Advanced Learning with Rabbi Myriam Klotz
Thursday March 31, 2022
10am PST | 1pm EST | 8pm Israel
Becoming an Embodied White Anti-Racist
But all our phrasing--race relations, racial chasm, racial justice, racial profiling, white privilege, even white supremacy--serves to obscure that racism is a visceral experience, that it dislodges brains, blocks airways, rips muscle, extracts organs, cracks bones breaks teeth. You must never look away from this. You must always remember that the sociology, the history, the economics, the graphs, the charts, the regressions all land, with great violence, upon the body.--Ta Nehisi Coates, Between the World and Me.
Collective racialized trauma lives in our bodies no matter the color of our skin. For those of us with the societal advantage of being in white bodies, the journey towards embodying antiracism includes awareness of how racism lives in our bodies, and how we can actualize the mitzvah of antiracist intentions through our embodied practice.
In this session we will move between study and practice to reflect on the impact of racial trauma in our lives as white bodied Jewish people. This session is intended as an introduction to embodied antiracist practice, or to support you in your continuing journey at the intersections of inner work and embodied practice in a racialized world. If you identify as someone who has white advantage, whether you identify as white or not, this session might be for you.
Rabbi Myriam Klotz, Senior Program Director for Somatics and Social Justice at the Institute for Jewish Spirituality (IJS), has been teaching yoga and embodied practice with IJS 18 years. They are the founding co-director of the Yoga and Jewish Spirituality Teacher Training at Isabella Freedman Jewish Retreat Center. Myriam leads workshops and retreats on yoga, embodied practice and spirituality at Kripalu Center for Yoga and Health and with congregations nationally, and has published writings and guided practice CD’s. Myriam is a spiritual director, and most recently served as overseeing of spiritual direction programming with the Bekhol Levavkha Jewish Spiritual Director training program at HUC-JIR in New York City.
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