What is Social Field Sensing and Why is it Crucial to Social Justice Work?
By Rie Algeo Gilsdorf
There are so many ways that embodiment is pertinent to social justice work, not least of which is developing the stamina to stay present with our sensations and emotions. Many somatic modalities can be used to address this. But there’s an additional facet that is crucial, particularly for members of the dominant White culture like me - Social Field Sensing. In my experience, the lack of ability to sense into the social fields around us is a key factor in the perpetuation of the status quo in groups of all sizes.
But let me back up and define a few things. I work in Social Presencing Theater (SPT), an emerging discipline developed by Arawana Hayashi at the U.School for Transformation. It’s the cutting-edge of systems change work that extends Peter Senge’s Systems Thinking to Systems Sensing, in order to include the human component of any system. It’s practiced on three levels - the level of your personal body, that of the “social body” or assembled group of people you find yourself in, and that of the “Earth body” we all share. By looking at systems as bodies and providing somatic practices for them, SPT functions as bodywork for systems. In fact, the name contains all of this:
Social - a group activity
Presencing - a combination of Present + Sensing
Theater - from the Greek, a place where the invisible and ineffable become visible and tangible
Social bodies - be they a family at home, children in a classroom, protesters filling a street, or coworkers in an office break room - collectively generate a Social Field. It’s that “third space” between and among people that can’t be seen but sensed. Social Field sensing tends to get cultivated in the collective cultures of Black, Indigenous, and racialized communities more than in the individualism of the dominant White US culture. It’s the ability to notice, attend to and get an embodied read on the energy of a group. You have felt a social field if you’ve ever heard a speaker tell a moving story that left the room silent. Or if you’ve ever walked into a tense situation and sensed the vibe of it before you heard enough words to understand what it was about. Just as a person who focuses their attention on their mind will lose touch with their body, our cultural individuality causes us to withdraw from awareness of our social bodies. We become socially anesthetized.
The beauty of SPT is that it offers work in the personal body that helps us metabolize and develop stamina for the difficult feelings we experience once we allow inequities within the social body into our consciousness.
Living as a member of the dominant culture means we can get away with not sensing into what’s going on energetically in a room - after all, so often it falls in line with the dominant experience. And this is where the intersection with social justice begins. Not sensing a Social Field means that I don’t know when I’m dominating the dialogue or when I’ve made some out-of-bounds comment. Listen to the apology attempts of anyone in a dominant group toward anyone they’ve marginalized - from #MeToo to microaggressions, the apologizers commonly say they had no idea the harm they were causing. As a White person, I personally have had to learn to sense into social fields that included a more heterogeneous range of humans. I had to get over my surprise and learn to expect that there are alternate ways of responding to what I have just said or done. And though I wasn’t expecting to, the way I learned both of these was through SPT.
If you’ve had the experience of being or seeing a White person not understanding why a group’s response is not what they expected, you’ve experienced social field non-sense at play. At its worst, this non-sensing allows us to straight up ignore people who are deemed inconvenient in some way. That guy sleeping on the sidewalk? I see him, yet I don’t allow myself to sense him. Once we’ve withdrawn from noticing others, we lose empathy and wind up in apathy. Actively working to solve the root problem is then out of the question.
During the U.School for Transformation’s 2020 GAIA (Global Activation of Intention & Action) program, board member Dayna Cunningham summed this up: “I believe that Structural Violence is a series of human agreements that we will not pay attention to a set of humans that aren’t somehow as human as we are.” Those unspoken agreements are much more than unspoken — they are unseen and un-sensed. Those of us who participate in them have had them handed down to us over generations as a way of anesthetizing ourselves to the inequities around us. This fits with the “classic” writings of Cultural Somatics practitioner Tada Hozumi, who thinks of privilege as an “institutionalized dissociative mechanism.” Hozumi argues that this collective dissociation is baked into the dominant norms of White culture and that the key to undoing privilege is to re-inhabit ourselves by cultivating awareness of our entire bodies.
As an SPT practitioner, I have to add that we must also re-inhabit our social bodies by cultivating our awareness of our entire communities, including those at the margins. We do this starting with the people in our immediate environment - at home, in the supermarket, at the airport, on a downtown street. Of course, this will bring us out of our anesthetized state and cause us to move from apathy to empathy. It can be painful, particularly if, on the level of the personal body, we’ve been ignoring our emotions. The beauty of SPT is that it offers work in the personal body that helps us metabolize and develop stamina for the difficult feelings we experience once we allow inequities within the social body into our consciousness.
For me, as I developed my Social Field sensing along with my ability to rest my attention on my own body, I found myself more able to lead in an adaptive way, stepping up and back as the Social Field requires. When there’s friction in a group, I feel less pressure to say the exact right thing, instead sensing into my body and the social field and allowing a response to arise. This quality is called Action Confidence, that sense of deeply knowing what to do next. As a person who spent much of her life in Analysis Paralysis, this is another crucial element of Social Justice work that I’ve honed in my SPT practice.
Learn more at www.EmbodyEquity.com.
About Rie Algeo Gilsdorf
Rie Algeo Gilsdorf (she/her) is passionate about seeing and integrating the big picture. With advanced degrees in Biology and Dance, Rie appreciates the perceptions of the mind, heart, and body and the critical thinking and creativity they stimulate. She builds equity on personal, group, and systemic levels by integrating mind and body, science and art, healing, and change-making. Rie learned about learning as a teacher, designer, and director of arts-integrated, student-centered schools; later, a six-year position at Courageous Conversation taught her to engage productively in equity work as a white woman. Currently, Rie provides embodied facilitation and coaching via Embody Equity.
Meet Rie on The Embody Lab’s Therapist Directory and learn more about how Social Presencing Theater can help you apply mindful awareness of the body to personal, community, and global change-making.
If you’re interested in understanding more about how somatic practices can help you, consider working with a Somatic Therapist or Practitioner. The Embody Lab’s Somatic Therapist and Practitioner Directory can help you find the right practitioner to support your journey towards more self-compassion, connection, and authenticity. Explore our directory and find the support you need.
