Body & Politics with Abigail Rose Clarke
real change requires addressing embodied states
Currently, I am sitting on a chair that feels too small for my butt, at the border between my face and my hair, droplets of sweat are slowly drying thanks to the fan I urgently had to put on when I came home, the heat is relentless these days. My belly is rising and falling with each breath, tiny blonde hairs are raised by the fan every time the wind brushes my belly, my eyes and mouth feel moist like entries always are. Right now, in my body, there are thousands of processes happening, and words don’t do them justice.
Those of you who follow my work know how important I think connection to body is in dismantling oppressive systems. Every time we look at processes intellectually, we are half-blind, and, usually, whenever things happen it is bodies that are affected. From asthma rates growing because of pollution to mass graves under hospitals, to abortion laws. In the middle of all these processes where decisions are made with our minds, it is bodies that are affected.
Understanding our bodies and their place on this planet is, to me, a revolutionary practice, and someone who knows a lot about this is Abigail Rose Clarke, who I met on a spring morning earlier this year. She is an author, somatic educator, and writer with an inordinate amount of love for octopuses, the moon, and her extensive collection of anatomy books. When we meet, I feel immediately like I have met someone whose interests have bridges onto mine.
When I ask her about somatics, she starts with the etymology of the word, a process I deeply resonate with. “somatic comes from the Greek soma, meaning “of the body” or “of the whole body,” she tells me “So it’s different from anatomy, which comes from the Latin ana “to cut” and tomia “pieces”: to cut into pieces.” Starting at the root of words feels like a familiar process to me, and something I have adopted so much in my writing. Abigail’s work is based on letting the body speak a language to us that can help us understand how to relate to eachother and the world around us. “This is a book about relationships” says the first Chapter of her book.
We're living in a society that doesn't cater to all bodies, and each of us begins this work in different ways, I ask Abigail what came first for her, politics or the body? “I think the political works came first, I was an activist before I was in body. I started doing environmental activism in high school and participated in several protests” she recounts. “At those protests, we were exposed to tear gas and other chemicals. For the next two years, I experienced crippling pains in my belly that would come out of nowhere and bring me to my knees. I believe this pain was due to the exposure to the gases during the protests.” This realization extended into her exploration of yoga. “Yoga became mainstream in the early 2000s, and I initially saw it as a way to achieve a thin body and find peace in a rage-inducing world. However, it wasn't until I met my teacher, Patty Townsend, and practised Embodyoga®, which focuses on the relationship with the earth and alignment through gravity, that I truly connected with yoga. This practice highlighted the disconnect between the white-dominated yoga community and broader social and political issues.”
"Environmental activism can often obscure whiteness and privilege. Through somatic practices, I began to see how entitlement and privilege are felt experiences in the body. Real change requires addressing these embodied states,” she says, “So I started teaching somatics in 2013, realizing it could facilitate significant personal and social transformation. This led to the development of the embodied life method and eventually the framework for 'returning home to our bodies.'"
“One of the things that somatics has done is highlight the influence of whiteness and colonialism on our ways of living and being. Many somatic practices have originated from Afro or Indigenous communities. However, white people often entered these communities, observed their practices, and then appropriated and modified them for their use. This trend is evident even in the spiritual community today, where people pick and choose elements they like, creating a mishmash that is often taken out of context.” I resonate deeply with this and truly believe there is no healing without collective healing.
"Yoga feels like picking and choosing things that make us feel good. It's funny but also striking how people selectively adopt practices for personal spiritual experiences," says Abigail. "A friend from Nepal described how Buddhism in the West differs from its practice in Nepal. In Nepal, actions are linked in visible ways to everyone around you—your family, your town, your community. Here, in an individual-oriented culture, practices like meditation can reinforce individualism rather than communal connection.". Just yesterday in a podcast with adrienne maree brown she was explaining how one of the most impactful things she did was ask people who were voting for Democrats how they were exercising democracy in their homes and community. Most people noticed that though they fought for democracy, they weren’t practicing it.
If we operate within the paradigm of colonialism, we tend to pick and choose practices that serve individual needs, like promoting self-love as a remedy for heart sickness. However, no amount of self-love can replace the community support we often truly long for. “How can one generate self-love internally when it fundamentally requires external community care?" Abigail adds.
Abigail approaches her work through scientific and political knowledge, infused with a deep respect for ecology and nature, always the North Star in all that she does. “Western medicine by definition is oriented towards pathology, towards fixing the symptoms. From an anatomical mindset, the systems are looked at as isolated,” she continues “and now in the last few years there's more understanding of how intimately interwoven the body systems are”. She tells me about serous membranes in the body, such as the pericardium around the heart, the pleura around the lungs, and the peritoneal sac in the abdomen, which are bilayer membranes that create a fluid called serous fluid. This fluid is translucent and viscous, made mostly of white blood cells, and serves to lubricate and prevent infection. Recent discoveries have shown that these membranes, previously thought to be isolated, actually have nexus points where the fluids from the pleura, pericardium, and peritoneal sac come into contact, allowing cancer to spread. This interstitial space, previously thought to be just collagen, has been revealed by medical imaging technology to be a fluid-filled space supported by collagen. She tells me a 2021 study showed that these fluid-filled tubes cross organ and tissue barriers, meaning organs are interwoven with this space. This discovery provides a better understanding of how cancer can spread in the body.
I listen curiously to these discoveries and then she says something that I needed to hear, especially this year “The body is always on our side. It might get things wrong but it is never against us”. I sit with that for a moment as she continues “It's a mindset shift to remember that the body is always on our side. In fact, there is no 'side'—we are the body. We are not adversaries or even allies; we simply are our body.”
Much of Abigail’s work looks at nature and her lessons, and I bring to her something that came up in many conversations this year, that to live close to the land has become a privilege. She tells me, “It is not a privilege, it is a human need. To name it a privilege makes it something we should be ashamed of,” I hear her. “What if we rename it as something that we’ve had stolen from us? How would that change things? There's just not as much room for curiosity if there's no relationship to land, and even in a city, the land lives in cycles.” I tell her about this practice I have been doing that I named “nature noticing”, where every day I notice a display of nature in my city, which made me realise that it's always available, this connection to land. And nature which is what we are.
Ultimately, our conversation circles back to language and how we speak about the body in a very machinelike language, the heart being a pump, or how the immune system has to “fight” something off. “It’s all very positional based ideas around language around the body, and one way to move away from that is to refocus our attention, and speak a different language to it. As the body always knows what to do for you”.
We end the conversation and I cannot help but think about how much we still don’t know. The body is weird, and a mystery, even with everything we know. There's so much yet to be discovered, and it's also something we can experience here and now. So why would I try isolate it down into parts? unless I'm also trying to then increase my understanding of the whole by understanding the part that makes sense
Below find a nature noticing practice and some inspiring things I came across last week for paying subscribers.
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