Scribes aren't just artists.

We're systems thinkers and storytellers, creating visual landscapes for innovating clients.

DRAW THE FEELING: Cultural Somatics for Visual Storytellers

Can you distinguish where a feeling comes from? Do you know how to listen to your body when something doesn’t feel right? Do you know what justice feels like? Liberation? 

We might think about our bodies as neural synapses in a cultural nervous system - the messages our bodies send always include information about the health of our social field and environment.  In this workshop we’ll slow down and stick with the feelings we notice arising and what they can tell us about our cultural ecosystem.  

Although using the body as a tool for divination may sound mystical, the process of listening for collective health outcomes via our own bodies is very ordinary mundane magic.  It is a part of a wider decolonial project in unlearning the ways we’ve been taught to ignore the feelings in our bodies (or how to dissociate from them).  It is a practice of re-conditioning our schooled minds to believe that we know the truth of things not only through rational thought, but also through feelings, sensation, intuition, epigenetics/ancestral memory, and more.  

Visual storytelling for a social field can be both prophetic and diagnostic - the image reveals visionary imagination as well as the dis-ease of oppression that lives in the cultural soma.  In this workshop we will use trauma-informed somatic practices (such as breath work, guided meditation/visualization, gentle movement, and sound) to tune in to our bodies and begin to play with the translation of body wisdom into visual images.

WORKSHOP FLOW

In this two hour workshop we will begin by tuning into the sensations in our bodies and sensing into the associative networks of those feelings.  We will practice visualizing thoughts, feelings and sensations and close with some practical tools for identifying resources in the cultural soma to support group processes.  

This workshop will be recorded.  While a portion of the workshop will be devoted to group practice and reflection, it will be possible to have a meaningful experience by watching the recording at your own pace.  No prior artistic or somatic experience is necessary.

RESOURCE FLOW

Contributing $100 for participation would cover our costs.  We offer the following sliding scale for you to sit with and assess where you, your ancestors, and your current financial situation land: 

$0 for Black, Indigenous and People of Color who consider this work to be reclaiming ancestral lifeways stolen by colonization, enslavement & genocide.  This is not a scholarship.  We believe descendants and survivors of these legacies should never have to pay to access what is rightfully theirs.

$50 - $100 for folks from the global South, people from historically disenfranchised communities, low income/working class folks, people with less access to wealth (savings, investments, inheritance).  

$100 - $200  for folks from the global North, folks who identify as middle or upper class, people who have access to savings, investments, or inheritance. 

$200 - 300 for people who have benefitted from wealth extraction and would like to participate in the cultural healing practice of wealth redistribution, you might consider contributing generously at this level to support us in hosting cohort members reclaiming ancestral lifeways. 

What does this have to do with social change? The body is a metaphor that is used as a blueprint for our most powerful political and cultural institutions - we have heads of state, arms of the military, birth of the nation.  Visual storytellers who understand how our bodies function and how power plays out in our intimate lives know how to visualize power in the collective body, and what can be done to leverage that power, heal culture, and shift oppression.  

Visual storytelling as a social art invites a collaborative, dialogic process in which we facilitate deeper collective understanding about the living systems of cultures.  The social art of Somatic Scribing supports the collective body in visualizing itself and shows us how to make homeopathic adjustments towards systemic balance, flow states, authenticity, integrity, harmony.  In a movement context, we might understand the work of cultural, political and economic wellness making as moves towards prison abolition, climate justice, solidarity economies, reproductive justice, and more.  In an ever-increasing culture of inflammation, urgency, hypervigilance and overpolicing, this moment calls for visual storytellers who have the skills to intervene in the “solutions” that reinscribe the very things that are making our cultures sick in the first place. 

WHO IS THIS COURSE FOR?

Artists, cultural workers, scribes, graphic recorders, facilitators, teachers, counselors, parents and space holders of all kinds who:

• Want to apply decolonial practices to to the way they listen and reflect group transformation

• Are seeking to widen their somatics practice to include the Cultural Soma

• Desire more intimacy with the wisdom of their ancestral lineages

• Crave play space to experiment with visual storytelling as a method for shifting oppression

This course aims to be accountable to:

• The land

• pachamama/pachamante

• Our ancestors, well and unwell

• Our own bodies (not that accountability guarantees your safety or comfort)

• Impacted descendants of epistemicide 

*where accountability is the caring attention towards our impact on the web of relations that makes us possible

The Foundations Course is open to people of all backgrounds from across the world. It is hosted by and will center the voices of the Bodies of Culture that make up the global majority.

SESSION FLOW

The flow of each session will start with a somatic grounding, followed by a short presentation and open time to practice, offer feedback, and reflect on our learning.  Each session will focus on a different rhythm of the body: birth, breath, rest, digestion, eros, and death.  

All sessions will be recorded.  While we will invite cohort connections and community building on and off zoom for the duration of the course, it will be possible to have a meaningful experience by watching recordings at your own pace.  No prior artistic or somatic experience is necessary, although participants will be asked to maintain daily embodiment practices throughout the course.  

Acceptance to the Foundations Course automatically enrolls you in the upcoming Fall Somatic Scribing workshops: Draw the Feeling, Patterns in Nature and Shape of the Story. 

In between our monthly workshop, participants will also have the option to choose from a variety of additional resources including somatic practices, guided visioning prompts, readings/podcasts, and some sacred study. 

RESOURCE FLOW

The course fees are based on calculations of the course team’s cost of labor for the organizing and coordinating of the course, valued at meeting our basic needs including work schedules that allow for rest and wellness.  As queer, BIPOC and disabled people living within underfunded communities, each of us are also in a practice of redistributing a portion of our income as reparations, mutual aid, and other acts within the solidarity economy.  

Contributing $600 for participation would cover our costs.  We offer the following sliding scale for you to sit with and assess where you, your ancestors, and your current financial situation land: 

$0 for Black, Indigenous and People of Color who consider this work to be reclaiming ancestral lifeways stolen by colonization, enslavement & genocide.  This is not a scholarship.  We believe descendants and survivors of these legacies should never have to pay to access what is rightfully theirs.

$300 - $600 for folks from the global South, people from historically disenfranchised communities, low income/working class folks, people with less access to wealth (savings, investments, inheritance).  

$600 - $1000  for folks from the global North, folks who identify as middle or upper class, people who have access to savings, investments, or inheritance. 

$1000 - 2000 for people who have benefitted from wealth extraction and would like to participate in the cultural healing practice of wealth redistribution, you might consider contributing generously at this level to support us in hosting cohort members reclaiming ancestral lifeways.  

We will be delighted to discuss with accepted participants how to make resource exchange accessible, including payment plans.  We will not base acceptance to the course on your stated financial contribution.

Feedback from 2021 Lab Participants:

SHAPE OF THE STORY:

Animist Storytelling for Narrative Strategists

Any good storyteller will tell you that the story is woven by both the teller and the elements of the story themselves: the characters, the setting, the times.  This type of animist storytelling, where all stories are alive and all things that are alive are beings, has been central to culture making for most of human history.  As contemporary artists and cultural workers, pulling these ancestral practices through in our movement comms and narrative strategy work reconnects us to the somatic root of storytelling that moves the body of the listener: creating belonging, teaching, inciting action.

Chicana feminist Gloria Anzaldúa writes in Luz en Lo Oscuro: “throughout the centuries, one culture touches and influences another, passing on its metaphors and its gods before it dies.  Metaphors ARE gods. According to archetypal psychology, we have internalized the old deities, animals, and forces of nature that our ancestors considered gods. We could say that metaphors are allies, spirits (transformative aspects of the unconscious seeking to enter the conscious).” 

To learn how to tell stories collaboratively with the story-beings themselves, we have to develop a posture of resting that allows us to listen into the imaginal or dream space.  In this workshop, we will practice dropping into restful awareness to explore contemporary deities in modern myth using an animist-somatic lens.  We will listen decolonially for the shapes of these cultural beings through the use of metaphor and track how they move in the body of the listener.  Our collective attention will lend itself to charging the field of narrative strategy with the transformative animist-somatic storytelling of our way-back ancestors. 

WORKSHOP FLOW  

This workshop will be recorded.  While a portion of the workshop will be devoted to group practice and reflection, it will be possible to have a meaningful experience by watching the recording at your own pace.  No prior artistic or somatic experience is necessary.

RESOURCE FLOW

Contributing $100 for participation would cover our costs.  We offer the following sliding scale for you to sit with and assess where you, your ancestors, and your current financial situation land: 

$0 for Black, Indigenous and People of Color who consider this work to be reclaiming ancestral lifeways stolen by colonization, enslavement & genocide.  This is not a scholarship.  We believe descendants and survivors of these legacies should never have to pay to access what is rightfully theirs.

$50 - $150 for folks from the global South, people from historically disenfranchised communities, low income/working class folks, people with less access to wealth (savings, investments, inheritance).  

$100 - $200  for folks from the global North, folks who identify as middle or upper class, people who have access to savings, investments, or inheritance. 

$200 - 300 for people who have benefitted from wealth extraction and would like to participate in the cultural healing practice of wealth redistribution, you might consider contributing generously at this level to support us in hosting cohort members reclaiming ancestral lifeways.

PATTERNS IN NATURE

Ecological Literacies for Visual Storytellers

The pattern of branching efficiently distributes resources.  Wave patterns - soundwaves, brainwaves, waves in waters -  all tell the story of rhythmic movement.   When we as artists and storytellers study the natural patterns in which life organizes itself - like spirals, branches, waves, cloudforms, nets, and fractals - we align our stories with the intelligent design of the natural world to tell a more effective, powerful narrative of being in social and ecological right-relations.  

This workshop builds on foundational Cultural-Animist Somatic principles: all cultures have bodies, and all bodies are sentient ecosystems.  When we soften the perceived individualism of the modern self, we understand that both the humxn body and the cultural body are interdependent webs of eco-social relations.   Therefore, as students of the cultural soma, we must also be students of ecology.    

The sentient design of the natural world is ordered to be functional, efficient, harmonic, flowing, and beautiful - and so too can be our design work when we decolonize our imaginations and be in devotional study of the intelligence of patterns in nature.  We will learn how to apply form and function of natural patterns in visual storytelling towards the transformation necessary for eco-social wellness and liberation. 

WORKSHOP FLOW 

This two hour content-heavy workshop will present collected observations about the form and function of patterns in nature and how they get mirrored in culture. We will make time to practice, share back drawings, and reflect together on what this practice makes possible for cultural transformation.

This workshop will be recorded.  While a portion of the workshop will be devoted to group practice and reflection, it will be possible to have a meaningful experience by watching the recording at your own pace.  No prior artistic or somatic experience is necessary.

RESOURCE FLOW

Contributing $100 for participation would cover our costs.  We offer the following sliding scale for you to sit with and assess where you, your ancestors, and your current financial situation land: 

$0 for Black, Indigenous and People of Color who consider this work to be reclaiming ancestral lifeways stolen by colonization, enslavement & genocide.  This is not a scholarship.  We believe descendants and survivors of these legacies should never have to pay to access what is rightfully theirs.

$50 - $100 for folks from the global South, people from historically disenfranchised communities, low income/working class folks, people with less access to wealth (savings, investments, inheritance).  

$100 - $200  for folks from the global North, folks who identify as middle or upper class, people who have access to savings, investments, or inheritance. 

$200 - 300 for people who have benefitted from wealth extraction and would like to participate in the cultural healing practice of wealth redistribution, you might consider contributing generously at this level to support us in hosting cohort members reclaiming ancestral lifeways.