Nicole: Welcome to Modern Anarchy, the podcast exploring sex, relationships, and liberation. I'm your host, Nicole. On today's episode, we have author Staci Haines join us for a conversation about collective liberation. Together we talk about feeling into the wisdom of our bodies, our inherent draw towards healing, And the connection between personal and systemic transformation.
Hello, dear listener, and welcome back to Modern Anarchy. I am so delighted to have all of you pleasure activists from around the world tuning in for another episode each Wednesday. My name is Nicole. I am a sex and relationship psychotherapist with training in psychedelic integration therapy, and I am also the founder of The Pleasure Practice, supporting individuals in crafting expansive sex lives and intimate relationships.
Dear listener, what a special episode I am sharing with you today with Stacey. I know there are so many big things going on in the world right now in regards to social justice and our collective healing. And one thing I try to remember as a therapist, as someone working in this space, is that Social justice and our collective transformation, our collective healing, is a wide tapestry.
There are so many different areas that need change. And when you think about all of those areas, it can become overwhelming. We can go into that trauma response of feeling, it's just too big. I can't make a difference. And What I try to remember in those moments is that it's a wide tapestry, right? And a tapestry is full of tiny, tiny threads that are all woven together.
And so what is that thread of the tapestry that you're focusing on, right? For me, it's sex and relationships. That is my corner that I am devoted to, to studying for the rest of my life, of how to make change in this space. And when you find your area, you have to trust that there are hundreds of thousands of other activists out there that are finding their thread, finding their corner of the tapestry to focus on.
And so, dear listener, maybe you've already found that thread and you want to continue to trust in the expansive nature of our collective transformation. Or maybe you're still looking for that thread. And if you are looking for that thread, I hope that you can listen to your body. I hope that you can tune in and feel into the things that set you alive.
And in that journey to finding that Fred, I hope you can remember that you are not alone, and that all the things you are doing, the ripples that you are creating, will change the world. All right, with that, if you are ready to liberate your pleasure, you can explore my offerings and resources at modernanarchypodcast. com, linked in the show notes below. And I want to say the biggest thank you to all of my Patreon supporters. You are supporting the long term sustainability of the podcast. Keeping this content free and accessible to all people, so thank you. If you want to join the Patreon community, get exclusive access into my research and personal exploration, then you can head on over to patreon. com / modernanarchypodcasts, also linked in the show notes below. And with that, dear listener, please know that I am sending you all my love. And let's tune into today's episode.
So the first question I like to ask each guest is, how would you introduce yourself to the listeners?
Staci: Oh, so interesting. I mean, what a great thing to ask ourselves like every five years.
Um, because it keeps changing every day, every day, every day. Also, I'm going to introduce myself as someone who is really deeply passionate about collective liberation, um, deeply passionate about individual liberation and that I would. Enter those ideas, states, ways of being ways of relating both from the very structural, like what's happening with our economy and relationship with the earth and the planet and governing structures and I would enter it very, um, through like a healing lens of we have a huge capacity to transform.
And we also have limits inside of transformation and that there's something just so rich and beautiful about both those things. And then I would really enter it from a spiritual space. Also just go, well, what, what is spiritual path and what is awakening and how could we structure our relationships, our communities, our institutions, our social structures.
To serve personal and collective awakening. That would be a very different social structure than the one that we live in now. Yeah. So that's maybe how to introduce myself. I'd introduced myself that I'm a queer mom, like bonus, mom, step mom, mom, mom of three people who are now adults. That was an incredible learning, but I love that.
I'm a grandma of a six year old. And that I love, love, love the night sky, and I love mountains and sweet grass and high mountain streams.
Nicole: Hmm. Yeah, the divinity is right there, huh? Exactly. Yeah. Yeah. Well, you're in the right space, for sure. I already feel the limitation of our hour. I know it's not going to be enough to get everywhere that I want to explore with you today, but Let's dive into it.
When you wrote in about topics, you said the connection between personal and systemic transformation. Take me there. Where do we start this conversation?
Staci: You know, I've been in, you know, social justice, climate justice movement work for 30 years, and I've been in Somatics are embodied transformation for 30 years.
And in many ways, I hold both of those as part of my experience of spiritual path. To me, those things are whole operative, right? Interdependent and we don't do one well without the other. So when I think about personal transformation and I think about the things that shape us, hurt us. Violate us like many of the reasons we might be drawn into transformation is how do I be and live more whole?
How do I love more deeply? How do I stop being in so much fucking pain? Do you know what I mean? Like whatever draws us so many of the root causes of those things are because of our social and economic system, right? So if we look at the impacts of white supremacy and racism or homophobia and how it impacts both individuals and communities.
If we look at how traumatizing poverty is or what it means to like struggle as a working class person, right?
Nicole: Mm hmm.
Staci: I mean, please if we look at gender, right?
Nicole: Mm hmm.
Staci: The root causes of those things are power over social and economic systems that are based on domination and exploitation. That shit causes trauma.
Like, where does it all come from, right? I'm a, I've written about this publicly, but I'm a survivor of child sexual abuse. And one of the things that was weirdly relieving for me as I struggled my way into my own healing is finding out the sheer numbers. Yeah. And I was both, like, horrified. But I was also like, Oh, it's not personal.
It's profoundly personal, but it's actually not personal. This is a collective sickness. And then when we go, well, what are the root causes? Cause let's change the root causes. We're straight back and up into structural work, social change work. Right now, of course. There's people who do those harms who also need transformation and need to stop, but do you know what I mean?
They didn't start it. They didn't start it. So, you know, so much of the healing approaches we are taught in, let's say, mainstream Western psychological thought have no social analysis. Like
what?
Nicole: I know. I know. I know. I know.
Staci: Mm hmm. Yeah. Activism being involved in collective change being politicized are so profoundly healing in and of themselves, but that's not a part of the treatment plan that people get trained in right now.
I really hold our generation. Now, my guess is we're a slightly different generations. But if I just go, our generation went large, I would like our generation of. healers, facilitators, practitioners to really have a huge impact. So less and less about healing approaches and modalities get to pass our generation without a profound political analysis.
Right. And social movements are helping us do that, but it's very important. Then if I go on the social economic change, structural change, bigger, the issue, the larger mass of people we need to transform it. How are those masses of people organizing well with each other? Well, we don't organize well when we are shaped by so much trauma.
Right. And, you know, no matter what, what I love about somatics is it is so understandable that we are shaped by our social conditions, no matter what our values are. So I can have really liberatory values, but I've also been shaped by exactly the systems of domination. Right. So of course we have to transform if we have a different vision that we want for the world.
And that could be healing transforming, that could be a more. Embodied transformative leadership development. It's a lot about how do we learn to relate or relearn to relate? Not only in our intimate relationships, not only in our families, which are huge and difficult, as we all know, but also if we're building a different future together.
To me, to do that well toward a vision, we have to keep transforming to become that because we've embodied something else, which is inevitable. So anyway, I just think these two things go together. I think some of the limits sometimes is that sometimes, and this is going to be totally overgeneralized, but people who've been trained or do one on one healing are like, well, if everyone just did their healing work, our world would change.
I do not agree with that. And sometimes people who are working at the level of mass movement, policy, electoral work, which is all really necessary. Sometimes there can be a dismissing of the level of healing and personal and relational transformation that's needed almost like that structural change alone will change this.
I just think it's a big and, and, and, yes.
Nicole: Yes, absolutely. Oof, so many places I could pick up this conversation and start from. I think because of my positionality in the field of psychology, I just, so much frustration for the perspectives of the individual, the individual, you know, we can go to the Freudian, the individual has this sort of inner psyche conflict, yada, It's painful to watch some of my colleagues work from that orientation without any larger structural understanding because Like you were saying these systems impact us, right?
Internalized homophobia, that voice of judgment, that exists in our own psyche, that is negative towards ourselves, that didn't come from me, that came from the system, and so if we start to have this individual look, we're missing out on pointing the arrow towards the system. the system. And I think so much of us have been in this sort of, I'll name it an abusive relationship with these systems where we've just kind of become normalized to this level of existence.
And we think this is the best that it could be because it is hard to see anything beyond that, right? How do we get out of these systems? What would that even look like? It's hard to imagine that. But thinking about the semantics and how much of that exists in our body on every, every day that we move through this world that we're not even connected to, it's heartbreaking.
Staci: Yeah. Yeah, exactly. It's so funny because if we think about again, more of a Western mainstream culture, individualism is a deep, deep thing that we're trained into. We are collective. If we look at the 200, 000 years of human history, we organize ourselves in groups. That's what we do. We are a social animal.
We're not isolatory animals. Like we're in packs, we're in herds, right? And, you know, when I think about how we totally harm each other, throwing people in isolation is a, how we torture each other, right? So to me, there's already a miss now. I am not in argument. I think sometimes a one on one space is a very important transformative space for people to.
Learn, grow, all of that. But limiting it at the individual to me just shows the embodied individualism of the approaches.
Nicole: Mm-Hmm. ,
Staci: um, really we're collective and I actually think we transform much more quickly inside the collective than one-on-one. Again, I'm not throwing one-on-one out. I just think it, we should name its limitations and know that it's actually not the end goal.
Nicole: Right.
Staci: Yeah. Right. Like, how many of us yearn for communities. Where we can be in practice and belonging and instead we've been, uh, the structure is so set up isolate instead of to build community. Right. And there's a lot of amazing social change experiments. Community experiments, like, so, so many looking at how do we do this collectively in a different way?
But yeah, yes, the limits of individualism. And the individual is the only side of change. You know, there's this model that we use that's in my. You know, the politics of trauma that's in the book, but it actually comes from a public health model that was looking at how do we stop HIV AIDS and all the levels.
I think about this too. How do we end the sexual abuse of kids? There are so many levels of social change, or how do we become a sexually Sex positive, sex competent, discerning culture. We're a completely sex obsessed culture. I don't know. Not sexually competent. Do you know what I mean? Yes, I know what you mean.
You know exactly what I mean. So, but what's so great about this model, now we kind of renamed it and tweaked it, it's concentric circles. And one circle is the individual. The next is family and intimate networks. The next is community. The next is institutions. The next is social norms and historical forces.
And then the biggest, biggest, biggest one is land and spirit or the ever expanding universe, whatever you want to call it.
Nicole: Right.
Staci: And we don't need mean organized religion by that. We mean, a vast unknowable source. Right and if we look at any kind of change, every single 1 of those levels has to change for radical sustaining change for the whole.
Right. Like, let's just say coming back into relationship with land. So we all inherited dominion over. I mean, that's so stupid. We're going to kill ourselves. Well, we are. Yeah, exactly. I know.
Nicole: That's terrible. Yep.
Staci: Um, here we go. Exactly. And then sadly that dominion over the earth, obviously deeply, deeply embedded in Catholicism.
Christianity very quickly becomes dominion, like becomes a belief system by which Catholicism, Christianity, totally participated in colonizing most of the world with a power over. But if we come back to it, it's like, no, we're just, we're creatures on the planet. And if the atmosphere goes, we go, if water goes, we go.
If the rest of life goes, we go like, we are an interdependent part of the planet. And a unique animal were unique for sure, but doesn't don't mean we're going to last forever. Right? So anyway, blah, blah, blah. But that helps me that model helps me go. Okay. Right. If we're going to generate some life affirming change, let's say a life affirming regenerative economy.
We have to go, okay, individual family, internet networks, community, or do you know what I mean? It's more of a hologram multilayer change, or if we're going to have radically affirming relationship, all those layers have to reflect some of that change as well. So that a small, tiny portion of every generation isn't having to relearn it because we learned something.
So not life affirming about how to relate. Anyway, you get it.
Nicole: Yeah, I mean, to me, I'm thinking this is the heart of relationship anarchy. Truly, right. This level of understanding of all of the different systems that are impacting us from the most personal to the largest above. And how do we work to work within and against these power systems?
Right. And as you were talking, I was just thinking about, you know, the origins of the field of psychology, trying to establish itself as a profession, right. And falling under the same sort of scientific frameworks of Newtonian physics. Physics of we just have this and it exists here. And it does this thing to the deeper understanding.
If we want to try and get into the hard sciences, you know, of quantum mechanics, nothing exists. On its own. Okay. So as a field, we have to collectively shift towards this deeper understanding of all of the systems that are impacting us. Otherwise, we're, we're failing to understand our existence. And so I appreciate this level of, you know, zooming out and zooming in to understand the politics of it all right here.
Staci: Exactly. Exactly. The interdependence, right? The interdependence of the, the big of every breath I take, every breath we all take is interdependence, right? What we're inhaling and exhaling to stay alive and help other creatures stay alive to, you know, if our, if our site of change, let's say our focus site of change, like how I hear you when I was asking you the questions before we started, that your focus site of change In the individual family and intimate network and community, like that those are some of your focus sites of change.
I didn't hear you rewriting policy for the field of psychology, right? You're in a much more interdependent relational practice that we all have sites where we focus our change efforts. But they're connected all the way up and all the way down. Then we always get to ask at what scale, right? And then what are the practices of change or the theories of change?
Anyway, we don't have to go too far down that path, but I really appreciate this as being like some healers are like, I really want to impact social change. It's like, awesome. At which site do you want to practice and put your work for whom? Toward what future?
I tried just questions for all of us to be in and be in together right.
Nicole: Yeah. And I so deeply appreciate the space and I have been training at clinically because it's pretty radical and the best way and I love it. And one of the big things that I took from some of my supervisors when I first started training there was. direction of what you're talking about here.
Where do I want to spend my limited time and energy as self care, right? When you feel all of these systems and the pain of them, how do I take that energy and not just get, you know, washed over by feeling powerless in this dynamic to, okay, I feel this energy and I'm going to channel it towards some level of change, some level of something truly for my own self care.
Staci: That's nice. So many definitions of self care out there. We could spend the entire podcast on that. Exactly. Where do I want to focus my change toward what world, what future, what quality of relationships? I think we all, you know, I, I like looking at and hearing stories about death bed conversations. Oh, yeah.
What's, what's happening around death and dying and what's meaningful to us at the end. And there's a beautiful piece I read and I'll have to pull up the name again, but they're basically going, what they found having interviewed all these people in the Stages of dying is one of the things that mattered most was quality of relationships.
Who was I connected to? Who did I love? And who loved me? And did we love? Well, it was making a difference, right? Did I make a difference? Who and what did I make a difference for? Those were really the things it wasn't so much about racial capitalism and stuff, you know, but, but those questions of what's deeply important to us.
Nicole: Yeah, which is why I see everything that I do with sex and relationships is so political. I do believe that the more intimacy and healthy connection we have in our lives, the less you are interested in, oh, that handbag and this, that symbol status, et cetera, et cetera. Cause like you said at the deathbed, it's not, Oh, I, I had this item.
I had this it's no, I was in connection to, I gave back to the land to heal it from all those invasive species that we're taking over, right? All the ways that we're in deeper relationship and intimacy to that is the heart of what makes us thrive. And so. Every single time that I'm talking about kink or anything of that caliber, I know that it has that deeper political implication, even if it's not the main selling line of the pitch.
Right? And I just love the juiciness of it because of our society's. sex repression. Oh, what a juicy conversation. You want to talk about it? Let's talk about it, you know, and it's just at the heart of everything.
Staci: Totally. Totally. Sex is a constant compelling topic.
Nicole: Yeah.
Staci: Really at whatever stage in someone's sexual life and development, you know what I mean?
And it's used to sell us so much shit that we don't need. Exactly. Yes. You know, I think for me, my Draw purpose, what I feel compelled toward is for me working at that, let's call it the therapeutic, like running, running healing groups for, for trauma survivors, right? That was positive or working 1 on 1.
Now, I still do some of that, but for my being person spirit, I just keep being drawn towards scale and the collective. And so for me, I found, you know, I had a primarily healing private practice for a number of years, and I was like, okay, I, I, not everyone, need to work at a more structural change level. I just, I have to go up, right, or sometimes, you know, they'll call it primary, secondary, and tertiary prevention.
I had to get more into primary prevention. And so, like, our work at Generation 5 that really asks the question, how do we end the sexual abuse of children?
Nicole: Yeah.
Staci: Right. Just respond to it. How would we end it? Right. That takes us up to that social norms level. How does our economy work? Right. And how do we.
You know, we came to a transformative justice approach to ending the sexual abuse of children because it didn't then replay carceral systems that are not at all about liberation, or like with generative semantics, which is another organization that I co founded, we are really looking at what are the collective of Healing skills and capacities we need to strengthen our social and climate justice movements.
So it was still doing healing and transformative development work, but it was with particular people who are already lifelong committed to. Economic and social and climate change, right? So it just again, it's this thing of like, where do we feel like we need to place ourselves in the different scales of change?
And I so deeply honor and love the people who are trying to invent a new global economic system. There's a man who I got to spend about a week with last summer, you know, it was a week long gathering where we were like, what's the scale of change we need and the timeframe we need and how the heck are we going to do that?
Nicole: Yeah.
Staci: Because our timeframe is shrinking because of what we've done to climate and he, he's fricking brilliant. Maybe he's one of the people I'll suggest you interview, but his whole brilliance is totally hacking the global economic system and giving it back to the collective.
Nicole: Love that.
Staci: Taking out all these middlemen companies who are making all this money off of what is a natural human exchange and giving it back to the people.
It's brilliant. The stuff he's doing. Thank goodness. He knows that is not my draw. That is not my job, but it is his draw and it's his brilliance or all these people who are like electoral politics. And how do we have the progressive left come into governing? Like we have a multi billion dollar budget.
Guess who's making decisions about that? A very small number of people. What if we made the decisions about that? Right? I love the people who do that work. It's also not my draw or gift, but the people whose it is. I'm like, Oh, thank you. Thank you. Thanks for doing that. I'm more like, how can I support them?
You know, you know, getting to do that in a more sustaining, transformative, loving and connected way.
Nicole: Yeah, which makes me want to ask, you know, for all the listeners who are tuning in and trying to find out where do they fit in this system? How do they get involved? I'd be curious. You know, I'm going to say the words feel into this.
I'm already thinking the body, but how did you feel into finding your place in this?
Staci: It's such a great question because you know, somatics, the word Soma means the living organism in its wholeness. And some people think it's just the body. So I first want to say the Soma is our thinking self, our emotional self, our livingness, our body and sensations.
The ways we make contact with others, like all of that is what we'd consider. And then we are embodied creatures. The only way we're here is we have a body, right. And a brain and a heart and a gut and all those good things. But to me, exactly dropping deeply into our sensations, our aliveness, working with some of the, the visions we inherited, we got taught.
That might not feel real to us or congruent to us. It's like, wait, I don't actually believe that. Right. And then listening and feeling very deeply, kind of doing some, either some thawing out or some unearthing, uh, to go, what am I called? What's my calling? What's my calling? Right. So I do think it's a very visceral somatic process.
Um, you know, when people talk about their visions, they often touch their hearts or they touch their guts. They don't necessarily touch. And right next to that, what gets called social consciousness or political education or learning about social history is also really important because really brilliant people, um, Taught me how to understand and think about power at really large levels and the distribution of what I call safety, belonging, dignity, and resources.
How are we distributing safety, belonging, dignity, and resources? And why is that so inequitable? We could distribute them in really different ways. We could distribute them to the weak. Right. Distribute them in, in honor of land and water. So yeah, that calling, dropping it inside plus learning how we've been shaped by other things.
You know, I kind of hold it as a bull fan, like some pretty good mind work and then a lot of. Visceral, listening, unearthing, maybe getting some blockages out of the way of work.
Nicole: Right. Absolutely. And I think just holding space for the journey that that is, right. If you've come from trauma, right. Your experience, my experience, there's so much going on in the body there and learning to inhabit it again is such a long journey, let alone the systemic Stomach trauma that is on us, that is disconnecting us from our bodies.
So to actually feel into that, to feel oof. Mm-hmm , this actually doesn't feel like the right space. And I don't maybe have the words for why, but something in my body is saying no. And that's all I can kind of get right now. That is a journey.
Staci: Totally, completely, completely, completely, you know, obviously different cultural practices do this in such a different way, but even that question of asking each other, we care about what are you built for, right?
What are your what's your longing? Yeah. And what's your longing in service of community or in service of life? You know, they're not questions we had asked, but there's quite their questions. We can ask each other, right. We can ask ourselves, we can ask each other. And like what you said, make a lot of room for the process of that.
And in some ways I do really trust, like I, many ways I see the SOMA or the embodiment as really like, this is 3 billion years of evolution. That's what we're living inside of, like on this planet. Right. You could say 4. 5 billion years, but whatever. It's a long, long time.
Nicole: Yeah.
Staci: Got it. Oh, wow. Sure. This is 3 billion years of evolutionary wisdom and then basically our society says mind over matter.
Our society trains us in both repression and totally acting out. Right. And then we get trained into domination, which is part of human capacity. We have capacity for domination and cooperation, right? Examples of different ways societies have organized themselves. And we have the whole range, right? But I really believe this many years in that there's an inherent reharmonizing process that's a part of our SOMAs.
But the more we drop inside of our viscera, the more we drop inside of our bodies and sensations, the more that kicks back into gear, right? This self healing, this harmonizing, which to me, I also hold as a reconnection to the collective. Of course, we want the collective to be well, once we can feel ourselves and feel each other again.
You know, I think empathy is deeply inherent in us and gets distorted, obscured by. Individual trauma, collective trauma, privilege, like all the weird shaping and denomination that happens. But there's very beautiful stuff inherent in us, and I think coming back into the aliveness of the SOMA. Is an important part of it and back into relationship with earth, the land, and I mean, I love the night sky.
Nicole: Yes, yes, that, um, inner capacity for empathy and love feels like anarchy to me. Right? Yeah. And, uh, a lot of people, you know, come back to this question of, is human nature good or evil? Is human nature good or evil? And again, to me, I think that when we're enacting harm, it is a result of the systems creating limitation of resources.
It is the result of trauma. I do believe inherently that we are loving Kind beings and that we thrive in that cooperation. And sometimes I talk about the metaphor of, you know, a puppy, right? You see that puppy and it comes out and it's loving and kind and excited for the whole world of possibilities.
And then when that puppy dog has been harmed, hurt, and then it bites, you know, at that hand that comes to it, right? The dog is not. Wrong, bad, all of those things, right? It's a result of that, but then my brain was spinning. Oh, what about in the past before dogs were domesticated? You know, then I was going, I don't know, but I think the metaphor stands right in trying to understand us and the ways that this question of good or evil, again, it goes back to the quantum mechanics, right?
What's the system. That you're in, rather than trying to understand is H2O water? Is it steam? Is it ice? Right? It's, what's the system you're in?
Staci: Yeah, that's true. It's a, I'm asking myself the question, do I have an answer? Do I think humans are good or evil? I think early on I totally was a survivor who came out of like a total belief in human goodness and we can transform this and I think I've been mellowed with age and fermentation and we have a really wide range of capacity.
We're terrible. We're terrible. And we're exquisite. You know, and then I'm like, okay, what in our wide range of capacity, what is it that we're cultivating, right? Like, what are we cultivating? Our social norms ask us to cultivate certain capacities and beliefs. That point us to reenact a lot of harm, you know, and there's so many other possibilities.
Right. And I think so many of us long for other possibilities of like, what can we be collectively cultivating instead in our. Relationship to the planet relationship to each other understanding of this broader collective harmony in our right role, right? Like, we got a right role ourselves on the planet again as humans.
And we can do that in a terrible way, or we can do it in a very beautiful way. And I think that is yet to be seen. I know what I want and what I'll work for as long as I'm here. But, um, you know, we're complicated creatures.
Nicole: Absolutely. The yes and to all of our possibilities there. And I'm curious how the spirituality starts to draw into this vision and your understanding of all of this.
Staci: So, so funny. I feel like my spirituality is something I'm only more recently talking about more openly. And partly I feel like it was, um, staying connected to something more vast was so vital in my own survival of trauma. You know, like, I feel like I very much stayed connected to something much more vast and beyond and was like, I don't know about humans, you know what I mean? And then it also, like, it's very important to me. I think often spirituality can be used as spiritual bypass.
Nicole: Yeah.
Staci: That's not good. That's not good for any of us. You know, um, like disembodied spirituality and the ongoing seeking of altered state. So it's to not be here.
Nicole: Right.
Staci: This is a pretty complicated place to be incarnate, but to me, I've experienced my spirituality as a quality of aliveness that runs through my body in many ways from the get.
Um, I wasn't socialized into any religious practice because both my parents have been raised Christian and neither of them liked it. So in some ways I feel like I got, you know, the general mainstream Christianity, which of course got into me, but it didn't get in deep because I wasn't in church. Our church was wilderness.
And I feel so grateful for that, you know, it's like mountains and snow and frozen lakes and, you know, that is where I spent my time and I feel so, so grateful because it's just a massive place of spiritual connection for me. And then I feel like sometimes when I liked it, and sometimes when I did not at all, there was a kind of spiritual guidance.
so much. That was that I really trusted very, very deeply. In fact, I trusted it more than people. So even when really important people disagreed with what I was doing, like I quit college after my first year. And, you know, I come from a working class family, so going to college was like, you have to go to college.
If you are gonna come upwardly mobile, or have more choices. And when I quit after my 1st year, I quit because there was something called the Great Peace March for Global Nuclear Disarmament. That was a walk from LA to New York to DC. It took nine months.
Nicole: Wow.
Staci: And they had organizers that come to my college and be like, Hey, this is happening.
Does anyone want to join? It was no mental process. It was like a bell went off from my head to my feet. And I'm like, shit, how am I going to tell my parents I'm quitting college? Cause I knew I was going on the great peace march. Yeah. And like, my grandpa, who obviously is no longer alive, he's like, that is a communist Trojan horse.
You should not do that. You're going to become a communist. He was very upset with WTF. But I went to college, and I joined the Peace March. They were already on the border of Nebraska and Iowa. And I walked from Iowa to New York to Washington DC over six months. I missed it for months, but it was like, it was a spiritual journey for me and it was a political journey and it was a healing journey.
Like so many things that I have no idea what I did it because go that calling. That's what I followed. So I feel like that, what I would now call spiritual path led me smack into healing. I did not want to do it always has informed my spiritual work. Like, okay, what's mine to do? What's mine to do next.
And I keep growing, developing and learning by learning in so many other ways. It's like, I love learning. And I just feel very, very thankful. It's like my teachers, Chanda Mohanty, uh, Richards Josie Heckler, Mary Beth Krause, Audra Lorde, people I partnered with in work, Prentice Hemphill, uh, spent a candle wallet.
Like there's so many people that I have learned from and with on the spiritual, political, transformative, whatever we call it, journey of life.
Nicole: Mm hmm. That bell ringing.
Staci: Mm hmm.
Nicole: Yeah, so powerful. Yeah. Maybe I even just want to leave it at that because I'm grasping for more words of how to find that, how to hear that, how to follow that.
But maybe the ringing and that actual sound is, is enough to describe the phenomenon.
Staci: Yeah, I think thawing back into our livingness. Which means thawing back into our bodies and the energy that naturally runs through our bodies that we can scientifically measure, you know, that my SOMA affects your SOMA right now, and you're affecting me.
Chemistry is both changing because we're in contact. But to me, that thawing out, that deep listening, the political education that helps us discern. Not my values. Oh, this is mine. There's a discerning process that definitely needs a social analysis. Yeah, that I think gets us more and more there as well as being in relationship with the earth and being in relationship with the stars.
They're right there. But we have to thaw out to come back into contact with them, too, because we got taught to separate.
Nicole: Mm hmm. I'm curious, too, you mentioned that on your journey there were some lessons that you didn't want to uncover or some pieces of healing you didn't want. Uh huh. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So
Staci: yeah, I know what I call spirit.
People should call it what it is for them. Yeah, pushing me to do healing work around child sexual abuse. Oh, I kicked and screamed no, no, no, no. I did not want to do that. I mean, the level of pain and the loss, I mean, that road is rough. That road is liberating, but wow, that was painful. I did not want to do that.
I did all kinds of contortions before I surrendered and did not work, including just to say like, I just said, I forgive everyone. It's fine. I'm done. No, that was not true. Right. Yeah. You have to do the real. Embodied transformative path, you know, of that work, I didn't want to found generation five. I didn't want to do that.
I was like, no, no, no, I don't want to. I don't want to. I was afraid. I just stare straight up. So afraid, basically take on child sexual abuse as my political organizing work and to organize with others into a vision. Uh, what do we actually do about this? You know, that was like a decade. I spent a decade of my life, but I'll tell you founding that I had a somatic practice called the Joe.
It's a staff that's called the Joe Kata and it's staff work. It's a series of movements with a staff. I would wake up so afraid. And I would just go out and do joe work for like 30 minutes, even call my nervous system down enough to actually center enough to then start my day of work. I mean, that helps me work through a lot of trauma around being so public around child sexual abuse.
And that was like in the 90s. It's, there's more room now, but you know, it's very taking a very private thing public. Of course. Right. It's hard. Tender. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. No, there's plenty of things on spiritual path. I mean, I want to ask you too. It's like on your spiritual path. What have you been so excited that path brought you?
And so like, no, I don't want to do that. I can imagine you've had both as well.
Nicole: Sure. I mean, in some ways I, yeah. My first thing that came to mind was being diagnosed with generalized anxiety disorder. Um, when I work, I don't work from the DSM these days. I really am trying to envision a world beyond these labels, beyond that, that has a much more personal, contextual understanding, but even just that, right.
To this inner calling of, Oh, I want to do this podcast. I want to do this podcast yet. Here I am embarking upon this journey of talking to strangers that I've never met before and having to put myself out there publicly as a perfectionist that wants to control all of that. Right. And is anxious about all of that.
I think at least for me, that's been the biggest stretch of, of doing this, of trusting these people I'm meeting with and kind of living into that. Yeah, I also felt this deep calling to create this space, to do this space, to do this space, but it almost directly juxtapositioned my desires to be small and not seen and I don't want to be, you know, judged or any of that.
So I continue to come up against that. Of course, even any of my experience as a queer, non monogamous, all of those pieces to my Mormon family, right? I mean, I didn't get a choice in all of that one, you know what I mean? Did you get kicked out? Uh, I mean, I've been not talked to for periods of time and come back to deeper connection.
And so we have grown so much, but yeah. Yeah, even the last time I saw my family, there was words that were said from my mother that are deeply painful and, and going through that journey of having some of your most difficult, unsafe relationships be your biological family. I know. Ooh, you know, no one loves that.
That so I know I, if I had a choice, I would have been born into some hippie loving family where I could have just been radical and not had any of this, but here we are, you know, and, and in some ways that's been one of the more powerful conversations on the podcast, because again, if we're talking about all of this, the power of the patriarchy and Christianity and purity culture, that is something that I have spoken to.
Because I grew up so religious and have gone from a space of I'm gonna get married to a man, one man, and only ever have sex with this one man to the space I'm in now of, uh, pleasure that I feel in my body. So I didn't choose that path as much as I was thrust into it. So, yeah.
Staci: It's so interesting, isn't it?
So many choices. Right. And what we get access to like, I just think about the politicization I got, I feel so thankful for because I, I didn't have names for what was happening in my life.
Nicole: Yeah.
Staci: I didn't have names for my lived experience. And then getting those names is so empowering, you know, so there's choices.
And then I agree with you. Sometimes I just feel like, I can't not go on this path,
Nicole: right?
Staci: Right. Cause it's in some ways what feels most congruent. Although sometimes it's just so scary. And then there's always learning. Like, one of the things we do in semantics is we always start, we don't ask the question, what's wrong.
The main question is, What do you long for? What do you want?
Then we have a lot of questions about what are you noticing in your body and reintroducing people to sensations and aliveness, but really, we start with a whole piece of work around. What is your longing or your vision or what we call your declaration and it might be an individual declaration, or it might be a collective declaration.
Right? Um, and then the next question is like, Oh, cool. Who do I need to be to embody that declaration to live it, relate from it and act it at least most of the time we all get triggered and grabbed, right? Most of the time. But what's so interesting is that It's just so, oh, I was going to tell you what I think the joke is, the spiritual joke is I feel like our visions are always ahead of our current embodiment and always between here and what we long for is a path of transformation.
I just think we're always. Continuously asked to grow and transform becoming what it is we care about, or the difference that we want to make, or the kind of love we want to know how to give and receive, or the kind of parent we want to be, you know, and then along the way, there's just straight up failures, you know what I mean?
It isn't just like positive, like, no, other. Failures, there's learning. There's like, oh, I wish I could do a do over on that. Right.
Nicole: Yeah.
Staci: And then totally satisfying, beautiful experiences. I could have never imagined my life what it is. It's amazing. Right. And it's hard sometimes.
Nicole: You're not the first person to speak to this.
If I'm hearing you correctly, this, almost this idea that. Your future self is speaking to you now is calling to you now. And I've, I've thought a lot, another guest brought this up a few months ago and I was thinking about it and it is a beautiful idea to think about that, that future self that is already there.
And also then what about free will right? Where does that play into the conceptualization of that path? And then I chew on that Rubik's Cube a handful of times, you know, it's tough.
Staci: Totally. It's so interesting. I, two things. I think we have to build our muscle of imagination. Sure. I think it's like a practice to envision.
And not many of us. Some of us are called to it. For some of us, it was a survival strategy, but it's like building a muscle to go. How do I imagine my life or our life in a way that is. Beautiful, equitable, and life affirming.
Nicole: Right?
Staci: And when I think about the future self idea, I don't think of it as a future self.
I think of it as there is a life force that is more liberated, that is more harmonized with the whole. That's what's calling. I love that. It's like much more of a collective presence that is there. More liberated than trying to show us a path or offering paths. I don't know how it works But that's what it feels like to me.
Nicole: Mm hmm. I really like that I think I'll have to simmer in that one for a handful, but it it takes it out of this individual to a much larger Union, harmony, peace, pleasure, right? That's a much, something much bigger that is calling to us that we have the choice to say maybe yes or no to when we're feeling into our body, right?
It kind of gets it out of that paradigm of future self, free will questions into a much bigger opportunity for us to be in greater harmony together. I like this. Hmm. Which almost, you know, a tough question, but again, to the listener who's enjoying this, where do you start them? Where do you invite them to pick up this journey to that harmony and connection?
Staci: I mean, in many ways, wherever they felt drawn, because I, again, at this age and stage, I feel like we all have different doorways. You know, if we kind of go, there's this. Inherent draw toward healing, harmony, and liberation at different scales. It's just like, okay, where are you drawn? Some people art is their doorway.
You know, I don't know if you've seen, uh, American symphony, John Baptiste. I mean, it's like liberation through music, right? But, you know, so maybe for some people it's music, maybe for some people it's straight up activism. And, I mean, I love the night sky, right? And writing futuristic novels, or maybe for some people, like I have a friend who's getting his PhD right now.
He's an amazing movement theorist, movement leader. That is like his jam. I mean, he's a amazing theorist. It's his jam, but that's where his path is. And then all of it is based in time, place, and conditions. So we kind of have to go, what are my time, place, and conditions? It's a wild time. I think about my kids and my grandkids generations.
I'm like, oh, you guys, it's going to be a while next 200 years. You know, I tend to think in long arcs of time, as you can tell, but okay. We have our time, place, and condition. So what's our calling and what's ours to do in our time, place, and conditions? Given our draws, given the gifts we've cultivated, given maybe whatever natural gifts are, I don't even know quite know what those are, but those are the things, follow the draw, get with others who have that draw, and get with mentors who have that draw, right, like who's farther down the path than us, so we can put ourselves around, I, I, mentorship and teachers, I am in such support of, and in communities of practice, whatever that is.
So those are the pieces that feel markers to find our way toward.
Nicole: Such a joy to have these conversations on the podcast and to know that people are listening and being inspired by them around the world. Like, Oh, what, what a dream. What a dream. I could have never imagined. Oh my God. Yeah. Or the collective, right?
The oneness. Um, but it's, it's nice because, you know, Think about the ways that systemic forces impact all of us on such radically different levels. We all have privilege on different levels, right? And we're all being impacted and just kind of sitting with the reality of that in my therapy room. I, I went through a trauma response of, Oh God, like, what are we doing?
There's not enough. I can, Oh God. And you can hear it in some of my recordings from that time of my life. Just going, Whoa, I'm part of the pro Oh my God, to, you know, yes. Yes. And okay, what do we do with it? Right? And you here coming on the space of saying, you know, finding that calling that speaks to you and, and trusting in that calling and the power of that to make these larger changes through the ripples.
I mean, Um, I'm just kind of taking in the moment of, of that journey of getting out of the trauma response from the systems into movement conversation.
Staci: It's that piece of why it's so important to like, get with others. Yeah. Movements are always collective. Like get with others, get some mentors and teachers, you know, wayshowers.
Whatever that is, you know, to me, an easy equation is the bigger the changes we want to be a part of making we want to participate in then join that number of people. And what I mean by that is organizations, right? There's. Organizations already doing things that usually feel somewhat aligned with our calling and maybe that short term 2024 because it's a particular year in the U. S. or it's long term. But the bigger the change you want to make joint. Organizations are coalitions that are working on that and then add our. Yeah. Or if you like with me, when I first started organizing around child sexual abuse, I couldn't find organizations who are taking the orientation that I wanted.
I just started inviting people to join me. Right. It became a thing, right? So it's like, you know, it's finding our crew and finding our mentors. Finding our, our practice community.
Nicole: Yeah. Which I'm so delighted to have you be one of those for me in this moment, in this space, right? And for all the listeners to learn from you and the co collaboration of our minds melding for this hour, right?
Awesome. Yeah. I want to ask if you could. Pause and connect with your younger self for just a moment. Wherever that younger self comes to mind, is there anything that you would want to say to her?
Staci: Oh, that's so sweet. All right, let me go with this metaphor. It's not a metaphor I often use in myself or in my work, but I'm going to run with it.
The first thing is like, um, I was delighted about life when I was a little small child. I was like, what's happening here? Like I was into it. And I just want to say to her, Oh, that impulse is so trustworthy. What a, what a beautiful affirming impulse to be like interested and awake and alive and what's happening in the sky and how's the grass smell.
And you know, all of that. And then I also want to say maybe to the parts of me that just got much, much more hurt. Probably what I would say, and this might be again, lifelong path to know this in every one of my cells, but that you're not alone, you know, you're not alone. That was really lonely making that was super isolating because trauma caught my traumas plus so much isolation.
Um, like when you get separated from your own family, who's taking care of you. It's rough, you know, intrafamilial violence is so rough because it's a very particular kind of isolation. So I think I just want to tell that younger me, it's like, I know it feels so fricking isolated and you're not alone, you know?
Nicole: Yeah, absolutely. And I hope the listeners can take those words to heart. You know, I'm thinking about one person who had tuned in and told me just before, like hearing messages like this and it brought them to tears. And so I just, The power of what you just shared and leaving that as is to resonate with the humans that are listening that message and what it means for them.
Yeah. Well, I want to hold a little bit of space before I guide us towards our closing question. I always like to take that deep breath and just feel into if there's anything else that you want to share with the listeners. Otherwise, I can guide us towards that closing question.
Staci: I think a learning that I've been in like these last four, five years. Um, you know, you use the word pleasure a lot, which I really appreciate.
Nicole: Mm-Hmm.
Staci: and, uh, learning and a practice I've been in is really like, um, a regular, a daily practice of noticing the small joys.
Nicole: Yeah.
Staci: And noticing the small pleasures.
Nicole: Mm-Hmm.
Staci: and really letting them touch me, change me, inform me, and just. What a rich part of being alive. That is. And, you know, I tend to go for like the big things, you know, I'm a little bit more of the, uh, an X intensity junkie for all the good reasons. I feel that like the small joys, the small pleasures, noticing them, sensing them, feeling them, delighting in them for me feels very Nourishing, pleasurable, important.
So that's the last thing that came.
Nicole: Yeah. And that's a practice, right? Building those neuronal pathways, which in the past, you know, especially when we're, we've been hurt, right? Oh, this is what's wrong. This is horrible. This, this, this, this, this, your brain is used to looking for that because we're trying to keep ourselves safe, right?
We're looking for the danger. Where is that? But to start to build the muscles in your brain with those neuronal pathways of focusing on the joys of waking up with a partner slowly in the morning and having a cup of coffee and oh, how the whole world of pleasure is just in that moment right there. That, you know, one grape.
I love juicy green grapes. Mm. Yeah. The world's like, you know, nature's skittles. I'm just taking that moment to actually taste that. Oh, I mean, that practice to slow down and feel that truly creates the reality that you experience the world in. It creates the frame to your existence and absolutely changes your whole world.
It's worth anything, you know, to be able to do that.
Staci: Totally. And, you know, somatically we would talk about it's like learning to be with, allow and make more and more space for sensations of pleasure, sensations of satisfaction, sensations of like delight. It literally is a growing our visceral capacity, which goes along with all those neuronal pathways.
And I always think of neuronal pathways as way more than a brain thing. Like our nervous system runs to the very bottom of our feet because sometimes we don't learn to be with, allow, or make space for any of those things. Right? So, yeah,
Nicole: and when you open yourself up to feeling that level of pleasure.
You feel the pain, right? Now it opens us. Yeah. In the most It's all good. Exactly, right? Ugh. And I think that that's at the heart of the politics, if I could say anything, to be able to cry when you look out and see what you see. I think that's the heart of all of it right there. Yeah. Well, if it feels good to you, I can guide us towards our closing question.
Okay, great. So then the last question that I ask each guest on the podcast is What is one thing that you wish other people knew was more normal? . Funny .
Staci: Oh, that's amazing. Question. Mm-Hmm. .
Nicole: It's such a projective. I love to see where everyone takes it. It's so fun.
Staci: Um, okay. I'm gonna say a couple. The first thing that came is just like this wide, beautiful, and sometimes erotic love.
Which we might call polyamory, but I don't even mean you can have one sexual partner, but like totally love the air anyway. So that is normal. It is normal. It's fine. It's okay. It's great. That's and then being a sensitive creature, it's we're sensitive creatures, you know, when we get so trained in the thing, we're not supposed to be, but we're, we're very sensitive creatures.
That's just more normal, which is such an odd weird word in and of itself. So those two things, that's what came.
Nicole: Mm hmm. Yeah, you'd love my dissertation on relationship anarchy. Again, it's not about, yeah, sexual fidelity. It's about that deeper connection to all of our relationships and the joy that that can be.
And, uh, yeah, just the strength in our softening, right? Oof. Yeah. Yeah. Exactly. Spend my whole life exploring that one, right?
Staci: Exactly. May you get to.
Nicole: Thank you. Yeah. It was such a pleasure to have you on the podcast today. Thank you for joining us. Yeah. Delighted. Thanks for having me. I appreciate you. For the listeners who are connecting with you and want to learn more about your work, your books, where would you plug them to connect?
Staci: Yeah. Well, they can just, the StaciHaines.com. There's a lot of information on my website. And then there's a lot of resources there. So if you want to expand from there around somatics and social justice, climate justice, all that kind of stuff. And then my latest book is the politics of trauma, somatics, healing and social justice and my early book, which is a very long time ago now, but still out there doing this thing is called healing sex, which is really a.
somatic approach to really transforming sexual trauma and inviting in sexual pleasure, erotic pleasure. Those are the spots.
Nicole: Lovely. Such a pleasure to have you again. Thank you. If you enjoyed today's episode, then leave us a five star review wherever you listen to your podcast and head on over to modernanarchypodcast.
com to get resources and learn more about all the things we talked about on today's episode. I want to thank you for tuning in and I will see you all next week.
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