How to Change Ourselves & Our World | Prentis Hemphill

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Episode Transcript:

Prentis Hemphill: [00:00:00] How could we ever be satisfied by something that didn’t emerge from our own longing? Like we could try to get full on what somebody told us we should eat? But how could I ever feel deep satisfaction if I’m not answering the call that’s coming from inside of me? What is worth organizing your life around? What vision do you see is worth organizing your life around? And I think that’s what the work of visioning calls us towards. I dream something that is not sold to me, that’s not offered to me, but comes from the deepest parts of my belly. And I will organize my life around this devotion to this vision.

Jonathan Fields: [00:00:41] Hey, so have you ever felt a deep longing for something more, a richer sense of purpose, more authentic connections, or a life that just thrums with energy and aliveness? Or maybe found yourself going through the motions, numbing out from the fullness of your experience. So many of us struggle with the feeling of being disconnected from our bodies or choose each other and even the world around us. My guest today is Prentis Hemphill, a writer, embodiment facilitator, organizer, and therapist whose work really guides us in reconnecting with the vibrancy and the power of our full, embodied selves. Prentis is the founder and director of the Embodiment Institute and the Black Embodiment Initiative, and host of the podcast Becoming the People. And for over a decade, they have practiced and taught Somatics embodied mindful practices everywhere from social movements to community organizations to individuals and during times of change. In their debut book, What It Takes to Heal How Transforming Ourselves Can Change the World, Prentice shares hard won wisdom on individual and collective healing, and they explore how inhabiting our bodies more fully and developing an embodied presence, and we go into that can be a portal to personal transformation and societal shift. Throughout this conversation, Prentice really invites us to get curious about our longings to envision new possibilities and to do the courageous, relational work of building authentic community. Whether you’re seeking more aliveness or belonging or ways to be a part of change, this compelling dialogue it’ll leave you inspired to take steps towards wholeness. So excited to share this conversation with you! I’m Jonathan Fields and this is Good Life Project.

Jonathan Fields: [00:02:29] As I was really sort of diving into your work, it’s interesting the work that you’ve been doing as really focusing on healing individual and collective trauma. As a therapist, as a somatic practitioner, as a teacher, an organizer and a writer, it’s this really interesting dance between the personal and the collective and the book and this whole body of work, really. It’s also it feels like this is and you write about this early on, like, this is deeply personal for you. This isn’t something that you just said. I’m going to do this as a profession. This really is an outgrowth of just you and your experiences in life.

Prentis Hemphill: [00:03:04] Yeah, that’s that’s absolutely right. You know, in writing the book to I wanted to take away some of the distance you can have when you create a book about trauma. You know, I’m going to talk about this from some distance, about other people. I wanted to take away some of that distance without becoming self-indulgent in any way, but to offer my story as an example in accompaniment to other people in their own journeys. But it is deeply personal to me. And, you know, because it’s about things that I’ve experienced. But it’s also about this, like you’re pointing to this collective experience, what I’ve seen in other people’s lives, how it mirrors and matches what has happened in my own. And the book is really an offering, a question of how do we actually address the issues that we feel individually, but also the experiences that people are having Collectively. If we are really serious about those questions, where do we begin? And sort of facing trying to come up with the answer for how we actually heal.

Jonathan Fields: [00:04:04] Yeah. I’m curious, you know, when for you, what was behind the decision to say? You know, there’s been a lot have gone through in my life and that I’m continuing to go through. And, you know, there’s work that I want to do to see if I can heal this for myself and my local community. But I’m always curious about the switch that flips, that says, I also want to make this my vocation. Like, I want to step into this and really center this in the way that I’m sort of contributing to the world.

Prentis Hemphill: [00:04:32] You know, that’s a it’s an interesting question because I it came with a lot of questions. I mean, everywhere that I’ve kind of gone in my career has been because I had a profound and itching, annoying sometimes question that wouldn’t let me sleep at night. The questions around social change that kind of brought me into organizing and then the questions around trauma and healing that brought me into that work. But I think a flip switch where I was like, I think I can offer something into this space one, because those questions haunted me. So I kind of felt like, well, I’m already pursuing them. I might as well really turn and face them and include them in how I live my life. And the other piece I actually, when I was thinking about becoming a therapist, I asked my therapist if she thought it was a good idea and she said, I think that’s a great idea. That makes a lot of sense. And I felt like I had a kind of permission. I mean, I could self-authorize myself, but, you know, when your therapist thinks you should maybe be a therapist, it feels like a pretty good endorsement.

Jonathan Fields: [00:05:35] Yeah. I mean, it’s really interesting that Rev. angel Kyodo williams is no friend of mine. And yeah, I remember talking to her a bunch of years back, and there’s definitely some really interesting overlap in the work that you do. Absolutely. And, and it was interesting because we were having a similar type of conversation like, why this? You know why. Yes. It’s there. Yes. This is a part of your devotion. And she said, this isn’t actually the thing that I necessarily wanted to do, but this is the thing that I need to do right now. I would much rather be running a coffee shop and like, really figuring out, like the perfect way to like to do this and to do that. But she’s like, but this is where I’m called right now. Like, this is the nature of what I need to do. And she’s like, can we just get past this and do all this healing so I can get back to like, doing that other thing already?

Prentis Hemphill: [00:06:17] Absolutely. I mean, I would love to run a bookstore, maybe next to angel’s. Uh, coffee shop. But these are the questions that also bring me alive in this moment.

Jonathan Fields: [00:06:26] You know, for you, I know a big part of this was also really thinking about, and I guess, experiencing a lack of representation, you know, like not seeing yourself in history, in society and locally. Take me into that experience more and how that sort of informed what you’re doing.

Prentis Hemphill: [00:06:43] Yeah. You know, representation, it’s so many things. But I think in part it’s like, do I exist in the future? Is there belonging for me in this society or in this world? Those are the questions that it kind of begs of you. You know, if you don’t see yourself represented, if you don’t see yourself in the places where you’re curious, do I have a future? Are there futures for me? And that was a lot. You know, my growing up in Texas, I grew up in a black community primarily. I rode a bus across town to predominantly white schools and was starting to, I think, in that kind of journey, see that there was the world of my community, and then there were these other worlds that I didn’t actually know anything about until I rode the bus somewhere else. And, you know, it was the world of my school. And there were also these worlds of power, these worlds of people that made changes that impacted my community. But I didn’t, you know, as I saw more and more worlds, I saw fewer and fewer people. And so there’s kind of a choice point when that’s the case.

Prentis Hemphill: [00:07:46] It’s, uh, do I try to become something that I never will be and therefore live with this perpetual insecurity? Or do I do what can sometimes be very lonely work of maintaining my own dignity and insisting on my aliveness, that I am here, that I am valuable, and that the reality of my life doesn’t necessarily match the world that we’ve constructed as human beings. So, you know, I write in the book that there were these people along the way, teachers, historical figures that either ushered me forward, brought me more into myself. Like I read about Harriet Tubman, and just the image of her was enough to fortify something deep in me. And there were also these confrontations with teachers or adults that deny the reality of me. And contending with that, or insisting in my own existence and my own worthiness, for lack of a better word. So, you know, I think the question is representation, but it also connects so much to how we structure our societies. And then also what young people or any of us have to do to imagine that we’re possible in this world.

Jonathan Fields: [00:09:01] Yeah. I mean, I imagine it’s hard to really understand or see what’s possible when you can’t look at it in the world and easily find a representation of that. It’s like to show you that this yes, this, in fact, is a path. Exactly. It’s interesting you use the word aliveness, and I’ve heard you use it before. And I know this is this appears in your writing also. Which makes me curious because it’s an interesting word for you. What are you actually talking about when we’re talking about aliveness?

Prentis Hemphill: [00:09:27] I feel like it’s one of those multi-dimensional words that to me is about, I think you can think about it in terms of a kind of vibrancy, you know, a connection to your own presence. But I think it also refers to the current that exists inside of all of us. You know, the thing that is larger than my individual life, but is the force of life itself. So I talk about aliveness like that. Is that that bigger thing, but also my expression of that bigger thing. It is a term, a concept that really connects up to my somatic work, my embodiment work, how I think about power in the world. It’s a really a concept that’s central to a lot of what I do and how I’ve been taught to think about things and in the world.

Jonathan Fields: [00:10:14] Yeah, that makes a lot of sense to me. Aliveness. The word itself, just as I even hear it the way you describe it, it’s like it draws me from my head into my body. Yeah, yeah. Like I feel. And maybe some people feel utterly alive when they’re living in the world of thoughts and things like that. But for me, I need to actually drop into my body for that feeling to feel like it’s it’s actually the juices are really flowing there. Yeah. That’s right. And you bring up this, this notion of somatics, which is it’s such a central part of the way that you approach. It seems like everything healing, like organizing. So take me deeper into this. You know, I remember a number of years back sitting down with Bessel van der Kolk, who was really one of the first people that I remember saying, no, no, no. Like, we actually can’t deal with this thing with trauma, with wounding, with, you know, like the healing process. We can’t talk our way through it. We can’t just think our way through it. That’s a part of the process. That’s right. But we’re missing a really big piece. And it seems like this is something that piece is where you really centering a lot of your energy.

Prentis Hemphill: [00:11:12] Absolutely. I mean, it is the place that I try to live from. When you talk about dropping into your body, I really try to live more from that place. And I notice that when I live more from a place that’s deeper in me, I think differently, I move differently, I relate differently from how I even position myself in my body. So to talk about what Somatics is, is to say there is a way that we get taught or trained or people model around us. There’s a way that we live in our bodies, I will say, but that primarily focuses on us living in our heads and in our thoughts. And that, like you said, your thoughts are useful. They have a function, we need them and they’re great. But we often do that. We deprioritize what we feel, our emotions, our longings, all the things that emerge from our bodies that we tend to in this split, imagine as unruly or more like animals. We think about our head as where the civilized us really lives. But when we make that split, which to me is really a posture, if you think about it that way, it’s not so much some real split, because your head is a part of your body, and your thoughts are something that occurs, at least in part in your body.

Prentis Hemphill: [00:12:37] But it’s a posture, and it’s a way of prioritizing what’s actually happening in the body and prioritizing my thinking. And I’m deprioritizing my feeling, and I’m doing that intentionally, and I’m practicing that every day. And somatics is it’s many things. It’s a it’s study, it’s practice. It’s, you know, research, but it’s saying I think it’s asserting that we are much more dynamic, holistic than we imagine. And there’s a way to see ourselves inside of the processes and the systems that really are us and that are going on. We can listen from that place. And what I do as a somatic teacher, or I call myself an embodiment teacher more so these days, but that I invite people into practice and into listening that kind of sometimes gently, sometimes maybe more. Confrontationally agitates people into different movements, different ways of being in their body that can bring in different sensations, different feelings, memories, thoughts, so that we can start to include the wisdom that is our body, the memories, the stories, the impulses, the desires. Because I think there’s so much wisdom and authenticity that the body allows.

Jonathan Fields: [00:13:48] Yeah, no, that makes so much sense to me. I’m so curious what your your lens is, you know, as, as you’re talking. Part of what I was thinking was so much of what we go through in life, we accumulate a certain amount of harm. Everyone does. Like, there’s no opting out of that. It’s some people so much more. Some people are a lot more protected from it, but it’s going to hit everyone. And oftentimes when that harm is physical to start with, we expect it to end up lodged in our body right now. But when when the harm feels more psychological, then my sense is we have less of an expectation that that lodges in our body, you know, because, oh, it was a brutal conversation or culturally like things are really just not supporting me. That’s something that I need to deal with in my head. We see when there’s a physical harm, well, that that can lodge in our body. We need to probably do something with our body to help process it. Right. But when we perceive the harm as starting largely like behaviorally or in our head or culturally, we kind of don’t make that connection. And so maybe we feel less inclined to actually need to bring the body into the process of healing. Does that make sense to you?

Prentis Hemphill: [00:14:55] It makes so much sense. One thing I just want to trouble a little bit in that is that even something that feels like a psychological harm is a physiological experience. So true. No matter what, the body is recruited into what we are experiencing. Which means that all of those, you know, we talk about fight, flight, freeze, peas, all of that that might arise when you’re in what you might imagine is physical danger, a degree of those arises and maybe to a large degree, but arises even in something that is not maybe physically dangerous, but our body might read it still as dangerous. You know, I think that’s why there’s so many challenging, you know, conversations these days and people feel so immobile around immobile when we’re having these heated conversations. Because what’s at stake for people? You might think, well, this isn’t a life or death thing, but in a way people can extrapolate it to be life, and death can feel that level of danger or some level of danger that has a physiological. We’re dealing with people’s physiological responses, which means the hormones, the tissues, all parts of our body are recruited in the response there. So even that I would say we have to understand that at all times, the body is there, at all times the body is responding the body, the full body is the interface with the world.

Jonathan Fields: [00:16:16] That makes a lot of sense to me. It also makes me curious about, you know, the notion of I wonder if something that then happens, you know, in a conversation a, you know, modern times, like you have a conversation, you know, like today when you’re talking with somebody. And a lot of the word triggering, I think, is being used a lot these days. And I often wonder whether we’re really talking about triggering or whether we’re talking about a current experience anchoring itself in a past embodied trauma. Absolutely dips back down into that physicalized experience without us even realizing. And maybe it’s like decades old.

Prentis Hemphill: [00:16:54] Absolutely. I say to people often, like, you can have a part of your body that is stuck in 1996, or you can have a part of you that’s in 2003. And what I mean by that is there’s like a pattern to how we hold ourselves that can be in response to another time. Now, it may not be, you know, our bodies are constantly learning. They’re adapting. They’re saying, okay, this is what keeps me safe, okay. This is what accomplishes this. I’m going to learn that and we practice it over time. I say, you know, a lot of people do sports and they know how to practice hitting a baseball or doing a layup. We do the same thing around how do I protect myself in social situations? I’m going to pull my chest back. I’m going to pull my whole body back. I’m going to kind of tighten my face. I do these things to communicate things and hopefully achieve a certain outcome, likely of safety or belonging or whatever it might be. But those are practiced motions that we make. Now the challenge is we want to have a body. I think that can do a lot of things. It’s not that we just want to have a completely neutral body all the time.

Prentis Hemphill: [00:18:00] We want to have a body that can stand up for us. We want a body that can leave situations when we need to. We want to have a body that can have all of these moves embedded in it. But I think, like what you’re saying is a lot of times we can get stuck, you know, if something is unprocessed in us, then we can get stuck in that fight from earlier in the day or five years ago, and we start to bring just a shadow of that fight, just a little bit of the taste of the posture to our relationships. And sometimes we practice it so well that we start to think it’s who we are. We start to think it’s our personality. We start to overidentify with that self-protective aspect of us. And I think that’s when a lot of us get stuck. We’re like, I want to get out of this, but I actually don’t know how to do it. You know, I wish I could do something different in an argument. I wish I could do something different when I have a crush on somebody, but I actually have no idea how to do it.

Jonathan Fields: [00:18:59] I wonder part of what’s going on there also is depending on the circumstance and the person, is that we kind of feel like we hit a point where like, you know, I’ve adequately compartmentalized what happened in the past. I can function okay on a day to day basis. And, and I kind of don’t want to mess with that. You know, it’s like like I’m on cruise control here. It’s sort of like, enough so that I know there’s something there, but I feel like I’ve, I’ve, I’ve tucked it away in a drawer enough so that I can I’m doing life. Okay. And we just we don’t want to reconnect those circuits.

Prentis Hemphill: [00:19:27] Absolutely. I feel like I’m in the right podcast to be able to have this conversation, but I think so much of what we’re talking about is a pain aversion. And I’m not saying that there aren’t really great reasons to have pain aversions. To say that was actually a really difficult thing. I don’t want to look, I don’t want to look back at it. I’m actually fine. And sometimes if something remains, there’s often something else that we need to retrieve from that. And maybe it connects us to another moment in time. Maybe it tells us something else for this time. But I think often it’s like, I don’t want to feel that. But the accumulation we have to numb more and more, the more that we don’t want to feel the things that are waiting for us to feel.

Jonathan Fields: [00:20:07] Yeah, that’s that. We don’t realize the cost is that accumulation until, you know, like the dam bursts and then it’s like, okay, so now we actually have to deal with this and we’ll be right back after a word from our sponsors. If you’re working with somebody, you know, whether it’s an individual or maybe working with a group or a community, and you’re sort of just starting into these ideas, you know, and somebody is like kind of nodding along and they’re open to it. And I would imagine the question comes up in some form of like, how do I start this process? Like, how do I start to reconnect the synapses here? What are your thoughts around some sort of like opening moves?

Prentis Hemphill: [00:20:43] Yeah. I mean, we have opening practices, but I will say, you know, at the very the principles inside of, I think the, the initial practices that I might do with somebody, it’s just listening. Nothing much more profound than that, but learning how to listen and listening to sensations. You know, we do a body scan with people really early on in a training where it’s just like, can you notice where you’re hot? Can you notice where you’re cold? Can you notice where you’re tight? Can you notice where you can’t feel anything and start to fill out a picture of your own body? It’s like having a relationship. It’s like developing a relationship because a lot of us, you know, I don’t think it’s just me, but a lot of times we think about our bodies as something to control, something to dress, Shape optimize that we think about our body as an it that we’re always, always molding. And I think we’re less practiced in and less encouraged to meet our bodies with relationality, with a curiosity, with a listening. And I think it’s really in that move that what needs to emerge can emerge. But any practice I would do with someone, whether it’s a body scan or a centering practice or a guided meditation, I think the intention, the principle at the core would be can you listen and can you begin to to have a relationship with your body in the first place?

Jonathan Fields: [00:22:09] Mm. Just the notion of noticing and getting curious as a starting point, because I feel like so many of us have tuned out to that. We’re not curious, if anything, we’re almost like anti curious.

Prentis Hemphill: [00:22:18] Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Jonathan Fields: [00:22:20] Like you don’t want to be curious because we don’t know what that curiosity is going to bring us. So we’re like, that’s right. I’ll tuck the curiosity away along with all the other stuff. Part of what this brings up also, and this is something you speak to, is this notion of having a vision of a different way to be. And that can be both individually and collectively and probably and this is so much of your work, is it kind of has to be both. Take me into the notion of visioning here, because I don’t see it talked about a lot. And this is something that you really do you address in a really interesting way.

Prentis Hemphill: [00:22:54] Yeah. You know, it occurred to me somewhere along the way that that’s always where it has begun for me, is being able to see. And I again, I want to reference Harriet Tubman because I she’s such an important figure for me. But I growing up, I couldn’t quite understand how someone could live under such intense conditions and imagine that things could be different and conditions that weren’t only intense, but were actually trying to, in a way, eliminate hope for change. Possibility. For change choices. It was so complete a system and she started off with her brothers, but it ended up being primarily led by her. She saw something else, and I often just think about that. Like, what kind of visioning practice did she have to do that? And I find it really extraordinary. And, you know, I think about it in my life and the lives of people that I’ve worked with, that when we listen to our longings, you know, we can get sold a lot about how our lives are supposed to go. We’re supposed to marry this person, have that. If we have enough of these, you know, and the goalpost is always moving. It’s like, okay, now I have to look like this, and now I have to wear this, and I have to, you know, there’s just more and more to accumulate. And you’re always running after satisfaction, wholeness, you know, through these material things. But I think the longings that actually emerge from our bodies that are not sold to us externally, they’re not like, hey, if you get this, you might belong. But the longing that comes from our bodies of like, if I do this, if I act on this, I think there is an offering of a fulfillment. I haven’t yet known something deeper.

Prentis Hemphill: [00:24:44] I think it’s so critical to listen to those things. How could we ever be satisfied by something that didn’t emerge from our own longing? Like we could try to be try to get full on what somebody told us we should eat. But how could I ever feel deep satisfaction if I’m not answering the call that’s coming from inside of me? So I think there’s a correlation between listening to our longings, our visions, satisfaction. And when we were talking at the beginning of this podcast, the questions that compel me, the questions I wake up with about healing. Yeah, there’s a part of me that would have been like, I would so have preferred to have done something that required less sacrifice or challenges, but the satisfaction I feel and the power I feel, and I mean the kind of power that comes from inside of me, the kind of power I feel pursuing the visions that come to me makes my life feel well lived. Do you know what I mean? It makes my life feel full. And I think these visions cultivating vision, imagination, dreams, I think, is how we start to envision societies, our relationships, in new ways. I want to feel love in my life and visioning a life with love. Okay, how do I organize my life around that? You know, I always ask, you know, my my students and courses. What is worth organizing your life around? What vision do you see is worth organizing your life around? And I think that’s what the work of visioning calls us towards. I dream something that is not sold to me, that’s not offered to me, but comes from my the deepest parts of my belly, and I will organize my life around this devotion to this vision.

Jonathan Fields: [00:26:32] I love that question. I want to repeat it. It’s what is worth organizing my life around. Yeah, I mean, it’s so interesting. Years ago, I was having this conversation with, um, Matthew Crossman, who teaches one of three professors who actually teaches this course at Yale, sort of about what does it actually mean to to have a life well lived? The entire question, he tells the students in the very first class is like, this is going to be profoundly frustrating for you because all you’re going to get is questions.

Prentis Hemphill: [00:26:58] Oh, yeah.

Jonathan Fields: [00:26:59] Yeah, there are no answers here. But one of the questions that that he’s offered, and it just stayed with me and I keep thinking about it, is what’s worth wanting. And it feels really similar. It feels like it’s in the same family of that question you just proposed.

Prentis Hemphill: [00:27:11] Absolutely. I love that question. That’s right. And it’s such an evocative question. It pulls something, or rather, it calls something out of you, out of your body. And I think that’s that’s power.

Jonathan Fields: [00:27:26] It’s interesting also because I wonder whether oftentimes when we start to think about the process of visioning or creating a vision that so often the default mode is, well, I’m really clear on what I don’t want. Yeah. And maybe because it’s it’s our current experience. So it’s like you, you can like this is what I’m feeling now. This is what. So no no no no no. These are all my nose. These are my nose. Now, if I feel like I have agency and power to change them, and they’re my absolute nose in the future. But I often feel like there’s so much it’s harder to access that the longing you’re describing which says. But what are my yeses?

Prentis Hemphill: [00:28:04] Right? You know, I find that to be true on the individual level. I find it to be true on a kind of movement level or social change level that it’s much easier for us to go. I don’t like that. I don’t want that this has to stop. But it’s so much harder for us to go, I want this, I long for this. I see this for us, for myself. And, you know, I think it comes down to it’s much safer for us to do that. And it’s necessary. You have to say this has to stop. This has to end.

Jonathan Fields: [00:28:35] So we’re kind of deep into the conversation around visioning. And we were talking about, to a certain extent, how often we get really clear on what we don’t want pretty quickly. I think most of us could literally like just list it off immediately without thinking about it. But oftentimes we don’t have anywhere near the level of clarity around what we do want. And I want to float this sentence of yours actually, where you wrote visioning is not easy. We are born into other people’s visions for us and for the world. And I wonder if that’s part of the problem here. Like we are so wrapped up in other people’s visions for us that we have a hard time teasing out what is actually us in those visions.

Prentis Hemphill: [00:29:12] Yeah, it’s such a great question because one, I want to say we’re born into other people’s visions. That is not necessarily always a negative thing. I’m glad that my parents had some visions for me that helped move me in a direction that would actually serve me. But we are born into so many, so, so many and sometimes competing visions. And I think what ends up happening is that, you know, these visions end up being inside of them as this question of can I belong? Is this what it will take to belong? Living inside of this vision means I belong means I mean something to my community. I’ll make somebody proud, this is what I should do, etc. and we can end up in that toggle for a lifetime of living inside someone else’s vision, but also feeling our own longings. But, you know, retracting back into what we’ve been told that we have to be. We can spend a lot of time there to the point that we never actually cultivate or listen to our own longings or generate our own vision. So, yeah, I think we can get really stuck in other people’s visions, and it’s hard work to listen in and to say, I choose this, but I don’t choose that. I’ve had to do that a number of times. I know how challenging it can be.

Jonathan Fields: [00:30:27] Yeah, and like you said, sometimes there’s value in other people’s. I think especially sort of like in the earlier parts of life. That’s right. But also it feels like there’s also safety in other people’s visions. Because going back to what you described, like the whole idea of belonging. You know, like we kind of know that as long as we’re within the confines of another person’s vision about who we are and how it will be in the world that we’re going to belong to that person. If that person is a parent or somebody whose care we want to, you know, belong to, we want that. So there’s safety in not stepping out of it, because we know we’re always going to get what we want from that person or that community, and we don’t. We risk losing that when we’re like, no, no, no. Like, actually this is who I am inside. This is this is the vision for me outside of that.

Prentis Hemphill: [00:31:13] Yeah. And those visions are often taking care of something. I know that, you know, my mother’s vision. For what kind of girl I would be was taking care of not only her kind of not wanting to. Her social standing or shame. The potential for shame, but also taking care of my safety. You know, she was concerned about how the world would treat me. And so, you know, for a lot of people, we get shaped into these roles. We get molded. And even when the child is going, hey, I’m a little bit different than that. I’m actually interested in these things. You keep wanting to shape them, not only because we’re wanting to kind of suppress who they are, but because we care about their future, and we think this is the only way they can be safe. So there’s a lot that goes into how those visions become imposed on us. But I think one of the relational challenges we end up having is saying, this is your vision, and I choose this path. Can you modify your vision in order to include new information about who I actually am and who we might actually be to each other. And that’s a super challenging relational move. A lot of us want to just, you know, kind of phone it in. Yeah.

Jonathan Fields: [00:32:27] And there is I mean, not to discount there’s sometimes very real risk in that. Absolutely. There’s sometimes a real risk of a rupture in that relationship. And we have to be willing to say, okay, if this happens, you know, like, how am I going to move through that? And it may it may not be easy.

Prentis Hemphill: [00:32:43] That’s right, that’s right. And that risk is always, you know, that edge. It’s not that we have to live there all the time. But you know, I find that something about that edge keeps me feeling alive when I’m being honest, not seeking the edge in a relationship for the sake of it. But getting to that point where you go, oh, okay, the relationship is kind of here. We haven’t moved past this point or incorporated this information. How can I take this risk to be known? How can I take this risk to know the other? And the risk might be, as you said, rupture in relationship, loss of relationship. I’ve definitely experienced that. And it’s tragic. It’s devastating. And I’m giving the other person an opportunity to know me.

Jonathan Fields: [00:33:26] Yeah. And giving you an opportunity to actually show up without feeling like you’re performing someone else.

Prentis Hemphill: [00:33:32] Exactly. Yeah. That’s right. Yeah.

Jonathan Fields: [00:33:34] Um, which I feel like we discount the pain of that so much. We’re kind of like. I feel a little bit stifled. I’m kind of shape shifting a little bit, but I’m okay. Yeah, but in reality like that, that builds over time.

Prentis Hemphill: [00:33:47] It really does. And all the, all the coping we end up having to do in order to be okay each day is just so challenging. And I feel that in a number of ways in my own life, when I’ve had to go, okay, I don’t want to live a life of coping around this thing, I’m going to move into that risk so that we can be an actual relationship with each other.

Jonathan Fields: [00:34:06] Yeah. And that really brings us also to one of the things that you, you write about in the latest book, this idea of remapping relationships, sort of like saying, okay, so it started in this way, and this was the map of it, and we each had our own internal map of what it was. But it’s time to do some reimagining. Take me into this concept a bit more because I think it’s really important.

Prentis Hemphill: [00:34:28] Yeah, it connects up to what we were talking about and that, you know, we often inherit scripts. We inherit scripts in relationship. This is how relationships should be. This is how I should relate to someone in relationship. This is how I should relate to these kinds of people and what I should feel in a relationship, what should be sort of reinforced about who I am in a relationship, and what I’m calling into question in this chapter is, are we able to investigate these scripts, the kind of rote ways we enter into relationship, the rote expectations we have? It’s not that we don’t have expectations or needs to be met, but there’s a way that we inherit these scripts. It’s like, you know, putting on your father’s clothing. It’s like, does it necessarily fit me? How do I want to have relationship with people, and can I step outside of these scripts, these kind of inherited scripts, sometimes historical scripts to actually meet people and to be met? And so that’s what remapping relationships, really the what I’m trying to offer in this chapter is that actual relationship is actually underneath the scripts, and there are all these relational skills in a way that each of us is going to have to develop in order to be in that dance. It’s like steps. We have to learn to dance well together as we figure out how to actually relate to each other.

Jonathan Fields: [00:35:50] Yeah. It also, I mean, I feel like it touches a little bit on a little bit of what we were talking about earlier in our conversation about representation. Like, it’s sometimes hard to imagine, like, what is a script for a different type of relationship if you’ve never seen it represented to you in the relationships around you? Does that make sense?

Prentis Hemphill: [00:36:05] Absolutely, absolutely. Modeling is so important and it’s a jump off place. It’s like I’ve had modeling for relationships, and I see that repairing rupture is possible. And that’s so, so helpful. Most of us haven’t seen anything like that. I see that trusts are encouragement. All these things are possible, and it’s a jumping off point. As you enter into relationship with people, you have to be endlessly creative in a way. I mean, I’ve been married only for ten, 11 years now at this point, but I realized that it’s it’s an endlessly creative process of just trying to find each other as we change and grow through life. And it can be really fun and it can be really hard to.

Jonathan Fields: [00:36:47] And both at the same time. I’m close to 30 years into marriage with my wife and it’s like, are we the same people as we were 30 years ago? No, there are fundamental elements that are, but we have. Thankfully, we’ve changed and grown not just together, but as individuals. And you’ve got to, like, figure out how the scripts that you’re running change because it’s got to accommodate who you’re becoming individually and collectively, or else they’re just just kind of no hope.

Prentis Hemphill: [00:37:15] Yeah. I really want to learn from you. I mean, I feel so early on the journey to, I don’t know, I’m.

Jonathan Fields: [00:37:19] Still fumbling and stumbling, not sure how much I have to teach anyone on that, but, um, and we’ll be right back after a word from our sponsors. But I’m curious because I love the way that you phrase it. You know, like, this is still a jumping off point. You know, like you can see it represented to you. You can see it modeled, but this is still just going to give you a hint. And like, like it’s all about like you and doing the work along the way. I’m curious, do you have do you have a sense of okay, so here are some things to really observe, to think about, to consider as we’re trying to remap these relationships over time.

Prentis Hemphill: [00:37:57] So I would start with authenticity. It’s like can I be real? Is that even possible? How in my own scripts and how in other people’s visions am I captured? Can I step outside of those things? And, you know, I talk about authenticity and and vulnerability and even the potential for intimacy in some ways as letting yourself be at times kind of surprised by what emerges from you. Because I don’t know if it’s just me, but I’ve certainly, you know, had moments in my life where it’s like I’m almost kind of calculating myself. How am I going to show up? What am I going to say here? I might even rehearse it, which is cool. You know, sometimes you have to visualize things before we do them. But at the same token, I think there’s there’s something different, you know, when you’re for folks that have fallen in love, when you have that feeling of falling in love, it’s almost like things are being pulled out of you. You’re offering things before they are kind of refined for the public. You’re letting yourself be seen. And so having that kind of practice and skill, I think, is so necessary for actually engaging in real relationship with people. Can I be real and congruent? Can more or less what’s happening inside of me match what’s happening outside of me? Can I allow for that congruence that sets us up really well for relationship with other people? The other thing I talk about is boundaries. And this is kind of I often say that my tombstone will be the boundaries. Quote about the distance simultaneous. Maybe you’ve heard it. If you haven’t, look it up. But I think boundaries are so important because they give shape to a relationship.

Prentis Hemphill: [00:39:36] They say this relationship doesn’t have to be like every other relationship. This relationship has this rhythm, and this cadence has this level of proximity versus this level of proximity. I use the example in the book of rupture I had with my father, and coming back, I kind of had this expectation, okay, we’re trying to repair, which means I have to have the same relationship I had with him before, but in fact, I didn’t have to, that I actually learned something from that rupture about proximity. I wanted him in my life, but I wanted the cadence of it to be different. And so boundaries help support what happened in our relationship and what didn’t happen in our relationship. And I think boundaries are how we choose the texture of relationship we have with each other. I would also say trust. You know, this, um, I do a lot of work in my own organization around trust, but these risk extensions to each other, doing things together, you know, I’ve had so many folks in the kind of organizing world say, I don’t really know you until I’ve done something with you, until I’ve built something with you. And in that, we’re doing all these exchanges of trust. Do I trust you here? Can I trust you with this? And how do we build trust? Inspire trust. Be accountable to the trust that people are offering to us. I want to inspire trust in people based on how I hold the relationship with them. I want to extend trust to people because it allows us to build deeper with each other. These moves to me are how we shape and build and continue to refine relationship over time.

Jonathan Fields: [00:41:12] Yeah, I mean that resonates powerfully, especially trust, you know? And I feel like trust is one of those things. Curious whether you agree with this, where you can’t speak trust into existence, you have to behave it into existence. Yeah.

Prentis Hemphill: [00:41:25] Yeah, absolutely.

Jonathan Fields: [00:41:26] And if what you say doesn’t support what you do and vice versa, it just doesn’t ever land. It doesn’t. There’s no trust that ever can get built.

Prentis Hemphill: [00:41:36] And it makes sense why we want to speak it rather than do it because of the risk of it. It’s like, am I really going to trust you with something? I might say, oh, yeah, I trust you, I trust you, but I never allow something. You know, as Charles Feltman talks about, like allowing something that you care about, it becomes vulnerable to the other person’s actions. It’s. Will I actually allow that? Will I include you when I need you? Will I take the risk to show you what I care about and let you hold it in your hands and do something with it. It’s much easier to talk about trust. We say we trust each other, but it’s much harder, I think, to actually do that risky move. Yeah.

Jonathan Fields: [00:42:16] I mean, especially if you’ve been burned in the past, which pretty much everyone has on some level, sometimes by an individual, sometimes by a family, a society, an entire culture. Nobody operates in a vacuum when it comes to trust. That’s right. We bring a history to it.

Prentis Hemphill: [00:42:29] And bad practice. I don’t think a lot of us are really, you know, we talk about modeling. I don’t have a lot of great examples of watching people trust and be accountable to that trust. I don’t have a lot of great examples from my young life and that. And so why would people believe in it? Why would people try it if other folks have, you know, such few models and examples? But I think the more we can, you know, in our organization we talk about trust a lot. We say trust. We give trust assessments of each other. We say this is where trust was broken. This is where trust was built. And it makes it a less of a kind of mysterious quality that’s just floating around and something that we are intentionally offering and also naming where it has been broken and needs to be rebuilt. I think we have to reveal trust in our relationships to really learn how to do it.

Jonathan Fields: [00:43:22] Well, yeah, I love that notion of building sort of regular process around that, because rather than just letting stuff build up that’s never actually centered or addressed, it’s like if you have almost like it sounds like you have almost like a trust check in basically. Yeah. So that you can actually address it before things go too far off the rails. That’s right. Or know that maybe this is something that I don’t think actually is capable of being fixed. So we need to figure out where to go from here. And maybe that’s not, you know, side by side.

Prentis Hemphill: [00:43:51] Exactly. So many of us avoid those, those accountability conversations, but because they feel, you know, there’s so much that comes with it. But the more you practice it like anything, the more you can do it. So that’s, you know, in our work, that’s something that we as soon as people come in, we do assessments as often. We do trust assessments here. It’s part of how we relate to each other and we encourage. And we also name where we fell short and we want to do better or potentially we can’t do better. And we have to, like you said, address that.

Jonathan Fields: [00:44:22] Yeah. I mean, it also speaks to this is one of the things you write about when things fall apart, you write, our greatest challenge is to not allow our ruptures and breakdowns to become new sites of trauma for one another. And I feel like that does happen so often.

Prentis Hemphill: [00:44:36] Jonathan, I feel like this, um, moment in time, it’s what I’m watching most closely as we fall apart in so many ways. Sometimes things do fall apart, must fall apart. And what are we doing on the on the way down as things are breaking? Are we hurting each other? Are we, you know, making another person more vulnerable we increasing the suffering of anyone else as we are falling apart. I think it’s something that is just so necessary for us to bring our attention to. Things will rupture. I think it’s our resistance to that sometimes that keeps us really entrenched in a the kind of fight of it or the avoidance of it. We will hurt each other. Things will fall apart. We will disagree. Mistakes will be made. Ruptures will happen in relationship. But it’s what we do with that and what we intend to do and how we go about resolving what has been ruptured. That matters almost as much as where the break happened. It’s like, what do we do with it? And are we replicating the pain and trauma in our own past and our current relationships? I think about it every day.

Jonathan Fields: [00:45:52] So where do we start with that? How do we step into this in a way where we say, okay, I’m not going to keep deepening this. But like, what are the first steps in to figuring this out?

Prentis Hemphill: [00:46:02] I’ll start here. You know, I’ve been doing conflict facilitation for years. And, you know, I often say coming into it as I’m kind of setting up with people, that my main goal and facilitating any conflict is to make sure one more breath was taken that wouldn’t have been taken otherwise. That someone paused and took a breath, means that the outcome would change of what was likely going to happen before. So it’s as simple as that. But it’s also what’s happening when we are in conflict so much. We’re getting so activated. Often in our past fears, past traumas, the narratives we’re creating about what this person’s intent is, what it means to our lives, what it means to our sense of ourselves. There’s all these stories kind of running and and kind of being generated through the conflict, activated through the conflict. What serves conflict? I teach a course called Embodied Conflict. What serves that is being able to one have a way of sitting back in ourselves, of witnessing ourselves, of knowing ourselves, which is, you know, as a facilitator, we often get called in when things are almost intractable. Right? You know, it’s like, help us facilitate this conflict. You’re like, the conflict actually started six months ago, but you’re calling me today.

Jonathan Fields: [00:47:19] It’s like it’s the save us call. It’s like. Yeah.

Prentis Hemphill: [00:47:23] Totally. And by then, there’s just very little breath. There’s very little space. There’s very little ability to self-reflect, to say, what of my past is entering this present? What really matters to me here? Where am I, in a way, going to be immovable because it aligns with my values? And where am I acting outside of my values? You start to lose that vulnerability. The more entrenched in conflict we get, because it’s just about winning or litigating something. It really helps us in conflict if we have in our practice and our lives some way of understanding ourselves, reflecting on ourselves, knowing ourselves and our behaviors, and knowing that we can also be out of line, that the greatest gift of conflict is not who’s right. Figuring out who’s right or who’s wrong. The greatest gift of the conflict is understanding what the conflict is trying to teach us about our relationship, what it’s trying to teach us about the needs in our relationship, our communication in the relationship, what our boundaries are. That’s the greatest gift and conflict. And the more we avoid that, the more we get entrenched and we avoid the vulnerability of self-reflection, the more elusive that central lesson becomes to us.

Jonathan Fields: [00:48:42] Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. Reflecting in a very, very, very past life, I was a lawyer, and I remember learning very early on that in the last bit of it, I was sort of like a deal lawyer, and the whole thing would start with two people that would come together and kind of like, hey, like, there’s this awesome way that we can work together, let’s do this thing together. And they would agree on it and kind of like, like, yeah, we kind of agree on terms. We like each other like this will work. And then they bring in the lawyers. And the lawyers were basically like it was, you know, it’s an adversarial process immediately from that point forward. And it doesn’t have to be. But that’s what was happening, and it wasn’t unusual for it to get to a point where just things were so adversarial and heated that at some point, the two principals who started this whole thing were like, what’s happening here? And you’d have to bring them back together and basically tell the lawyers, we actually want this.

Prentis Hemphill: [00:49:36] Mm.

Jonathan Fields: [00:49:37] Wow. We came together originally because like, we see the value in each other, we see the world. Similarly, we want this to happen. Like, your job is not to pull us away from that, but to bring that into the conversation and make it work, not to win over the other side. And I feel like that’s a lawyer example, but I feel like we have that lawyer voice inside of us.

Prentis Hemphill: [00:49:57] Absolutely. I, you know, I think about it as the it’s like a judicial voice. When I facilitate, people are often trying to be the innocent one, trying to make someone else guilty. I think that that mode of dealing with societal social conflict is in all of us. It’s shaped all of us in a way. It’s shaped our imagination about what’s possible. I have to imagine the conflicts that could be in order to even begin building with you now. And yeah, I just think it’s so deeply ingrained in us, and we don’t often recognize how much that limits what happens when things get hard.

Jonathan Fields: [00:50:35] Which brings up another thing that you wrote that I loved. I think it kind of folds into this conversation. You write much of what lies ahead is the work of expanding our we and learning to relate to one another not as we’ve been taught, but with a new future in mind. Um, there are so many pieces of that that I think are so powerful but also so rarely acted upon.

Prentis Hemphill: [00:50:57] And I wonder some days, like what it will take for us to get there. I think that the I’ve been sitting with these questions lately of of like, who is the me that can do that? Like what is the version of me or what is the posture? What is the way of being that allows me to do the work of expanding the we? And I think there’s just so much set up against us to, to do that. Well, there’s such a individualism, especially now with social media. And I’m a part of this. There’s so much like everybody can be a celebrity for, you know, the length of a TikTok video. We’re all kind of vying for this, um, prominence, this specialness, this certain kind of individualism that I think ends up confusing what it means to be together. I love social media. I do a lot there, but the work of actually being with people is much different than accumulating a lot of likes. There’s all this listening we have to do. There’s all this deep listening and including and repair. There’s actually deep repair that a lot of us need to do with each other. There’s the willingness to change and transform once we encounter new information that we haven’t received before. It’s deep work to expand our we. And I think it is actually, you know, we often say in our work that relationship is the reality. We just end up denying all the relationships that we’re actually in. I’m in relationship with all the people that live in my geographic community. Do we talk to each other necessarily? I do talk to some of my neighbors, but we end up denying and cutting that off and like, oh, I’m actually only going to talk to the people that are just like me in this other place. But the relationship is the reality. And so who do I need to be in order to live in the reality of my connection with the people around me? That’s the question I’m curious about right now.

Jonathan Fields: [00:52:58] Yeah. And it is certainly is a question of the moment. It’s so interesting you bring up social media in this context also, because, you know, the phrase following or follower has become the sort of like the way that you define. And people say like, I have a massive community, I have a bazillion followers. And it’s like, that’s actually not a community. No, no. You know, like you have very likely have little to no relationship with the vast majority of those people. They’re just raising their hand to engage with what you’re putting out there, as long as it tickles their fancy.

Prentis Hemphill: [00:53:30] That’s right. As long as it tickles their fancy. Yeah.

Jonathan Fields: [00:53:33] And then you start to once you start to realize what that is, then you start to perform what you think they want, and it makes it even less of a relationship if it ever really was one. And yet we feel like, oh, I’ve got this giant community and I wonder if you feel like that sometimes gives us this false sense of we have what we need and stops us from saying, let me actually turn to the person next to me, or the neighbor or the community, or have a block party and like, what if we actually did something real, right? Right next door?

Prentis Hemphill: [00:54:04] Absolutely. You can have a lot of followers, but who’s going to watch your kid on a Thursday night? If you want to go to see a movie, you know who’s going to come over with soup when you’re sick? Doesn’t matter if you have thousands and thousands of followers. If you struggle to name anyone, they’ll actually be there when you need them. And I think that’s the conundrum a lot of us are in. You know, we are deeply confusing those things and the meaning of those things because they’re not external, performative. It doesn’t show. I talk about my the avatar of me. There’s the me, and then there’s the me that’s kind of co-created by people who follow me and are kind of using the idea of me to symbolize something, but I have to. In a way, I’m consenting to that. But I also know that what really matters to me is my life, my day to day life, my relationships, my friendships, my family, my kid. I always moved from, this has to be good first before I can kind of engage in that. And so, you know, I could play that game much more than I do. But it really is important for me to have a real flesh and bone kind of foundation of relationship, because when we need it, we need actual connection, we need actual relationship. And we’re getting kind of confused with the the virtual community and all of its hierarchies and, you know, ways of valuing each other. We’re getting really, really, really, in a way unskillful at the day to day relationship building, talking to people, showing up for people, really showing our care, building community and doing all the things that we’ve been talking about with people in our lives. It almost, you know, for people I work with, it almost feels terrifying. It’s almost, you know, the most terrifying thing in their lives is to talk to a stranger. And I find it concerning, but it also makes a lot of sense. You know, the more connected we are, the more deeply isolated we seem to become.

Jonathan Fields: [00:56:08] Yeah. And often because it’s like it’s not us who are actually connected. It’s the avatar that we show to the world. It’s the avatar. No matter how like beloved that avatar may be, the we underneath it or behind it, or the fraction of like ourselves that we actually shape into that avatar, we’re not seeing enough. We’re not vulnerable enough. We’re not like, they’re not actually saying yes to us. They’re saying yes to the projection of us. Yeah. So we never we never like, get what we need because it’s not us. You know, it’s just we never go there. Yeah. At the end of the day, like so much of your work like what really, really kind of like drilling down to is this notion of healing, right? It’s this notion of like, how do we bridge the divide? How do we find ways that we can live with ourselves, that we can live with our partners, with our families, with our communities, with society at large? And like that doesn’t happen without a certain amount of openness and vulnerability and hard moments and willing to go there. And as you write, also, it’s not just about I think your words are mending what we feel is broken within us, but actually transforming the conditions that that led to those wounds. So we have to look beyond like our own skin, basically.

Prentis Hemphill: [00:57:24] Yeah. That’s right. Because we’re we’re made from this world. It was created maybe before us or wheels were set in motion before us. And it’s kind of made us in the way that best serves how it’s working. And so the transformation we we can kind of go within, do work deeply, transform. It’s so, so, so important to build that kind of relationship, that ongoing relationship with ourselves. And if we aren’t also engaged in the transformation of the world, it ends up reshaping us back into those habits and patterns, or it’s shaping the people right next to us. It’s both. And for me, it’s, um, you know, in spiritual communities I’ve been in, at times, there have been these conversations about engagement or disengagement. And I deeply believe in engagement in the world and building things together, building organizations, building community, building relationship with each other. I deeply, deeply believe in that because there’s a logic in a way, embedded in every institution we have. It’s it’s embedded with the logic of it’s time, and it’s going to keep doing that. It’s going to keep creating that. And so we have to also build things that are imbued with a different kind of logic. Logic that is perhaps more healing oriented, more sustainably oriented, more regenerative. We can build things in that way. And they may not look like skyscrapers, they may look more like circles, but we can still build those things that we need. And I think as we do, more and more people will be called to them, you know. But I think we must we must engage. We must change conditions. We must address the needs in a way of what needs that people have, because it’s really hard to show up for your healing if you’re hungry. That’s just a fact of the matter.

Jonathan Fields: [00:59:18] No, it’s so beautifully said. It feels like a good place for us to come full circle in our conversation as well. So in this container of Good Life Project., if I offer the phrase to live a good life, what comes up.

Prentis Hemphill: [00:59:30] To live a good life? Love at all costs. Love at all costs. Love in a way that breaks you. Open that changes you, makes you different. Take that risk. Yeah. I think love moves things around if we let it. If we let it really flow. So love at all costs. At the cost of your own transformation and the transformation of the world.

Jonathan Fields: [00:59:52] Mhm. Thank you.

Prentis Hemphill: [00:59:54] Thanks, Jonathan.

Jonathan Fields: [00:59:56] Hey, before you leave, if you love this conversation. Safe bet you’ll also love the conversation we had with Rev. angel Kyodo williams about liberation. You’ll find a link to Rev. angel’s episode in the show notes. This episode of Good Life Project was produced by executive producers Lindsey Fox and me, Jonathan Fields. Editing help by Alejandro Ramirez. Kristoffer Carter crafted our theme music and special thanks to Shelley Adelle for her research on this episode. And of course, if you haven’t already done so, please go ahead and follow Good Life Project. in your favorite listening app. And if you found this conversation interesting or inspiring or valuable, and chances are you did. Since you’re still listening here, would you do me a personal favor and share it. Maybe on social or by text or by email. Even just with one person. Just copy the link from the app you’re using and tell those you know, those you love, those you want to help navigate this thing called life a little better so we can all do it better together with more ease and more joy. Tell them to listen, then even invite them to talk about what you’ve both discovered. Because when podcasts become conversations and conversations become action, that’s how we all come alive together. Until next time, I’m Jonathan Fields, signing off for Good Life Project.