Decolonizing the Body: Conversations about Race, Social Justice and Psychedelics with Camille Barton

INbodied Life with Lauren Taus

Camille Barton (they/them) is a non binary artist, writer and somatic educator, working on the intersections of wellness, drug policy and transformative justice. Camille is the director of the Collective Liberation Project, and the creator of a trauma informed approach to diversity and decolonization work that centres on the body and lived experience.

Camille offers Embodied Social Change - movement sessions that fuse somatics and partner work to explore how oppression, such as racism and ableism, is rooted in the body; and how we can re-pattern it using mindful attention and movement.

Camille is currently researching grief on behalf of the Global Environments Network, creating a tool kit of embodied grief practices to support efforts for intersectional ecological justice. They also work as an advisor for MAPS, ensuring that MDMA psychotherapy will be accessible to global majority communities (POC), most harmed by the war on drugs.

In this conversation, we talk about the critical importance of the body in anti-racist work and social justice. We dive into dance, psychedelic medicine, our ancestors and the possibility of collective liberation.

What You Will Learn:

- The limits of traditional activism, and the need for somatic social justice to repattern areas of dominance and oppression in the body

- The need for white people to pivot from guilt, shame, and white saviorism into a place of collective liberation for everyone plus the significance of white on white violence

- How dance has been colonized in the West with its focus on how it looks and why shifting into a model of dance as reclamation, pleasure, and reconnection with ancestors is a powerful medicine for healing. Go on, dance like nobody’s watching!

- How so many Western New Age Movements are guilty of spiritual bypassing and how conscious communities can do the needed work of social change by dissolving ego

- The ways in which drug policy has been a tool for creating fear and racism; the importance of harm reduction and why the process of building trust will take time

RESOURCES

Camille's Website

The Collective Liberation Project

The Roots of White Supremacy Are In Our Bodies

Healing Our Thousand Year Old Trauma by Rezma Menakem

White Awake

Selfish Activist

Body Intelligence

http://radicaldharma.org/

Book: Medical Apartheid

Ray Johnson

James Baldwin

Maria Sabina