Soul wounds can come about through family mistreatment, abusive institutions, systems, or cultures. But it can also be transmitted through genetic and epigenetic inheritances from traumatized ancestors. Menakem: It’s always been there. There’s always been this kind of resonant knowing that something’s there. Because it’s been decontextualized and handed down from my mom, my grandmother, my grandfather, blah blah blah, all the way down, I didn’t have a language for it, but there was a knowing that “this ain’t right.”

Menakem: So the other thing that I say is that when people talk about the 13 colonies, the 13 colonies were filled with colonized white people. So what ends up happening is that when you have that level of brutality for all that time, and then right after the Bacon Rebellion is the first time you start to see, in law, “white” persons — not landowners, not merchants, “white” persons … The poignancy of the author’s discussion of his childhood, as well as how he raises his own son, who doesn’t understand the dangers waiting for him in the world, is captured in this quote: “(The) paradox of creating a loving home: parents raise kids whose bodies are unprepared to protect themselves from all the evils they will eventually will face.”

Sensitive and probing, this book from therapist Menakem delves into the complex effects of racism and white privilege. Departing from standard academic approaches, he speaks from the wisdom of his grandmother and his own expertise in somatic therapy, a field that emphasizes the mind-body connection— Publisher’s Weekly

Third, he basically only talks about body work (also known as somatic therapy) yet also has some subtle fat shaming and anti-fatness which is completely antithetical to the purpose of body work. Krista Tippett, host: Across the past year, and now as the murder trial of Derek Chauvin unfolds, with Minneapolis in fresh pain and turmoil, I return again and again to the grounding insights of Resmaa Menakem. He is a Minneapolis-based therapist and trauma specialist who activates the wisdom of elders, and very new science, about how all of us carry in our bodies the history and traumas behind everything we collapse into the word “race.” We offer up Resmaa’s intelligence anew on changing ourselves at a cellular level — practices towards the transformed reality I believe most of us long to inhabit. Tippett: It’s amazing. If I ask you, through this life you’ve led and this knowledge you’ve taken in and that you teach people, how would you start to answer the question about how your sense of — your sense of what it means to be human, how that is evolving, how you’d start to think that through right now? Resourcing: identifying and utilizing the resources you have (e.g. supportive relationships, comforting memories, or calming breathing etc.) to help manage stress and trauma.white-body supremacy lives in our BODIES; it's in our blood, dna, flesh, and the pre-cognitive parts of our brains (aka the lizard brain). Tippett: One thing that occurred to me, reading your work, is one reason that elders are so comforting and healing — and children understand that — is because — not everybody becomes an elder; some people just get old …