Resmaa Menakem is the author of “My Grandmother’s Hands: Racialized Trauma and the Pathway to Mending our Hearts and Bodies,” published in September 2017, which appeared on the New York Times bestseller list in May 2021 as well as "The Quaking of America: An Embodied Guide to Navigating our Nation's Upheaval and Racial Reckoning," published in 2022.  Resmaa is the founder of the Cultural Somatics Institute. He also wrote Monsters in Love: Why Your Partner Sometimes Drives You Crazy- and he tells us what to do about it. He has done more interviews than I can count, including the Breakfast Club.  Resmaa has single-handedly changed JD and many others' professional and personal life. 

What You Will Hear:

The Quaking of AmericaHealing in and through the bodyWhat do bodies of culture need to do to continue thriving and moving forwardWhite bodies deflecting white body supremacy and embodied gnawingThe growth area = gnawing and discomfortThe soil of AmericaTrauma Trump and learned templates (victim and perpetrator)The MirrorWhat’s next for Resmaa

Quotes:

“Recent studies and discoveries increasingly point out that we heal primarily in and through the body, not just through the rational brain. We can all create more opportunities for growth in our nervous system, but we do this primarily through what our bodies experience and do not through what we think or realize cognitively.”

“We learn from what our parents or our care caregivers recoil from and lean into, not just by what the instructions that they give to us.”

“You are not defective.”

“Bodies of culture have been gnawing at us every moment we live because racial trauma persists.”

“Embodied gnawing is the way towards generative knowledge. You cannot get knowledge without gnawing.”

“The growth area is actually in the shit that you don't like to do.”

“The Dark Ages wasn't the dark ages because motherfuckers turned off the light. It was the Dark Ages because it was some brutal, foul shit happening from powerful white bodies to less powerful white bodies.”

“The plantation organized white people.”

“White folks have created a world that is on fucking fire, like literally on fire, and we keep trying to take our buckets and throw water on it, and they keep squeezing kerosene on the other side.”

Mentioned

My Grandmother's Hands: Racialized Trauma and the Pathway to Mending Our Hearts  and Bodies

The Quaking of America

Resmaa Menakem

Mama Rose Underground Books

Penumbra Theater Group

I AM Music Group