How has modernity shaped the way we perceive, inhabit, and relate to our physical bodies? What does it mean to “reclaim whole body sovereignty”? How do we free not only our minds, but also the body from the shackles of coloniality and extractivism? How do we unroot the old myth of separation and domination from the sacred soil of our physical sanctuaries?
These are some of the questions explored in ‘Decolonising Our Bodies’, a webinar hosted by the Learning Thematic Group of the Global Tapestry of Alternatives. In this expansive conversation, Wangũi wa Kamonji (regeneration practitioner, researcher, dancer, storyteller and facilitator) and Hajar Tazi (moderator and steward of the GTA Learning Thematic Group) dive deep into questions of decolonization, healing, and how to begin to see our bodies as living systems, interwoven with the fabric of life.
This is an excerpt of the conversation between Hajar and Wangũi. You can access the full webinar here.
Hajar: Wangũi, there is no other person I can personally imagine as a better guide for this particular conversation. I want to begin by asking – what are the relationships that have shaped your personal life path and the work you do today? These can be relationships to humans and with the more than human world.
Wangũi: Such a beautiful question. One of my critical earliest relationships that has shaped how I move in the world was with the garden outside of our house while growing up and being in the presence of or within rhythms, such as the rhythms of planting, ripening and harvesting, which happen in different seasons.
I also want to name another layer of the garden that was more relational, agential, and perhaps also animistic. I remember one day walking outside and hearing an invitation from the garden to step into the soil and lie down and saying yes to that invitation. Stepping into the soil, lying down and being held by the earth brought a different perspective of noticing the world from that angle. I thought, “Look, there’s this maize plant growing next to me! I’m curious. I feel like eating it.” Then, tasting the sweetness of the stem of the maize – not the usual part we eat – made me wonder if there might be a relationship between maize and sugarcane.
It was a very early experience – I think I was four years old at that time – that then faded into memory and only returned much later when I went rediscovering my own wholeness and fullness of being. This is one of my early relationships that marked me just being outside, playing, exploring, and being curious. Then there’s also my relationship with my brother, who is three years older than me.
Hajar: Thank you for sharing, Wangũi. I’m also curious about the work that you’re doing at the intersection of reclaiming ancient and reimagining new ways of being, of knowing, of relating to self, each other and nature and how that intersects with questions of social justice and of moving past coloniality, extractivism and modernity which lives within us. How are you bringing all of these threads, weaving them together, and how did this sort of work come to be in your personal journey?
Wangũi: I want to first talk a little bit about one of the aspects of coloniality using a model called ‘the five frames of coloniality’. Certain ways of knowing, primarily knowing with the ‘rational’ mind and the intellect are privileged within coloniality as being the only way that we can engage with the world, the only perspective that is valid and valued. For me, it’s been a journey of emphasising that there is more than just this one way of knowing. Sometimes I invite people in my classes to listen with the ears of their whole body, which is not just listening with their ears, but also listening with their skin, their imagination, their heart, their gut and all the physical sensations that might be showing up. All of these are ways of knowing that we have access to, but they are not ways of knowing that are valued or seen as valuable within a colonial world. Probably they haven’t figured out how to make money out of it! The things that can be extracted are often privileged and seen as more valued and valuable within coloniality. At the same time, the people who are more skilled in these other ways of knowing are often marginalized, looked down upon, cut away from resources, not valued, and experience much more harm in a colonial world. These are the people who work with, for example, plants, medicines, herbs; women and indigenous peoples who work with their bodies. So reclaiming other ways of knowing or moving towards our whole fullness is meeting that place of coloniality and saying, there’s more. There’s more than just the mind, the intellect, than what is privileged.
Within social movements, there can be another kind of privileging that is about only the material that is valuable, that is, the thing that will put food on one’s table. When we do that, we’re cutting off the more subtle experiences of the body and the spirit and the knowing of the heart. This leads to a kind of starving – starving ourselves, our relationships and the world of all of the other more diverse possibilities that exist, like the idea and the invitation of the pluriverse, that is, a world in which many worlds fit to recognize ourselves and hold our fullness. To quote Eisenstein, I think it is the more beautiful worlds that our hearts know are possible.
I also love to read this short excerpt from Audre Lorde. She says: “When we live outside ourselves on what is expected of us, rather than from our internal knowledge and needs, our lives are limited by external and alien forms and we conform to the needs of a structure. But when we begin to live from within outward, we begin to recognize our deepest feelings, we begin to give up being satisfied with suffering and self-negation and with the numbness that so often seems like their only alternative.” The colonial world will give us substitutes, right? It will give us false substitutes for that actual deep satisfaction that comes from moving towards and living from our whole wholeness.
Hajar: Thank you. What you shared brought up this question for me, which is that the very ways that we define the body and the boundaries of the physical body are also imbued with modernity. Where do these boundaries even lie in your perspective?
Wangũi: I use a frame of five bodies- the physical body, the mental body, the emotional body, the heart, and the energetic body. So while my physical body ends here, my domain of being – the space within which I have agency, power, and the ability to sense – stretches out to my energetic body. I think with these five bodies and invite people to sense into what each of these bodies need.
We could take a moment right now to pause and attune to that. What are you noticing in your physical body right now? Notice how your muscles are in the moment; notice places where you are constricted and places where you’re more relaxed and then attune to your emotional body. What’s present there? This is the realm of feelings and emotions, sometimes also of numbness because we have turned down the volume on our feelings. Perhaps we do not have the capacity for it, or perhaps we have just been trained to not pay attention to our emotions. And then noticing our mental body and in this place, noticing more the quality of that mental space, what is alive there? Is it feeling full? Empty? Is it feeling clear? Foggy? Is it feeling like there’s a lot of speed and rushing thoughts? Maybe there’s clarity of thoughts, curiosity, and imagination. Then, attuning to the energetic body and sensing. How do I feel about my own quality of how I meet the world, my openness to other people, my openness to the space around me. The energetic body is also where your boundaries lie. And so that place of meeting you, you as a body, you as a being, meeting other beings and then noticing your spirit body. This one might be the most subtle of them all to attune to. We can do this by just sensing where we feel the deepest part of ourselves. This one is a more ancient, more continuous presence or part of ourselves.
Hajar: That’s beautiful. Thank you, Wangũi. I love these five aspects of the body. What it’s sort of leading me to feel is the very notion of the individual that stems from modernity is based on our physical bodies and the inability to recognize all of these more subtle bodies that also make us up. When I stumbled upon the notion that we’re holobionts – that is, communities of living beings – I found that inspiring. Even our physical body is an inner ecology made of different living beings who live in community and who know how to live in community. We are pretty much a vessel for all these living beings within us. It also made me think about the sort of symbiosis that exists within our bodies and how we can learn from that and our ways of showing up and relating to each other and building community.
Wangũi: Yeah, I love that so much. I think that invitation is to approach postures of compassion and curiosity with all the inner beings that combine to make us up. That we are not just human – whatever that might mean – is also a posture that we can bring outside.
The other piece that has been my own process of weaning myself from coloniality and the attachments that it brings, has been relinquishing the position of “I know” or “I need to know all the time”. While growing up and moving through colonial schooling, to not know meant a kind of punishment, sometimes even corporeal. It meant fear and harm. Whereas, when we move towards decoloniality and reindigenization, you are humbled or you’re invited to reclaim humility. Humility and honesty. I think those are two key postures. That I don’t know and I don’t have to know. When I adopt that posture of compassionate curiosity and humility, that posture of I’m going to ask a question and I’m going to say that I don’t know, at that point, I can relate with all these inner selves. But if I come in with a dominant energy of I’m-the-one-who-knows it won’t be relational anymore.
Hajar: Very beautiful. You mentioned one of my favorite words, which is reindigenization. Can you tell me more about what that means to you?
Wangũi: My work is around regeneration, and I think of it as a process of reclaiming that moves us through decolonization, reindigenization and then regeneration. Expanding on the definition given to us by Eve Tuck and Wayne Yang, decolonization is the reclaiming of territory. In their work, they talk about the rematriation of land. I want to expand the notion of land and territory because we rematriate the territory of the body too. We rematriate physical land but we also rematriate the territory of our minds by reclaiming other kinds of imaginations and other kinds of knowing.
Reindigenization is to do this work of asking, what is this that I was not taught? What is this that was hidden in the silences? I like to think about or talk about sounding out the silences. What is this other territory that was kept hidden from me, that was perhaps forgotten or only shared in whispers, kept in the shadows? It is going after those territories of knowing and relating with wholeness and with life at the centre. This might look like engaging with indigenous freedom foods, stories, herbs and medicines, and bringing yourself back into cycles that are more earth-based, like the cycles of the sun and moon, and learning to pay attention to your whole body. It is bringing myself to meet the whole community of beings, not only humans, but also the spirit beings and invisible beings, and engaging with them as a whole community with life at the center.
In my perspective, all indigenous communities have had certain values that they were moving towards that were often articulated at the moment. We are reclaiming many of these words slowly. Some of them we are much more familiar with, like Sumak kawsay (good living) from Ecuadorian territories. At the core of all of these values was an orientation towards life, towards maintaining life, towards tending life, and towards healing as well. For me, reindigenization is reorienting towards those values so that we can reclaim our own capacities to regenerate.
Hajar: We spoke earlier about this notion of inner ecologies and how the self is many. What you just mentioned about reindigenization, kind of in a poetic way seemed like that process involves also coming back to the larger body of the earth of which we are from. So not only is the self composed of these many selves – the emotional, the spiritual, and so on – but it also embedded in the body of the earth. And that’s the process of remembrance that comes with reindigenization.
Wangũi: Yeah, absolutely. I also want to name that it can sound beautiful and nice. But it’s not only about the beautiful and the nice. It’s about the whole. It’s about being with all of it. So, returning to the territory of the earth will also mean contending with what took us away. What is it that led us believe that we were separate and had us moving through the world as individuals and as communities, as systems, as societies, as though we were separate? And that will bring grief. Grief-tending is needed to contend with that loss.
Contending with grief and loss is a critical part of the process of regeneration, decolonization, and reindigenization. Reclaiming our skills of how to be with grief, how to be with not just the happy and the cute and the nice and the joy, but also how to be with the sorrow and the pain in ways that do not keep transferring that pain to other beings, often the ones who are less able to defend themselves from our violence. When we do not attend to our own pain on the inside, then we take it out on other people and beings.
Hajar: What practices have you gathered as little jewels on your journey to reclaim whole body sovereignty and decolonize the body?
Wangũi: Grief-tending is such a critical practice. Somatic practices, too. I think that the two go together. I wouldn’t have been able to step into grief-tending as a practice without having somatic tools because so many of us have been so cut off from grief and grief-work that it feels like there’s a whole mountain of stuff to grieve. We’ve also been cut off from feeling the less comfortable feelings like sadness, disappointment, discouragement, disgust, fear, anger, rage which are all components of grief. Building up internal capacity to feel our feelings has been critical.
Building internal capacity means relating with all of those five bodies and attuning to what is present there. It means relearning the nervous system and understanding the ways in which the body has experienced trauma not only in this lifetime but how it also carries generational trauma and memories of oppression from previous lifetimes. The body learns to constrict and push away certain experiences because they remind the body of times when we have experienced pain, oppression, and trauma. Rebuilding those capacities means reminding the body that in the moment it is safe to drop the guard.
So grief work is intense. It can feel uncomfortable. But to distinguish between what is uncomfortable or what is discomfort and what is unsafe, to have that separation, is important. There are other practices too. For instance, food is a being, a practice, and a relationship. I can clearly remember the moments when food as a being has been like my guide, my teacher, but also food (nutrition) is critical to building capacity in the body, to be able to move into discomfort, to move into the things that we need to move into.
What I would say, pausing from moving into details about various practices, is it is important to return to a place of knowing that we are not doing this work alone. This is important to say we’re not doing the decolonization, the reindigenization, and regeneration alone. Just like you said, we’re returning to this community of the earth which means relating with other beings and remembering that again, from that posture of humility, that my agency as a human to do things in the world and to bring about the changes that I want to see in the world – it’s not all on me.
At some point last year, I started to say that we came to earth on joint contracts, but we’ve been trying to cut off our partners and do everything alone. We have so much help available to us if only we are humble enough to turn towards that help and say, how do we do it together? Who are the beings who are showing up to also do this because they are also interested in these changes? They are also committed to doing this work and imagining a more beautiful world. It’s a disservice to ourselves, it’s a disservice to our visions to try and do the things we’re doing all by ourselves. This is also a critical part of reclaiming not just this body’s wholeness, but the communal body’s wholeness and allowing the whole community to practice their agency.
Hajar: Thank you so much, Wangũi, for this nourishing, healing discussion. Someone mentioned in the chat that they sensed as though their entire being was involved in this exchange. I definitely resonate with that. So thank you from the bottom of our hearts.
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Note: This was an excerpt from Hajar and Wangũi’s conversation. If you want to watch the full conversation, including Q&A with participants, the full recording is available on the GTA website.
If you enjoyed this webinar, please do join the next one organised by the GTA Learning Thematic Group titled ‘Intergenerational Wisdom: weaving sense making and learnings in complex times’ happening on 27th March 2025 at 1pm GMT. Register here.
Wangũi wa Kamonji is a researcher, dancer, storyteller and facilitator. Deeply engaged in reclaiming and reimagining indigenous African ways of being, knowing and doing, Wangũi convenes spaces to enable healing of colonial violence and trauma and the creation of presents and futures that that work towards life for Earth, for society and ancestors.
Hajar Tazi is an ecosystem weaver, storyteller, and systems-transformation catalyst at the service of planetary flourishing. She serves as Director of Ecosystem Weaving & Strategic Initiatives at Synergia Institute and as a Board member at Shareable, Gaia Education and the Post Growth Institute.
The Global Tapestry of Alternatives (GTA) is an initiative seeking to create solidarity networks and strategic alliances amongst all these alternatives on local, regional and global levels. It is about creating spaces of collaboration and exchange, in order to learn about and from each other, critically but constructively challenge each other, offer active solidarity to each other whenever needed, interweave the initiatives in common actions, and give them visibility to inspire other people to create their own initiatives.
This conversation was transcribed and edited by Pooja Kishinani, curator and editor of Radical Ecological Democracy.