Identity and Accountability Statement

June 2020

Because I am a white-bodied person and I hold space from the perspective of my own life experience as such, some aspects of Body-Informed Leadership centralise the white body experience. I currently live in the UK, and am on a journey to befriend and understand the land and heritage of my ancestors, and my practice of holding BIL reflects that. And fundamentally, by seeking to address the root disorders of the “Western” somatic landscape, BIL is in some ways a somatic ancestral healing process for the European and Euro-diaspora lineages who’s historic wounding gave rise to many of those root disorders in the first place.

This aspect of BIL is held with a deep spirit of allyship, and with the explicit intention to re-weave – at the Somatic level – a sense of cultural identity which enables white-bodied folks to step back into good relationship with the rest of creation (both human and non-human). This includes cultivating the Somatic capacity for accountability, authenticity, and collaborative reciprocity, as well as critically analysing – and reimagining – the social systems white-bodied people contribute to from a disordered vs. healthy cultural somatic place.

At the same time, Body-Informed Leadership invites and honours multiple perspectives in its collective sense-making process. BIL is held with an intersectional awareness that the root somatic disorders of European/Euro-diaspora culture (for example, Domination) have profoundly impacted and shaped the lives (and Somas) of many people around the world via colonisation, globalisation, and white supremacy. That, in turn, people of many lineages and ancestries have embodied and expressed their cultural somatic resources and histories within and as part of the Western cultural soma. And, that these intersecting cultural somatic motifs are themselves experienced and embodied differently based on gender identity, sexual orientation, and class, and differently again in the United Kingdom vs the United States vs Europe vs Australia and so on. It is this diverse cultural somatic field that comprises “the West.”

Body-Informed Leadership aims to provide a respectful space where the multiple somatic lineages of "the West" can be shared and expressed with courage, kindness and solidarity and together, make strides, leaps, and shimmies toward right relationship within and among the human and other-than-human world.