trained all around the nation. I'm forgetting the name of the organization that she schedules through, but that's something else we can share out later - apologies for that. But, you can also google: Adrienne Maree Brown.
Laura, is there time for me to read a quick poem to folks?
Laura, CCI:
Yeah.
Tabitha Thomas:
Awesome.
Laura, CCI:
One other realization that I had from reading articles about it is the biomimicry, like pulling things from nature and human centered design, like the analogous examples. It's like, “how do we pull stuff from the world around us to help us think about how we might approach our own problems?”
Tabitha Thomas:
That’s spot on, yeah.
So, I'm going to end my portion with this poem that is by Adrienne Maree Brown. It's from her book, Pleasure Activism, and it is a radical gratitude spell.
“You are a miracle walking. I greet you with wonder in a world which seeks to own your joy and your imagination. You have chosen to be free every day as a practice. I can never know the struggles you went through to get here, but I know you have swum upstream, and at times it has been lonely. I want you to know, I honor the choices you made in solitude, and I honor the work you have done to belong. I honor your commitment to that which is larger than yourself and your journey, to love the particular container of life that is you. You are enough. Your work is enough. You are needed. Your work is sacred. You are here and I am grateful.”
Thank you, everyone.
Laura, CCI:
Thank you, Tabitha, so much for this. Definitely, I do feel recharged and appreciate it. You did a fabulous job in only 30 minutes!