![Rie Gilsdorf](http://assets.swoogo.com/uploads/thumb/2845653-64e914703f19d.jpg)
As a White person, it’s one thing to be able to participate in antiracist conversations and actions, and quite another to be able to feel and process them. The truth of the lived experiences of people of color can shatter cherished beliefs about our nation’s founders, our governance, our economic system, even our family histories. This creates resistance that’s expressed in our bodies, a natural outcome of the loss of the narratives upon which we have built families, systems and self-images. To move past our resistance we must develop the skills to discern, unpack and speak honestly about the places we’re stuck. Fortunately, Minnesota is one of the main roots of an embodied antiracism movement taking place across the country, advancing body mindfulness that allows us to metabolize our own trauma, recognize traumatic responses in ourselves and others, and develop embodied ways of working through them. The promise of this work is to develop skill at integrating fragmented places so that our difficulties and missteps become fertilizer for our growth. In this session we will move our head-learning about race and culture into embodied learning, to operationalize the things we’ve intellectualized. We don’t need to redesign a culture from scratch - we can embody existing ways of being that are common in Black, Indigenous and racialized cultures.