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“There's no such thing as personal change outside of a social context. You actually can't separate a person from our social context. And that is just like, well, duh, how did they ever think we could do that?”
In this conversation with Staci Haines, we dive into the intersection of personal transformation and structural social change. I appreciate Staci's commitment to holding these two aspects as inseparable - that true healing and justice require both inner work and outer change. We explore some challenging questions: How can we navigate conversations around Palestine and Gaza with our clients in a way that is grounded in compassion and truth? How do we ensure that transformational modalities don't inadvertently reinforce passivity in the face of injustice, but rather empower us to create change? What are the key distinctions between coaching and therapy, and how can we discern our realm of competency as practitioners?
Staci Haines is a pioneer in the field of politicized somatics and trauma healing. For over three decades, Staci has been dedicated to bridging personal and social transformation, guided by the belief that we cannot have one without the other. As the co-founder of generative somatics and a senior teacher at the Strozzi Institute, she brings a depth of wisdom and experience to her work supporting individuals and movements in healing trauma and embodying transformative change.
⭐ Key moments
- 02:43 - Opening
- 05:03 - Staci's roots: personal + systemic transformation
- 12:32 - The power of somatics in social change work
- 17:58 - How we're showing up for Palestine
- 27:54 - How do we move beyond individualism in healing and coaching
- 36:09 - Coaching to challenge the status quo, not to cope with It
- 39:43 - Imagining new credentialing orgs for politicized coaching/healing
- 45:28 - What do we mean by "transformation"?
- 59:25 - Staci's sources of joy
- 1:04:22 - Closing
📚 Resources & Links
- generative somatics (organization co-founded by Staci Haines)
- Strozzi Institute (Staci Haines is a senior teacher here)
- The Politics of Trauma by Staci Haines (book)
- Emergent Strategy by adrienne maree brown (book)
- Radical Dharma by Rev. angel Kyodo williams (book)
- Just Transition Framework (zine by Movement Generation)
- Sharks in the Time of Saviors (book recommended by Staci Haines)
💬 Connect with Staci Haines
- The Politics of Trauma by Staci Haines (book)
- Stacihaines.com (Staci Haines' professional website)
- Instagram @stacikhaines
🎙️ Other episodes you might like
🌲 Follow the podcast
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- @WiderRootsPod - Follow the podcast on Instagram to get a peek behind the scenes
- Leave a rating and review on Apple Podcasts to help others find this show
- If you’re interested in coaching with Jeremy, reach out on his coaching website
I’d love to hear how this episode resonated with you or any suggestions for future topics/guests. You can email me at [email protected].
Transcript
Staci Haines: There's no such thing as personal change outside of a social context. You actually can't separate a person from our social context. And that is just like, duh, how did they ever think we could do that?
And that social context is, based on power over. And what we're committed to at whatever level we're working is transforming all of that to a social and economic conditions that are based on power with each other, but also the planet.
Jeremy Blanchard: Welcome to the Wider Roots podcast, a show about how we can use the power of coaching and personal transformation to help create the world we most want to live in.
I'm your host, Jeremy Blanchard. And today's episode is with Staci Haines.
She's someone I admire deeply and I've been looking forward to having her as a guest on this show. Since I first had the idea for this project.
She's been in this work of politicized, somatics and trauma healing and transformative justice for over three decades. She co-founded generative somatics. She's a senior teacher at the Strozzi Institute and in 2019, she published her book, The Politics of Trauma.
And part of the reason why I find her teaching so powerful is because of her commitment to really bringing together. Personal transformation and structural social transformation. She really holds it in this way that you cannot have one without the other.
And in this conversation, we got to explore some really powerful questions. Like.
How do we hold conversations around Palestine and Gaza with our clients?
And how can we make sure transformational models don't just end up getting used to help people tolerate injustice and become more passive amidst capitalism.
And finally, we talked about the difference between coaching and therapy, which comes up all the time. And how do we identify what's our realm of competency and stay within that.
I loved this conversation and similar to episode five with Kazu Haga, I can tell that it's one, I'm going to come back to over and over again, as I integrate some of the questions and the topics that we were exploring.
And as you're listening, if there's something that you hear that really speaks to your heart, I invite you to take a minute to share this episode with a friend or a coach or a practitioner or a leader in your life who might appreciate getting to listen to it as well. It's what really helps this podcast grow. And if you're new here, take a minute to subscribe in your podcast app so that you can catch the future episodes.
All right. Let's dive in.
[00:02:43] Opening
Jeremy Blanchard: Hi, Staci.
Thanks so much for being here.
Staci Haines: Yeah, delighted to be here with you. Thank you for having me.
Jeremy Blanchard: Yeah. We first met last year when you were leading the Embodied Transformation for Changemakers course with the Strozzi Institute. And, that was right around the time I was starting to dream up this podcast.
Staci Haines: I remember. Congratulations.
Jeremy Blanchard: Thank you. You were one of the first people that I dreamed of having on the podcast. You have a multi decade commitment to this intersection of personal transformation and systemic transformation and, dismantling systems of oppression. So just very excited to have your wisdom here.
Staci Haines: I'm happy to be here. It's nice to have more and more of us passionate about the intersection and experimenting at the intersection. Yeah.
Jeremy Blanchard: Yeah, and you know, we've got your book, The Politics of Trauma, as one of the guides at this intersection. And you recently had your Politics of Trauma course, which I got to be in, in which you had 500, 600 more people in?
Staci Haines: We capped it at 500.
Jeremy Blanchard: Yeah. And so that's heartening too, to see, oh wow, there's so many who want to be this intersection. Very grateful for that. One of the things I want to start with is actually some gratitude for you for something that, you probably don't know yet, which is, that you helped inform the name of this podcast. Wider Roots, I knew what the premise of the show was, and I was trying to come up with a good name, and I picked up Emergent Strategy from Adrienne Marie Brown, and I picked up Radical Dharma from angel Kyodo williams, and I picked up your book, and I was flipping through, and I'll read the quote that inspired it and this will lead into a question, too.
You were talking about your first time going to, a Strozzi Institute course and learning somatics there. The quote is, : "While people were empowered in their empathy, longings, and to take bold new actions, the conversation of collective accountability and collective action was not there. Individual change was the ground. And even as people felt desire to make a difference for others, even support social change, the analysis of broader systems was absent and the support defaulted to individualism and unreflected upon privilege."
to that word broader systems and the name "Wider Roots" just popped into my head and I was like,
Staci Haines: huh
Jeremy Blanchard: that's a good name.
Staci Haines: That's a good name. Let's do that.
[00:05:03] Staci's roots: personal + systemic transformation
Jeremy Blanchard: Yeah. Thank you for that. And, yeah, it makes me curious about that. That is such a formative moment in your entry into transformational work and at least the personal transformation side of things. So i'm curious if you could share more like what was that origin story like of how you got into the personal transformation side?
Staci Haines: Mm It was before Somatics.
Jeremy Blanchard: Oh, yeah, tell me.
Staci Haines: I think I got into both social and personal transformation out of my lived experience, like many of us, I think, even as a kid, I was very, very interested in fairness, which is the only word I had.
I didn't grow up in a family that was politicized or even read that much. But I was really like, something is out of balance, out of harmony, unfair. So the fairness was so important. And then, watching the chaos in my own household, I was like, there has to be a different way, there has to be a better way than this.
And, the first thing that I kind of stumbled my way into was neuro linguistic programming or NLP. Coaching wasn't a word then, like it is now. We might call it a coach training then, but it was the NLP practitioner training. And, I helped actually organize and run NLP Austin.
It's so funny for me to think about how many trainings I've helped to organize in my life at this point. I'm like, wow, okay. Started early and I'm still doing it. But one of the things I actually liked about NLP is that people asked, what do you want?
The first question also wasn't wasn't what's wrong with you.
And it's what I love about somatics or embodied transformation, it's like, what is your longing and how do we answer that question, not from the inherited beliefs, of family, community, or society. It's like, Oh, I want a bigger truck. Do you know what I mean? Or I want more stuff, but rather feeling deeply into an older wisdom inside of us as, to longing.
And then really I kept seeking healing cause I was raised in a household where there was a lot of domestic violence in a community where there was a lot of violence between folks, a white working class community, and I'm a survivor of child sexual abuse. And it was very clear in my twenties, I need to crawl my way to some healing or this is not going to go well, including do I really want to be here and stay here?
So yeah, did some therapy. I have a lot of funny stories about going to my college's psych services and how utterly unpoliticized and unknowledgeable. You know, it was the first place I was told, Oh, child sexual abuse hardly happens to anyone.
It's really rare. and if you want a group, you're going to have to go organize a group by yourself and then come let us know once there's enough people. Welcome to the eighties. Anyway. Healing really out of survival and out of longing. Yeah, and then I found my way to somatics, which I felt so grateful for because it blew my mind.
I don't think I would have pursued healing to the depth that I did without having been politicized. And I know it happens in different ways for all of us. But the politicization that happened for me, Starting somewhat in high school, especially around Indigenous rights and being from Colorado, and the very large Indigenous presence there.
And then into college and going, oh wait, there's names for things that are happening to me, to my people, and to peoples that I know, see, and care about. My empathy. isn't off. My empathy is actually resonant with what's going on. I'm not weird and whack. I mean, I might be, but I'm not, I'm off. I'm right.
But finding that language and really, I landed right in the throes of third wave feminist theorists. And I'm ever grateful. You know, Chandra Mohanty, Audre Lorde, bell hooks, Mary Beth Krauss, Patricia Hill Collins. I'm just so thankful for what I got to learn and who I got to learn from and with. All of that is what actually gave me the courage to even heal.
And then getting active, becoming a campus organizer and a campus activist. All of that let me go, there's enough we that I can go face a level of devastation personally that I don't know if I'm going to live through or not.
Jeremy Blanchard: Hmm.
Staci Haines: So to me, they were just inseparable in my own actual lived experience. And the politics and the activism and the learning movement history. I was like, Oh man, I have as much choice freedom capacity as I have today because of the millions of people who organized for liberation before me. And I saw myself as a link in a very life affirming chain toward the future that somehow finding and placing myself there gave me a lot of courage in many, many different places, including to do my own healing and my own, transformation work.
So I want to keep putting that context on, especially given what we're talking about, because it does make me wonder if we all asked ourselves that question, why did I heal? Why did I get into organizing? Why did I want to be a coach? What is my draw? I wonder if our actual draw is more intersected between healing and structural change than the stories that get told.
Jeremy Blanchard: There's so much aliveness in what you're talking about. And I feel that connection to something greater. I'm sure some people find that through like a direct spiritual path, right? They needed to do the journey of healing. They needed a connection to something greater.
Maybe that was their spiritual connection. And perhaps that's part of your story too, but at least one part of what you're describing that I really admire is that connectedness to history and to, our agency, collectively, to make a difference toward justice and liberation, it sounds like what I hear you saying is, like, oh, I'm not only resourced more because of my connection to this, but I also, have a purpose connection, like, Oh, there's something bigger that I could contribute to.
Is that how it lived for you? Or is there any, a different way you'd put it?
Staci Haines: Most definitely, you know, I'm such a viscerally guided person. Like people talk about their inspirations and intuitions coming in different ways. And mine is such a deep feeling sense that it was both like, Oh my gosh, people just helped me name my own life. And my own lived experiences. And that is so deeply settling. And look at all those people who cared enough before us that actually have us be more liberated than we would have been. And then to me, just that felt sense of like, of course, that is what I want to spend my life, my love, my energy toward is more love and liberation for all of us, more equity for all of us.
Yeah. So we could say purpose for sure. And it just felt like it, I'm not, I don't know what metaphor to use, but there was already this river of collective action, love liberation happening. And I found my way to it. It felt so bouying and enlivening and sad and devastating, but fundamentally empowering and lifting in that way, that has seemed to sustain for many decades. you know, different versions, it looks different ways. There's different lessons at different points, but, I feel so deep and grateful.
[00:12:32] The power of somatics in social change work
Jeremy Blanchard: Yeah. And then that led you to somatics as a like vehicle for some of that work.
Staci Haines: And who, knew, that was going to be it. So in my 20s, I already moved to the Bay, cause the Bay seemed to be all about healing and politics. So I might as well come here, right? That's what
Jeremy Blanchard: what brought me here too.
Staci Haines: Yep
My buddy's car and 300 dollars. That's how I got here. It was a friend of mine who introduced me to somatics.
And the first thing I did was see a somatics practitioner. And, I was like, what the heck is happening to me? I'd been to some talk therapy. Again, it was really focused around my trauma healing. And I got on that table of somatic body work. And it was like, things were falling out of my body that my, conscious mind didn't even know.
My conscious mind would be the last one to recognize and learn. And then it would show up in my life. I was more free or I was more capable or I was not, triggered or history wasn't evoked in the same way. So that blew my mind. And then I was like, where did you learn how to do this? And it was Lomi School, which then became Strozzi Institute.
And, you know, back in the day, the only program you could get into was 36 days. It wasn't like four day here and a two day there. It was like, if you're going to learn how to do it, get in and get on path.
And I actually hope we go back to that. I know it's not accessible for everyone. I love that we have our online world to create more accessibility. But when I think about the level of numbing, the level of trauma and intergenerational trauma caused racial capitalism, caused by patriarchy, caused by neoliberalism, it's just so overwhelming. At this point, I think it takes us about six days of collective work, live together to get anywhere near back to our bodies.
But I joined Lomi school and I tell this story sometimes, but I was stunned at what was happening inside of me. We were asked to do two hours of meditation a day for the entire year. So that was like a dose into meditation practice to do other somatic practices daily. And then we were together at least three days a month. But things kept falling off of me and things came alive in me and the teachers, Robert and Richard, gave me somatic assessments and I was like, how did they see that?
It was so fascinating to me. I'm like, this is magic. Magic is happening. And then of course, what I got to learn in somatics is magic is learnable. It's learnable. It's just a change in paradigm and perception and perceiving things that we got taught to stop perceiving.
There was a, man in the course, kind of older, white, hetero, ran his own business, but not like a tech firm business, like, materials and supplies. And he was a person I'm like, this is not going to work on him. There is no way this person is going to change. And he took a little longer, but by the end of that program, his wife and five of his employees showed up at our celebration at the end.
And basically his wife was in tears with who he became inside of their marriage and who he became as a boss through doing his work at this depth. And I saw things come out of him that I was like, oh right, everyone has a story.
I can have all my assessments about a lot of things, but everyone has a story and everyone was shaped. And it just humbled me and it taught me a level of compassion that I forget and remember over and over again.
But after that year, I was like, no way, this is incredible I'm going to stay in. And by the, my second year of training, which was maybe just 16 days that year, I knew movement needed it.
And I'd already founded Generation Five, right? Whose mission is to end the sexual abuse of children within five generations through transformative justice. And I'm like the level of healing needed and the level of embodied capacity to practice transformative justice. We need somatics. So that became my first movement place to start experimenting with integrating somatics into our work.
Jeremy Blanchard: I love that. I feel there's so much value in us sharing these stories about how we find this intersection of personal and systemic. Because, yeah, for me it brings it to life. I was like, oh right, that's the direction, that was the possibility that rose up in you. That had you see. Like, oh, I want to bring these two together.
And I can relate to that in my own journey, where discovered personal transformation work. It was like, oh, all of my organizer friends.
Staci Haines: I know.
Jeremy Blanchard: need this. We so need this. We care so much and we are so driving ourselves totally into the ground because we care so much.
Staci Haines: Exactly. And there's a certain style of survival strategy. And, I also feel like, and I say this often, but I feel like those of us who are working for structural change have the hardest job. It is really complex. We're trying to imagine and invent worlds while we're shaped by an in this one.
It is a lot. It takes an incredible amount of creativity, smarts, relationship, and I want us to have the best transformational tools in us, with us, between us, because what we're up to is so powerful So it's also why I want very politicized, high quality somatics accessible and available inside of our movements, so it supports what we're up to.
Jeremy Blanchard: Yeah. Amen.
[00:17:58] How we're showing up for Palestine
Jeremy Blanchard: I know for me, my heart is breaking about Gaza every day and I can't do an episode of this podcast without, bringing it forward and seeing like, we're living through an active genocide and it is, uncomprehendable. And I think there's so much we could talk about the work of healers, of coaches, of like movement supporters in a moment where movement is, active at its highest levels, right?
There's this. We need all hands on deck moment, and therefore we need all of our supporters on deck too, to engage this, so.
Yeah, there's a few things we could talk about but one is like, I know I've gone through so many waves of numbness and, agony and feeling empowered and feeling like I really have my sense of agency with me and I may go through those waves in a single day.
First I'm just curious, like, where are you, like, how are you holding this in this moment? Which phases are you in?
Staci Haines: Horror,
Jeremy Blanchard: Yeah.
Staci Haines: Pain.
Jeremy Blanchard: Yeah,
Staci Haines: But one thing that I always want to remember, and I know you know, but I just, feel like we need to keep saying it is this genocide has been going on a long time. Like we are 75 years in almost a hundred years into the colonization of Palestine.
And, a strategic Zionist agenda to also engage our country and other superpowers to support and fund, which we are.
I'm just like, I don't know how much of a difference this makes, but maybe it just makes, helps me feel better. But I call the white house every week on their comment line, I'm like, what are you doing? Stop.
Staci Haines: I'm devastated. I'm enraged. I feel deeply loving and honoring. I feel helpless. I keep asking myself what's my best and right role. And how do I do that well? I've also really committed to having the conversations. Honestly, deeply, openly, lovingly with the other folks who are like, it's complicated.
I can't really, I think naming a genocide is too much. And you know what? I'm like, no, part of my role being who I am is, let me have that conversation incredibly loving way. Loving, curious. And I've had many, many of those since October of last year. And I'm good with that. That's part of my role. It's like how to hold a non polarizing space, because so much is at stake.
And I think polarization, we keep learning, doesn't work
So thank you for bringing it up, I'm really glad you did. In November is I woke up in the middle of the night, I, dream a lot and I talk in my sleep sometimes, but I was sitting up in bed and I was yelling, stop.
And I was like, oh my gosh. You know,
So that's how I am. And mostly I'm like, how are Palestinians? How are Palestinians? How are Palestinians? And then how do we orient around, stopping this, living through it and sustaining and, having Palestinian peoples have long lives and long culture and many more generations to come in different conditions.
Jeremy Blanchard: Yeah. That's right. Yeah, I think about. So much of your work is about trauma, individual, collective, how it moves through collective, what are the systemic conditions that give rise to it. This is similar to what we saw in 2020 with Black Lives Matter. Suddenly it was in our collective consciousness, something that has been there for hundreds of years.
And we've got a similar situation here where, okay, this issue, this tragedy is in the spotlight and it is getting the most attention, at least in the U. S., that it's ever gotten. So I'm just curious, what from your trauma and somatics work do you look to in a moment like this, of how to hold and how to show up, or how we can show up?
Staci Haines: I think there's any tidy answer.
We are a collective of organic changing creatures who are really wired around safety, belonging, and dignity. And trauma profoundly impacts those. And obviously people are being, murdered and tortured, at the scale we're talking about right now.
To me, I guess the question I ask myself, and this is maybe what I can offer as we sort through this together, is How can I be connected, centered, grounded with other people enough to let myself feel the devastation? Because, of course, all of our systems want to shut down this level of devastation and not feel it, not face it, or only face it, or right, whatever our survival strategies are, we have different ones. And then what we start to do is making each other wrong.
There's just a cascade of those particular survival strategies. So, I keep going, okay, how do I come back into me with others enough to feel? And then to, in a resourced way, be able to go, what's the next right action? What can I do in my particular role or location?
So it isn't like I'm going to feel bad for two seconds and then run away again. It's like resourcing ourselves and each other to try to stay in the ongoing questions and actions. And then back to questions so we don't get stuck. Part of our survival strategies is we get fixed and brittle into a certain way.
And then inside of that our options, responsiveness, capacity to, change becomes more brittle. So those are the, some of the things I'm trying to track for myself and the people that I'm with and in the work that I do right now. Yeah. Does any of that resonate for you?
Jeremy Blanchard: Yeah. Yeah.
Especially in a moment where there's so much to feel, there's so much heartache, there's so much agony, and collective grieving and pain that's happening, I really resonate with the part about how do we stay creative in that? Like, it's a moment, like so many moments right now, that require our full creativity to be online, our full capacity for connection. And, it is so easy, and I know we all, go here often, it is so easy to get into full crisis response mode in a way that shuts us down. Yeah, I'm really resonating with that. Okay, what can we do to ground resource and show up to the crisis with our full capacities, our full creativity, our full brilliance?
Staci Haines: Exactly. Or at least like 70% of it. Or,
Jeremy Blanchard: yeah.
I'll take 50% most days,
Staci Haines: Yeah
Jeremy Blanchard: Yeah,
Staci Haines: And also that lets us keep remembering it's like in this, who am I paying attention to? Like I'm on a, this very beautiful text thread from a man in Gaza, a signal thread. Saying here's what it's like for me, here's what it's like for us here Do you know what I mean to just be like, okay all the things we know and are so hard to do When we are caught either in survival or reactivity or you know working 20 hours a day to organize the next action. Thank you all who are doing that. And thank you to everyone who's showing up and you know putting the pressure on in the ways that we can from our seats, which is vital.
I'm hoping this is a pivot in the international positioning. That's what I hope it is. Me and many look at South Africa. It's like, when was that moment when it was like, okay, the international pivot happened and then pressure could be applied in a very different way for a different future.
Jeremy Blanchard: Yeah, absolutely.
I don't know how many. folks you're working with one on one doing somatics work with these days, but I'm curious, how are these conversations going with clients or with the people you're working with? What do you see showing up right now around
Staci Haines: Gaza?
So I keep a very small practice mostly of folks who are in, pretty hefty leadership and movement. And then obviously in the online programs, this conversation comes up and we have one on ones with people out of that. And then in rooms, in groups of people in rooms, comes up.
It's not like I need to initiate it. It's in the air that we're breathing. Sometimes it's grieving, sometimes it's rage. Sometimes it's like, how do I lead my organization inside of this? And how do I work with and navigate with my funders inside of this? Like, sometimes it's more dancing, with the, other narratives that we have been handed.
Inside of my coaching work, depending whether we're in person or over zoom, I feel like it's really important to keep pivoting between we're talking, we're practicing, we're actually moving into concrete practice together. There's different information and different capacity building that's happening in that.
When I can, and someone's in person, that's like, you know what, the level of bigness that this is, let's just go on the summit on the table. And do somatic body work. That is, to me, the most efficient way overwhelming energy can move through us and help us be at a more centered, responsive or creative space.
But making sure, and I feel like this for all somatic coaches, practitioners, whatever we want to call ourselves, especially in Zoom world, it is so easy to be like, we're going to talk about somatics, but that's what we're going to do is we're going to talk. Yeah. and for sure bring our attention to our somas and our sensations, which is great, but get caught there because it's such a strong default. And so that's one of the things I make sure we don't do is like, cool, that's good. Now let's do something else.
Jeremy Blanchard: Yeah.
There's a thread in here about, how do we resource ourselves to do the most important structural change work that's happening.
[00:27:54] How do we move beyond individualism in healing and coaching
Jeremy Blanchard: Something you write about and talk about a lot is this, how do we get out of individualism in work for healing, right?
We see it so much everywhere that there's spiritual spaces, healing spaces, coaching spaces that are geared towards your own well being and cool. We did our work together. That's all, you decide how you want to apply that. I talked about this with Dara Silverman on her episode that came out a few weeks ago and yeah, I'm just curious, How do you hold these two where you see individualism showing up in spaces for healing?
Staci Haines: Part of why I started generative somatics is so that we could purposely take a tool or a technology or a very, very powerful embodied methodology and very, very directly serve people who've already chosen into social and climate justice work. And to me, it's really to whom are we bringing the work? How are we bringing the work? And, to me that makes all the difference and we need both.
Like I don't want to dismiss the personal transformation. I mean from my view, I need to keep doing that until I die, right? And then there's the big transformation and we'll see what happens, right?
But to me, I feel like, we experimented with so much at generative somatics and I've been experimenting since I've been gone and here's a couple of, things I'm learning. One is that collective practice really serves groups, and it's helpful for it to be collective practice that's aligned with their purpose of their mission, right? So if it's around sustaining a lot of pressure, let's do practices that help us sustain pressure together, right? Or there's this whole practice of collectively move the line. We're from center, we move another line of people back, right? There's ways to practice with the collective that really serves the purpose.
One of the learnings to me from those years at GS is that when we are in a movement organization and drop into a level of what is more healing work, it's in many ways too complicated a space to do that.
When who's in the room have different It's like, Oh, this is my supervisor or supervisee. This is someone I don't actually choose to be that vulnerable with. And it is really one of the dances around coaching and transformative leadership development that I want to ask us to be really in inquiry together about.
It's like it doesn't always work to drop deep healing into a collective space that's about something else. And things like projection transference and counter transference are real things. Power and positional power are real things. What people's roles are and decision making power, those are all really real things.
So I, I really want us, as the healers, coaches, transformational space holders, to keep being rigorous about what are we doing in which spaces, and not all things for all spaces. I know that because I really wanted all things to be for all spaces, and I feel like I tried it and some shit did not work, right?
And it's like, cool, let me learn and let us learn from what works and doesn't work. So, I have this vision of maybe it's the next experiment going forward is that we have really transformative leadership development with groups that share a purpose that's aligned with that purpose and then when people need deeper healing that there are politicized, somatized healing groups that people can go to that they don't have to have their co workers in and that there's a place where that deeper healing can happen because we need it.
I mean oppression causes trauma. Colonization causes trauma. Slavery causes, do you know what I mean? We're just living in intergenerational trauma, but there's a place that is politicized and well held that can be accessible, but you don't have to share with your co workers or your co organizers or your co collective members because it really gets complex in a way that I actually think doesn't serve us.
when we're trying to do all that together.
So I want to toss that in and I know I can't remember what your question was. What was your question?
Jeremy Blanchard: Yeah. you're doing so good. I love what you, I love this. I love where you went
Staci Haines: Whatever, whatever.
Jeremy Blanchard: Whatever. Yeah, to speak to something you just said, I got to go to the embodied Transformation course from Strozzi, a few months prior to the one that I took with you. And so I took the kind of normal version of it.
And then you and the crew offered at the changemaker version, and, to see the differences and how you adjusted the curriculum was so, instructive and so powerful, particularly that you can do these activities where you approach someone and you, help them, center while they are experiencing some high pressure scenarios.
But then you can do that exact same exercise with a line of people as you're describing. And let's imagine that's our organization and that this organization is experiencing pressure. And what does it look like to collectively embody a centered response in the face of pressure? What an incredible invitation. What a meaningful way to practice and what a needed way to practice that when we are so caught up in the day to day work of our organization's mission, it's like, there's just more on the to do list. We gotta go.
Staci Haines: Completely.
Jeremy Blanchard: So that resonates.
Staci Haines: When I work with organizations, we really do ask that question. What's your purpose? In some ways, what's your collective shape? And your collective survival strategies or condition tendencies, given all of that, that informs what practices we should do together.
It isn't just like meditation is always great, throw it in, or centering is always great or whatever, right? It really, we want our practices to be informed by what's going to serve the vision and purpose given the collective shape that's practicing, given the particular pressures they're under and given their collective default strategies to pressure.
And then it can be like, cool, here's our practice. But we really encourage folks to go, okay, at least once a week at the staff meeting, do 20 minutes of practice, right? At least once a week at the staff meeting, go here is our vision and purpose. Here's how we'll know when we fulfill it. So we're coming back just like individuals. We're coming back again and again to vision, to purpose. And what are the practices that will serve us now? And fulfilling that purpose more powerfully or in withstanding all these pressures in a more resilient and connected way.
I feel like I've learned, there are to me a few things to track. Can we remember and stay connected to what we care about? It's also a question to go, can I remember what I care about? So what practices help us do that? Then there's like, can we stay connected to each other under pressure? Because it's really normal to splinter under pressure, to splinter during transition, to splinter during political disagreements, but guess what that does?
Weaken our movements. That's all it does. You know what I mean? So to me a huge question is with all this pressure is how do we stay connected? At the right distance, it's okay, but how do we stay connected under some of these conditions? That usually means we have to practice that. Who taught us that? What conditions taught us that?
And I don't mean the like merged connected or what we might call codependent connected. Like how do I be connected to myself and you and you in this maelstrom?
Another one is, okay, how do we stay connected and resilient? And I don't mean again, resilient, like override. I mean, a politicized understanding of resilience.
When all we know is coming is pressure. So all of that informs what could we be practicing to deepen this in our collective soma and keep us more in responsive strategic choices rather than reactivity. The hurt is authentic. And then how we be with the hurt is so much where there can be such a difference in, in what happens out of it.
Right?
[00:36:09] Coaching to challenge the status quo, not to cope with It
Jeremy Blanchard: Yeah. You're, embodying something that I'm really curious about, which is something that politicized Somatics does at like every step, which is weaving the systemic and the personal. And this way that I'm like, I look at it and I'm like, yes, more of that, because there's so much in the coaching world especially, I think, that can be used to further capitalism and to further other systems domination where becomes like, okay, we're going to coach our employees to basically be more compliant, docile, more accepting of pain, the pain that you're talking about. There's something that you have your sights set on that allows you and this body of politicized somatics to not let coaching become a tool for pacification or for just, oh, I can tolerate more of the injustice.
How is that happening that it doesn't get used to that way?
Staci Haines: What I'm really hoping is that, like, our generation, and I mean kind of those of us, let's say, actively in the world of transformation from our, like, 20s to our 80s, like, those of us who are rolling with this right now, that we make a very, very strong intervention during our lifetimes.
I think it's ours to do. And the intervention is, there's no such thing as personal change outside of a social context. You actually can't separate a person from our social context. And that is just like, duh, how did they ever think we could do that?
And that social context is, right now, on power over. And what we're committed to at whatever level we're working is transforming all of that to a social and economic conditions that are based on power with each other, but also the planet. So to me, we are the intervention right now.
And one of our risks is because everyone and their cousin is running a program online right now, which is okay. We're in a popularization moment, right? Of somatics of transformation, the vast majority is not politicized. Like we have to be real. The vast majority is not politicized, but what's happening is like DEI is like a frosting being spread on a warm cake. It's superficial. It runs off. It doesn't actually become part of what is. There's a lot of DEI overlay right now, and I really want us all, because we're going to do this together, to be like, a superficial DEI analysis is not enough. It wasn't enough in the 90s. It wasn't enough in the 40s. It's not enough.
It's not enough. Structural analysis means we're looking at structural power and the distribution, the collective systemic distribution of safety, belonging, dignity, and resources, right? So to me, there's this way, those of us who are transformational practitioners,
we need to stay in political education of ourselves. We need to stay involved in movement, right? We need to go, I'm an individual in a collective soma. How do I help this collective soma transform toward liberation? Right? And in some ways to just keep putting challenges where we need to put in challenges and grab each other's hands and lift each other up and keep growing together.
[00:39:43] Imagining new credentialing orgs for politicized coaching/healing
Staci Haines: Because what could get institutionalized I mean, coaching, okay, so the International Coach Federation. They invented themselves. They invented themselves and they invented their own standards. There's no legal thing about it. I thought about we should create one of those for politicized somatics and then I got too tired thinking about the bureaucracy that would take.
But, but the standards, collective liberation is not part of their standards. There's a lot of great things in there, but working with a collective SOMA, having coaching be inherently tied to becoming socially active, those are not the standards. We need to bring those standards because what's going to get institutionalized is the default of individualism and racial capitalism and patriarchy.
It's okay. We already know that. That's not okay. But we already know that it's not like news, but we have to stay in the intervention and stay in the intervention together.
So If someone out there is super called to generate collective standards and like a different narrative and a different, I don't even want the certification program, but a different certification bubble, or at least network all of us so we can be more powerful together.
If you're called to that work, please do it. Feel free to call me. I will join.
Jeremy Blanchard: Yeah. I mean, in there, you named so many possibilities for the seeds of what an alternate version of coaching, healing, practitionership can look like, right? In the world that we currently have, it's like, not polite in quotes, right? It's not accepted to say, Oh, great. How is what you're doing here going to inform you becoming active on the social issues that affect your life? that's, that's like, Oh, I don't want to push my client in a direction. I don't want to have an agenda, quote unquote. And yet I love that vision of it just being, well, obviously, how could this person just, think of themselves as this autonomous, isolated system that, oh, you take care of you and you're going to be fine. And, there's nothing, more to do.
Staci Haines: Can I toss something in here?
So in the 90s sometime, there was an international conference on somatics and it was great. I also was like, people look so vibrant. I'm like, I'm happy I'm in this world. Something life affirming is happening here. But there's a group of people who are talking about the conflict between standard Western therapeutic traditions and somatics.
And therapists were being like, I can't touch my clients. That's illegal. It's literally illegal inside of my license. And so they're talking about ethics and this and that. And, this guy, Thomas Pope, who's a long time in Lomi school. He said, what if somatic body work and touching your clients was the most healing and liberating thing for them?
Wouldn't it be unethical not to touch them?
And I was like, yeah, it would be. It would be. This is how I feel about politicizing somatics, is the most natural thing, it's like, I would go, okay, Jeremy, what do you care about for you? What do you care about for your community? What do you care about for the world? That's in us. That's already in us. We already care about the collective because we're social animals.
So to me that we only ask, no, don't talk about anyone else. What, just what do you care about? just for you. It doesn't make any sense. It's just like the somatics thing. If touching someone is what's most liberating, then become skilled at touching people.
So I feel the same thing about actions. It's like, what do you long for for us? What do you long for for the world? Do you know how to get engaged with people and communities who also care about that? It'll be so liberating for you. Cool. Here's some ideas. I don't know either. Here's some ideas. It isn't about someone getting it right politically. It's about understanding that we're interdependent beings that long to be back in interdependence.
I think we thrive in places that are life affirming. We thrive when we get reintroduced how to connect to the earth. You know to me one of the roots of individualism is our separation from the planet, right?
Now, capitalism, neoliberalism, all of them thrive on objectifying the planet and objectifying other people, especially people they need to, for cheap labor, right? But when I think about somatics allows us to re understand ourselves as living, dynamic, organic beings that come from and are part of the earth.
And you can conceptually reconnect with the planet or like, love land. But if you don't know how to let your own weight down onto the ground or soften and open in a way where we can feel, the stones or the water, something very profound happens through softening and re somatizing and reconnecting.
I just think it's part of the root of individualism is that separation and part of what we need to remember or relearn how to do again. But that happens not just conceptually, it really happens through the change in our tissues and following our actual longings. So I'm going off on so many tangents, but thank you for being with me in the conversation like this.
Jeremy Blanchard: Oh my gosh. I just had this longing rise up in my heart. I was like may it be so that 10 years from now someone is digging back in this podcast and is like What do you mean coaching happening without? Without people talking about what do you want for us? What do you want for the earth?
Of course we do that. That's just what we do now. Maybe however many years that project takes me it'd be so I just
Staci Haines: May it be so. Our new standard questions, right?
Mhmm
Oh gosh. Yeah. I'm curious, you're using this word transformation a lot and it's a word that, for a long time I had a very like fraught relationship with actually until course with you last year.
Jeremy Blanchard: I was like, oh, it's kind of vague. What are we talking about? It's used everywhere. Everybody throws out the word transformation, in my heart, I've always viewed the work I do with clients as transformational, but it wouldn't be a word I would ever say. There's this definition from politicized somatics of transformation that I'm sure we can talk about.
And then I want to like unpack it, like we're using this word so much all the time
what do we really mean by transformation? Yeah.
Staci Haines: So funny, because if you go to the root of it, It's about changing our embodied structure. If you go transformation or morph, do you know what I mean? Yeah, I mean, like any popular language becomes meaningless.
And I think it also depends on which, structural site are we looking at?
Are we saying an individual, a family, a community, an institution, or global capitalism. But as you know, how we define it in politicized somatics is that we know when we've transformed, when our ways of being, our ways of relating and our ways of acting, taking action are aligned with our deepest longings and visions, even when we're under pressure.
And to me, that's the measure is like, how can I be relate and act? When I'm under a lot of pressure because understandably, and this is what I love about like working with the soma on the soma's terms Not the rationalist view of the Soma, right? Working with the soma on the soma's terms is the soma is operating inside of patterns and habits that become Embodied and unconscious.
That's just how we work. There's no bad about that But because so many of those have been inspired by caused by trauma, oppression, privilege, individualism, weird, funky gender training, right? All of that. That we have these habits that don't serve our purposes, missions, and loves. And that's what we're talking about when we shape shift, when we embody new schemas, when we let traumas fall out of ourselves physically and emotionally. Like that's the transformation we're talking about so that we can be doing relate in a way that's more aligned with our vision and our values. So that's what I would say for individuals and collective bodies.
And then there's a different answer, of course, as you know, to structural change.
Jeremy Blanchard: Yeah. Tell us more.
Staci Haines: Yeah. I want to hear what you say about all this too. Structural change is really that we're changing the, pathways of power and commerce, from power over to power with, but it's really like the pathways of structures, the institutions of commerce, decision making, governance, our profound relationship to the planet, that those are really changing from ones of exploitation and power over to ones of interdependence, equity, what's life affirming, in a very different relationship with change and our many ecosystems. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
I'm just read the just transitions handbook It's like it's such a beautiful simple way that Movement Generation articulated structural change and the changes were up to.
Jeremy Blanchard: Oh.
Staci Haines: love
Jeremy Blanchard: that.
Staci Haines: Okay, given your relationship with transformation How do you now define it?
Jeremy Blanchard: Yeah, I have like fewer words for it, but a lot of felt experience of it. So where I go into is like, okay, what are the moments with my clients when I see something open up inside them that up until that moment has been so stuck, or rigid, or brittle, or confusing, or cloudy. What is a moment when something happens, cognitively and somatically, it's got to happen on both levels, where they are suddenly liberated in some way from that, right?
And it's possible for them to not just have a moment of insight around it, but to have, the capacity to act with more creativity,
Staci Haines: Mm-Hmm?
Jeremy Blanchard: act with more compassion, moving forward, right? That there is a new shape that has been taken. Maybe they're not going to do that 100 percent of the time from now on, but it is like, reliably accessible that there's some new way of showing up, new way of being that might have been either inaccessible before, or, so far out of reach, or just that someone was not even aware of, that there was a different way.
I know that's how it was for me when I first got involved, as a young activist, when I first encountered coaching. It wasn't somatic coaching. It was it was more on the cognitive level, but even then, I was like, I had no idea that I could even re evaluate that thing about how I'm approaching my to do list and how I need to constantly be da da da. I didn't even know there was another way. So that being invited into another way of being and supported in that.
Staci Haines: Thank you for sharing
Jeremy Blanchard: Yeah, thanks for asking.
I think there's one other question that I really wanted to ask you about. which is related to this, and it's about this coaching and healing paradigm we have currently.
And, we were talking about the ICF, the International Coaching Federation, and a lot of these coaching schools. As a new coach, I was told, Healing is about the past and coaching is about your future. No, okay, well, healing is about your emotions and your psychology and coaching is about your goals and dreams.
And we could go on and on with these sort of, I wouldn't say any of them are wrong necessarily, but at this point in my journey, decade in, I'm like, These feel wildly simplistic.
So I find myself curious, you mostly use the word healing to describe the work you're doing.
I see you use that word more often than coaching, but you're obviously right at this intersection of both in different ways. You know, maybe the distinction doesn't matter. Maybe that's part of the answer to this question, but I am curious if you have a way that you hold these two or the intersections of them.
Staci Haines: Yeah. I was already a somatic practitioner before the word coaching came along, so I just don't identify it with her personally. And it's great. Whatever. It's the language that, that we use now. So I was on a call, at the end of last year with some very, very seasoned, somatic teachers. People who have the 20, 30 plus years in, we had exactly this conversation. We just laughed because we're like, we can't even agree with each other. It was a great, we just kept throwing out, what about this? What about that? So
I don't think there's an answer.
What I do think there are, are, things to pay attention to around our competence.
Jeremy Blanchard: Yeah.
Staci Haines: what we can hold. That's what I think is very important. Now, obviously, legally, there's a set of legal standards that licensed therapists and counselors and social workers are held to. Which is another thing that we might want to politicize and change over time.
But there's a, there's a very clear set of, criteria and behavioral standards, right? Again, the ones for coaching people are just inventing and then building an institution out of. We can build an alternate institution, with a different set of criteria.
But to me the biggest thing is to go if you realize that what's happening for who you're working with either in a group or individually is trauma or complex trauma intergenerational trauma and you don't have deep training in that just pause and find another Practitioner to refer to. It just feels very, very important. The things, again, like I said before, it's just the complexity of what happens to us relationally under experiencing a lot of trauma is very complex. And it's important to know that.
What needs to be held emotionally with deep wounding is complex. And we need to actually embody that and know the terrain through training and through having done our own work and through listening and practicing and getting mentorship with a wide range of people. That's all very important. So mostly that's what I just want to invite us all to ask is like, where am I competent?
Where am I not? And no bad, let's be awesome at what we're awesome at. And let's be really clear. Like, I'm not good at that yet. Or maybe I'm never going to get good at that, it's fine, but be able to note that.
Also, rarely, it is important to actually understand when you might need a psychiatrist. And then to just go, there might need to be an evaluation or an assessment around learning differences, or a neurodivergence.
And if you don't know that, Don't start messing around in there. Be like, how can I find you another resource, right? And refer folks and as much as possible, get folks surrounded by the kind of support they need. Now, some of that support, you won't find someone politicized. So then you might be the voice with them and for them to go, cool, let's take that through a political analysis.
How can we make this work for you? Right. So it might be a bit of a combo team. Or a little bit here and there. That's mostly how I want to respond to your question, is that we be really accountable and collectively self reflective around what folks need, can we meet what they need, if not, how can we create an environment of support that maybe we can.
Jeremy Blanchard: Yeah.
I absolutely love that answer. Thank you. It feels so much more truthful than the common answers that are out there about this. And it also feels, it's very spacious to say that the label is only a little bit important, only to the extent that it conveys, truthfully to the people we're working with, what we're capable of, but much more important is the very nuanced terrain of what am I familiar with regarding how to support folks?
And what am I not familiar with? What am I not capable of supporting this person with? And that just leaves, there's so many different configurations that I can picture coming in, that do come out of that for each individual practitioner and what they're gonna be able to support their clients with. Yeah, it just feels very generative.
Staci Haines: I'm glad. Yeah. It feels more to what the lived experience is like, yeah.
Another thing that I would love, but I don't think I'm the person to do it, is how cool would it be if we had, like, joint supervision circles?
Like circles of circles or networks of circles, where we can also be in circles with folks who share our methodology and folks who are coming from a different methodology. And there is a way that, especially folks who are doing full time coaching, it can become very isolating. And I think coaching doesn't have its chops around supervision yet.
So I know folks who are fairly new in coaching and don't have a supervisor and just keep going. And I'm like, okay. Let's shift that up, everybody. Like, let's have mentors. Let's have mentors. So who's someone 10, 20, or 30 years down the road who is down to having your back and down to support you and down to engage?
And I, feel like it's part of the infrastructure that we need to build, both for accountability, where we can be in circles actually grappling with this question. It's like, I think I'm over my head. Who should I go to? Who should I refer this person to? That we can be in support and we don't isolate ourselves inside of this role.
And we also don't get, I think part of both because of my own survival strategies, there was a point in my work at generative somatics where I was so imbalanced with how much I was holding and how little I was being held. That was, it's not good. It wasn't good for me. It wasn't good for the people around me.
And I, there was a lot of course correcting and healing and rebalancing from that once I stepped out of my role there. But I think all of us have to pay attention to that who are in roles of practitioners, coaches, healers, transformational space holders. And I'd love to see that with each other. Like, can we have peer groups?
Can we have peer groups that share a mentor or a supervisor? Can we, in our peer groups, practice together, right? And just have places of healing and support for those of us whose main role is healing and support.
Jeremy Blanchard: May it be so.
Staci Haines: Yeah
Yeah I know some people who are doing it but it doesn't feel like it is a across the board systemic practice, a collective practice yet, and it feels like we need it.
Jeremy Blanchard: Yeah. Yeah, I recently, in a more peer fashion, started reviewing each other's sessions from someone else who has a similar amount of experience as I do, ten years in. And it's the first time that anyone has listened to my coaching sessions like since my training or something.
And when I realized that, I was like, wow, why do I feel so nervous to share these sessions? I was like, Oh, I haven't gotten direct, I've gotten mentorship in the sense that I would get consults, but I hadn't actually had someone listen to a recorded session.
And I was like, and I've gotten, and he's trained in a different model than I am. And so we just, it is such a generative space and a vulnerable space for us to be in.
Staci Haines: Good job
Jeremy Blanchard: yeah,
Staci Haines: That's great. Oh, I love that. I love that. There's so many ways for us to do it. It just would be, yeah, I'd love to see the majority of us do it
Yeah.
Jeremy Blanchard: yeah.
Staci Haines: Cool.
[00:59:25] Staci's sources of joy
Jeremy Blanchard: Is there anything else before we start to close that you want to share with folks?
Yeah
Staci Haines: Yeah
I'd like to say asomething about joy. So I also have, a strong spiritual path, and that connection to what is more vast has been very important to me ever since I was a kid. It's not in a religious context, but more, you know, I grew up in the woods, I grew up in nature and that was a really access point is all the wilderness. And that night sky, the unpolluted night sky. Wow. In my spiritual practice, I'll often ask like, What needs tending or what should I be paying attention to and it's so interesting for me over the last handful of years Joy has been the answer often and it has been a real inquiry for me like what why?
Did you look at what's happening in our world, you know? This own little dialogue, but and I don't know the answer, but I do really feel like whether it's very small practices of joy of just like at the end of my night, I'll go, let me reflect on my day. What were points of joy in my day? What were, what did that feel like?
What were points of connection in my day? Like our conversation will be part of my reflection tonight and letting myself feel like, how did that feel in my soul, in my body? As well as like, were there learnings in my day. Is there something I would have liked to do differently? But this piece about joy and whatever the resonance or the, somatic experience of it.
What I make up, I'm just making this up, is that it helps with the being flexible, changeable, curious, interested, and helps decrease the brittleness. That it maybe amidst all the pain is just a resonance we want to keep feeding by making sure we remember it. So there's, I'm, I am in a practice and inquiry of like the big joys and the really small joys.
So then I want to, share one as of late. So I got to spend all Saturday with my granddaughter who's six. And, we just spent hours on the playground and talking about somatics, what you can learn about somatics through watching a kid. She really wanted to do a new trick, but was afraid this whole somatic process ran in her, including getting really mad because she couldn't do it.
And then blaming me because I didn't help her. I was like, Oh, here we are. This is what we do, but obviously I could be a different adult grand and just be like, are you afraid? She's like, yeah, I'm just afraid. It was so quick for her to go back to acknowledging that. And then she did the trick, which is great.
But she decided to dress up for dinner because we were having a special dinner back at her house. And she put on, like really nine layers of costumes. And then she'd take a couple bites and she would very subtly take one of them off and then be there in a new outfit.
Jeremy Blanchard: Oh my gosh.
Staci Haines: And I think she was three outfits in before I actually noticed what was happening, because we were talking and, you know, hanging out.
And then, I just, I've just been pondering this week, the utter creativity of that, just the delight, her delight, and then our delight at that, how colorful, I kept going, you look like a rainbow, what's happening, how colorful it was, and it's a small joy in relation to the world and everything we've talked about, but the delight, experiencing the delight of it, and then delighting in her, is so nourishing.
Jeremy Blanchard: Oh, I love that. Just letting that sink in. Oh, what a picture.
Well, that leads perfectly to the question I like to ask at the end of every episode, which is, where are you getting your nourishment? So this is obviously one of the places you're getting your nourishment. Maybe there are other things, especially things you could recommend to folks, whether that's books or the leaders that you're following, the thinkers you're following, the practitioners, practices, anything like that you want to share with folks.
Staci Haines: Awesome. I love books and there's this amazing book called Sharks in the Time of Saviors. That's good. I've listened to it twice. So yeah, creative visions of the future are just, fiction writers amaze me. My next door neighbor organized about six of us to all plant trees up and down our block last weekend.
That was incredibly nourishing and this new little being lives in front of my house now that I get water every day and I to know her this new tree. so that just staying connected that way is nourishing to me. I think as you know. Last summer, I got diagnosed with very early stage breast cancer, and so I've been on a, like, the rearranged journey of all of that, and I'm seeing an incredible acupuncturist, and she is incredibly nourishing for me.
And what's interesting is, this is a question she asked me all the time, too. It's like, hold on, how are you nourishing yourself? And she means it in the biggest metaphoric way, so I'm thinking about this question a lot.
[01:04:22] Closing
Jeremy Blanchard: This has been great. How can folks connect with you? If they want to stay in touch or, find your courses?
Staci Haines: Thank you. Yeah, they can connect with me. It's so funny. It's so weird to me to have a Stacihaines. com, but I one now. I just have a website. I'm just in such an organization person. It's very odd to not be like, here's the organization. And, I also, teach in person courses through Strozzi Institute.
So folks can look there and find some of the in person work. But yeah, online, I'm on Instagram and I post sometimes. I was thinking, I'm a little bit older than Instagram, but I post sometimes, and that's Staci K. Haynes there. And, yeah, you can email me through the website, too. That's places folks can find me.
Jeremy Blanchard: Well, this conversation is definitely one of my joys and sources of nourishment today and I know it's going to be sitting in my heart for a while and I think it will be for the folks who listen to it. And I just especially want to thank you for all of the invocations or prayers or longings that you put in this time together.
I can just feel them like going out and like, may they ripple out to the people who's like, yes, I want that too. Or what a good idea. Let's get together and make that happen. So, yeah. for sharing all of your experience and care with us
today
Staci Haines: You're really welcome. I love that you called them that. Invoking. So powerful, huh? Imagining together.
Jeremy Blanchard: That's right.
Staci Haines: Thank you. It's a lot of labor doing what you're doing. and what you're gifting out to all of us through the podcast. So thank you so much for what you do and for having me and I'm glad our paths have crossed.
I'm sure they'll cross many more times now.
Jeremy Blanchard: Yeah.
Staci Haines: Yeah. Thanks, Jeremy.
Jeremy Blanchard: Thanks.
Thanks for tuning into this episode.
And big, thanks to Staci Haines for her fierce commitment to justice and transformation at all levels. And for sharing her wisdom with us here today.
You can check out the show notes for links to the resources that Staci mentioned and other ways to connect with her.
Episode nine comes out in two weeks with a coach named Andrea Ranae who runs a program called Coaching as Activism.
Andréa Ranae: My invitation is just to let ourselves feel the pain that we don't have to have the shame on top of it. It is painful to know that I have contributed to the harm of another person and that I had no idea. That is painful. I don't have to hold shame about it. I can grieve that, have the pain about it, feel the pain about it, be with others in my pain about it, and then do something to tend to that pain.
Jeremy Blanchard: So make sure you subscribe in your podcast app of choice so that you can catch that episode and all the future ones.
As always the website is widerroots.com, where you can find our newsletter. You can email me [email protected] and you can follow the podcast on Instagram at wider roots pod.
And lots of gratitude to Meg for helping review this episode.
Thanks as always do wild choir for the theme music for the show. You're currently listening to their song. Remember me, which will play us out.
See you next time. and I know I can't remember what your question was. What was your question?
Yeah. you're doing so good. I love what you, I love this. I love where you went
Staci Haines: Whatever, whatever.
Jeremy Blanchard: Whatever, Whatever.