In 2021, Prentis and Kasha Ho launched The Embodiment Institute to expand embodied learning and relational transformation skills to broaden our communities capacity and practice of just relationships. The Embodiment Institute offers courses, retreats, practitioner training, and programming to support and elevate collective change.
As a central and leading project, The Black Embodiment Initiative (BEI) is a unique space for Black people to explore what is possible in our lives and relationships when we are more embodied. This project will hold space for learning and practice of the embodied skills that allow us to reinhabit ourselves as organic beings and move towards healing and more just relationships and just futures. Currently, the Black Embodiment Initiative has focused on support for organizers in the most recent wave of uprisings protesting extrajudicial killings of Black people, supporting healing justice approaches and formations currently existing and springing up in this moment.
The Practice Ground
The Practice Ground is a community space for Transformational Characters, those of us who are committed to the work it takes to heal ourselves, our lineages, and the systems we are a part of. We are working together to transform ourselves and through our relationships to transform these systems toward justice and liberation, toward the ability to feel and be felt.
By joining this community you are making a commitment to yourself, to connection, and to all the life around and inside of us. We are debunking the myth that healing happens in isolation and embracing a collective journey together to remember what it takes to heal, and how to listen to our bodies. That’s why we need spaces that make it more possible for us to change towards each other, towards courage, towards intimacy, and towards leadership. If you are committed to your own transformative healing and seeking community along the way, The Practice Ground is for you. For practice, for connecting, for witnessing yourself and others along the journey.
As a member of The Practice Ground, you'll get access to:
Monthly live practice spaces with our teachers and community
A space to practice relationship building with fellow Transformational Characters on this healing path
Our library of embodiment practices
Weekly invitations to deepen embodiment practice and reflection
We also include our 36 lesson Self-Guided Embodiment Basics Course for you to traverse at your own pace.
Self Guided Embodiment Course
Join us for the first ever Self-Guided Embodiment Basics Course. The course is open to anyone and everyone who is looking to deepen their own understanding and awareness of embodiment.
Our hope is that this course helps you:
Emerge with more recognition of the relationship between your embodiment and your individual and ancestral experiences of trauma and oppression
Activate the sense that healing is possible and necessary for societal transformation
Decolonize your relationship to your body
Relearn basic tools for regrounding after activation
What is Healing Justice?
Cara Page and Kindred Southern Healing Justice Collective cleared a path and told us that “healing justice...identifies how we can holistically respond to and intervene on generational trauma and violence, and to bring collective practices that can impact and transform the consequences of oppression on our bodies, hearts and minds.”
A broad and intersectional vision of liberation work requires that we continue to recall this vision of healing and healing justice into the center of our organizing. We have been inundated with public images of Black death and the flagrant violence of oppressive systems that obstruct justice. Our current systems promise complex, compounded and nearly constant trauma for Black people and ensure that we have little resources, space, time or energy to heal and little agency to protect ourselves and our loved ones from facing the same.
Healing justice is active intervention in which we transform the lived experience of Blackness in our world. And in order to actively intervene and transform the experience of Black life, on every level, our movements and our organizations have to understand and value the wisdom of healing justice.
Healing justice means that we make central to our work listening to those who are imagining transformative justice responses to harm, responses essentially that seek to meet harm in ways other than feeding Black incarceration.
Healing justice means that we develop and honor practitioners of many different disciplines and modalities with capacities and skills to be with trauma, who know themselves well enough to navigate the complex terrain of emotion and guide others towards change.
Healing justice means that we identify the institutions that interrupt and undermine our individual and collective abilities to heal. And in those places we organize towards change and interrupt our dependence, be it against the apparatus of the medical industrial complex or against harmful and life-depleting food systems.
Healing justice means that we begin to value care, emotional labor and resilience, not as add-ons but as central components of sustainability that restore us to life.
Healing justice means that we realize that care and accountability are at the root of healing justice practice and are some of the most difficult and direct actions we can take. Care and accountability require us to reveal, to center and more than anything, to change.
Healing justice means that these interventions, and so many more not yet imagined, can no longer be pushed to the margins of our work, but must be central and given our attention and time.
We heal so that we can act and organize.