Black Embodiment Initiative

As a central and leading project, The Black Embodiment Initiative (BEI)  is a unique space for Black people to explore what is possible in our lives and relationships when we are more embodied.

This project will hold space for learning and practice of the embodied skills that allow us to reinhabit ourselves as organic beings and move towards healing and more just relationships and just futures. 

Currently, the Black Embodiment Initiative has focused on support for organizers in the most recent wave of uprisings protesting extrajudicial killings of Black people, supporting healing justice approaches and formations currently existing and springing up in this moment.

In March 2021, we launched our first Black Embodiment Basics Course, training 150 folks in a virtual three-day series. We closed with a spontaneous, hour-long dance party, celebrating all the windows of possibility and healing that we opened together. 

In 2022 we are focused on creating sacred spaces with the Black Trans and Gender Non-Conforming and Intersex Retreat and generated out pathway for Black Practitioners.

In 2023, our methodology team is continuing to support 18 Black Community leaders via our BEI Cohort. The cohort will be focusing on their own healing and developing embodiment skills to support their communities.

Watch this beautiful recap of the 2022 TGNCI Healing Retreat by Comfrey Films

Black Trans and Gender Non-Conforming and Intersex Retreat

Black Trans and Gender non-conforming and Intersex folks are divine, living in cycles of rebirth, often holding spiritual and cultural leadership in our communities. We are worthy of love, rest and healing. Worthy of connection, authentic relationship, and embodiment. We are surviving in spite of systems and culture that tries to strip us of our dignity, to silence, erase, even kill us. This daily struggle is exhausting and isolating. We deserve space to reclaim our divinity, to learn tools to heal our trauma and sustain our life-giving connections.

In the Fall of 2022, we were excited to host a healing retreat space for Black Trans, Gender Non-Conforming and Intersex folks on a beautiful farm on unceded Muskogee and Yamassee territory (near Savannah, Georgia). Together the participants:

  • Learned Embodiment Practices (understanding trauma and how it shows up in our lives, building center, and resiliency)

  • Rested

  • Built a community and vulnerable connection

  • Worked to heal our relationship to our divinity

  • Celebrated each other

Black Practitioner Development Pathway

​​Our communities need healing. And our communities need leaders trained to support our collective healing.

In the Spring of 2022, The Black Embodiment Initiative launched our first-ever Black Practitioner Development Cohort. Our vision is to have a pathway for practitioners to train in our embodied framework and approach. We know the need for embodied practitioners is massive and our goal is to create a cohort of well-trained practitioners that are able to support people, leaders, and organizations in movement and beyond.

This is one of only a few programs in the country specifically designed to develop Black somatic practitioners.

The cohort will run April-October 2022. We will have monthly teaching sessions with Prentis and periodic learning sessions with trusted practitioners, mentors, and teachers for each developing practitioner. We will also be engaging in a healing practice and digging deeper with personal learning in between sessions.

This will be a space of experimentation and refinement of The Embodiment Institute’s methodology. Our hope is that it becomes a place of reciprocal learning, where we practice skills together and then practitioners utilize them in their community work.