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Back to Bodily Knowing with Weena Pauly-Tarr

Tending the Roots: Composting Conversations

Release Date: 10/05/2023

What We’ve Sacrificed to Stay Safe and the Courage to Peer Beneath the Waterline

Tending the Roots: Composting Conversations

Karine shares a story from childhood about visiting her grandmother’s house where she encountered the heavy, unspoken tensions that would shape a lifelong commitment to shadow work. This reflection weaves personal memory with a deeper exploration of the cost of avoiding the shadow—those edges-places we’ve been taught to fear in ourselves, our families, and our social worlds. It explores what we sacrifice when we choose not to go to those places, and how this avoidance slowly distances us from intimacy, creativity, and our own aliveness. This mini-sode is an invitation and a gentle push...

In Care We Distrust (aka Experiments in Village-Making)

Tending the Roots: Composting Conversations

In Care We Distrust is an introduction and reflection from inside the Rooted Village, where we’re not just talking about care and care ecologies—we’re getting into the messy, layered work of studying, designing and practicing it/them. Underneath so much of the crisis we’re living through—political, ecological, economic—is a crisis of relationship (or a crisis of care, as our friend Cassie calls it) and beneath that, a deep erosion of trust: in institutions, in one another, and even in ourselves. This episode winds through some of that terrain, touches on our distrust in those...

On SE+AM: Relational Courage and Creative Aliveness w/Weena Pauly-Tarr

Tending the Roots: Composting Conversations

In this episode, we dive into a powerful and thought-provoking conversation with the brilliant Weena Pauly-Tarr, creator of SE+AM—a body-centered practice that blends Somatic Experiencing + Authentic Movement. In a time of heightened polarization and disconnection, SE+AM offers a profound way to explore how we show up in relationship—with ourselves and others—and how we can begin to recognize and move beyond our patterned ways of relating into spaces of choice, and creativity. Through this conversation, Weena shares how SE+AM reveals the dynamics that shape our connections and opens up...

Where Do I Belong: An Exploring Identity and Belonging for Bi/cultural bodies [THIS TIME FOR EUROPE]

Tending the Roots: Composting Conversations

Welcome to a fresh session of Tending The Roots. In this episode Karine Bell speaks with Dr Leticia Neito about an upcoming program hosted by The Rooted Global Village called Where Do I Belong: An Exploration of Identity and Belonging for Bi/multicultural bodies - this time, for Europe. It’s a fascinating one. The two of them talk about how this program for bicultural bodies came to be, some of the most interesting learnings that have come out of the last two iterations, and the intriguing role psychodrama has played in participant’s process of self-discovery. If you’re interested in...

Wanna Play? Play as Liberatory Practice with Heidi and Karine

Tending the Roots: Composting Conversations

About Heidi J Cardoza: From a young age Heidi has been empathic and expressive, with a love of nature and a desire to understand reality by honoring multiple perspectives. She studied physics, dance and performance art in college and produced several multimedia shows asking questions and inspiring integration and celebration. She joined La Caravana Arcoiris por la Paz (the Rainbow Caravan for Peace) for many years in South America. This was an international group of rebels who traveled, worked and made art together. They learned to live simple, everyday lives together in...

Part 4: Cycles of Fire: Imagination and our Maps

Tending the Roots: Composting Conversations

On our own, the desire born from the challenges we’ve faced can be a powerfully transformative force in our lives. Our personal embrace of the Soulful Chainbreaker becomes a cultural force when we gather together, commune, share stories, and support each other to commit to and sustain the journey. We do not disrupt and re/orient within a vacuum, other beings dedicated to this process become our co-conspirators and co-creators of new experiences and new future(s). Rooted in the experience of our non-separation we might find greater access to our creative life...

Part 3: The Spirit and Science of Change Work

Tending the Roots: Composting Conversations

Many experiences of trauma/oppression reveal where we’ve failed to belong authentically. The ways in which, as we navigate our social worlds, we come up against blocks and barriers to birthright dignity, authenticity, acceptance and belonging. That is, where we disappoint and fail to conform to the expectations of dominant cultural narratives. This rejection dampens our inner spark, disorients our desire, and erects borders and checkpoints in our interior world that prevents the wild rambling and roving that is our birthright and is necessary for wellbeing. This non-belonging is also a...

Part 2: Unlocked: When We Access a Desire Greater than Fear

Tending the Roots: Composting Conversations

The Chainbreaker as archetype invites critical questioning and reclaiming. We are invited to consider disappointing our families of origin, and the cultural influences at large by rejecting narratives and dictates that reproduce harms.It’s risky, even, for those most marginalized in these narratives. Yet in this risk we open to a vital rebirth: the opportunity to access desire long hidden or dampened by chains and obstacles. If we imagine our inner and outer worlds as a map; not one shaped by imposed borders but rather a map that authentically reveals the contours we trace in our...

Part I: Who is the Soulful Chainbreaker?

Tending the Roots: Composting Conversations

Transmuting Intergenerational Trauma Through The Creative Principles of Fire This is a story about what it means to be the one who steps out of line. The one willing to be the weak link in the chain. The one willing to disrupt and disobey; to embrace disruption as a portal and disappoint some of the expectations held for us (and the people associated with them) in the service of another future. And how a shift in imagination turns our deviance into a dedication to life, love, and liberation. This requires courage, fierce love and a fire (in the belly) that sustains our...

Dancing Beyond : Music, identity, and community with Cliff Berrien

Tending the Roots: Composting Conversations

Cliff Berrien has 40-years of experience as a student and teacher of Afro-Diasporic drumming and music traditions. He has combined his music studies, degree in psychology and years of experience as a professional DJ to develop practices that promote collective joy, cultural dexterity and global healing. Cliff has had the honor of using these practices for the past 5 years co-facilitating workshops with his mentor, Dr. Barbara Holmes, author of Race and the Cosmos and Joy Unspeakable: Contemplative Practices of the Black Church. Dr. Holmes’ work has deepened Cliff’s...

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I’m excited to have Weena on the podcast today. She happens to be a dear friend of mine and also one of our rooted team members. In rooted, Weena is probably the person who more than anyone else, brings us back to the body, to the impulse of bodily knowing, and how we can engage with the themes we’re working with in a space like rooted. Her work is focused on truly experiencing this world through our bodies. It’s a critical component of what we do. This conversation was both enjoyable, given our friendship, and felt somewhat incomplete to both of us, hinting at a possible part two in the future. It’s a casual, kitchen table talk that went wherever it wanted to. We begin by discussing perimenopause and its impact on cognitive functioning, verbal fluency, and the challenge of showing up authentically in spaces. This is tied to the unlearning process we’re undergoing and our critique of cultures linked to supremacist systems. I hope you enjoy this conversation with Weena. If you want to learn more about her, you can find links to her Instagram and website below.

Weena’s been working and playing in the worlds of dance, movement training, and somatic therapies in New York City for the last 25 years.

Her guiding light is to value the interconnected reality of bodily aliveness (and its absence in the tangible sense). She finds that aliveness through making dances, facilitating SE+AM group work, working somatically with folks individually, partnering and mothering, and in her amazing neighborhood of Jackson Heights. Weena is passionate about getting to the heart of what shifts our human-made systems toward that which protects, cares for, and supports our human needs for mobility, stability, clarity and love. SE+AM has been her response to that need. SE+AM is a practice Weena developed that is about making direct contact with the internal, bodily-felt aliveness within and around us. You can learn more about SE+AM and experience it for yourself at:
Weena's website: weenapauly.com
Weena's instagram: weenapaulytarr
Weena's Podcast: Reverence For Impulse

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