“The Wobblies used to say don’t mourn, organize, but you can do both at once and you don’t have to organize right away in this moment of furious mourning. You can be heartbroken or furious or both at once; you can scream in your car or on a cliff; you can also get up tomorrow and water the flowerpots and call someone who’s upset and check your equipment for going onward.” Rebecca Solnit wrote these words the night of the November 2024 election and many of us passed them around the next morning. “Don’t mourn, organize!” captures in a nutshell the 20th-century politics of emotion of the Old and New Left.
Solnit’s alternative, and the similar versions that have opened dozens of movement mass meeting Zooms and prefaced even more emails in the weeks since the election—words that encourage us to feel our feelings, to grieve and rage but avoid despair, and then to take action for “going onward” in formation—signal a significant 21st-century departure. It’s a shift that reflects transformative organizing, a powerful and growing force in the US Left in the last generation. The term has come to describe an approach that understands, in the words of Denise Perry of BOLD, that “in order for our work to be transformative, it must do more than just speak to people’s material needs. The central proposition of transformative organizing is that personal, community, and structural transformations are inextricably linked—that it is impossible to achieve one without the other.”
Transformative organizing is driven by a theory of change that rejects a linear, sequential approach to radical social change—first redo the structural conditions, then everything else will follow—and replaces it with an understanding that personal and systemic transformation happen in dialectical relation to each other. It’s a both/and response to the age-old Marxist chicken-or-egg conundrum: only broad structural change will bring the world we want, but how do we make something new from the conditions of the old? How, from inside the current conditions, do we become the people and build the pathways to get us outside of them?
Transformative organizing is composed of power-building structural change work plus transformative practice, a collection of beliefs, methodologies, and activities for helping individuals and groups bridge who and where we are and who we want to be to get where we want to go. Transformative practice includes a broad range of approaches to personal and interpersonal change that includes cultural, psychological, spiritual, and/or somatic methodologies. It can refer to deep healing from trauma, organizational culture building, ritual, and embodied therapeutic work. While the specific practices themselves are not necessarily unique to the Left, what makes transformative practice different from mainstream versions is a political theory of personal and interpersonal change that links them to comprehensive social transformation. In this way, writes Prentis Hemphill of The Embodiment Institute, we “become people who can live with more feeling, more balance, and more power…to give us what we need to show up.” It is an approach, says Right to the City’s Mia Herndon, devoted to “align[ing] how [we] show up in the world with [our] politics.” At its most basic, transformative practice’s theory of change is that individuals with more healing and more skills make for a more livable and effective movement ecosystem. At its most sophisticated, transformative practice’s theory of change is that strategic embodied interventions actually transform the tactics of movement building. Transformative practice is about healing in healing’s broadest sense and it is about winning.
For the last four years, I have been talking to movement leaders, strategists, organizers, practitioners, healers, and activists about these holistic developments of the last few decades. The field is still in a time of emergence and experimentation, but, a generation in, there are also some shared lessons rising to the surface. As movements move to get in formation against the second Trump administration, now is the time to study these lessons so we can marshal all of our resources for organizing under a more overtly authoritarian political regime.
The Right always divides justice movements where we are weakest, and has been successfully exploiting emotion to divide, conquer, recruit, and enflame. Transformative practice can help the Left strengthen our own personal and collective emotional infrastructure, build capacity and movement sustainability, and try to avoid some of the same old traps. It can complement the urgent tasks movement organizations are undertaking right now: honing strategy, broadening coalition, training people up in the specific skills needed for navigating authoritarianism and keeping each other safe, and reaching beyond what we currently know.
In the rest of this essay I bring together some of the insights, recommendations, and tensions that are starting to converge for movement leaders engaged in transformative organizing. The point of distilling lessons is to be able to make more informed decisions about what transformative practice is and isn’t, and how to conceive of it. This is not a call for centralization, but for supporting the strategic alignment we are going to need to build the bigger, stronger, multi-racial, cross-class united front that anti-authoritarian scholars say is our best hope.
Roots and promise of transformative practice
Twenty-first century transformative practice has roots in the forever care and recovery work that communities have always performed to keep themselves and their movements alive, especially the emotional, reproductive, cultural, and spiritual leadership of women of color. These traditions used to be more organically related to the political activity that was anchored in neighborhoods, churches, bars, and the places where people lived and regularly gathered, as they were during the civil rights and gay liberation movements, for example. In the wake of the non-profitization of movement activity that has evacuated many movement organizations of practices indigenous to their communities, contemporary transformative practitioners have sought to reinfuse movement spaces with holistic ways of being (together).
Feminist Gen X innovators midwifed new vocabularies and repertories for addressing personal and collective wellbeing, sustainability, leadership, efficacy, healing, spiritual communion, and new ways of building connection and belonging. The most influential include Cara Page, a cultural memory worker and abolitionist who together with the Kindred Southern Healing Collective coined the phrase “healing justice” in 2007, and Staci Haines who experimented with politicizing somatics through generationFIVE in the early 2000s and then began partnering with movement leaders to cultivate an embodied methodology for movement that became the organization generative somatics. Both of these lineages have blossomed, proliferated, and altered the culture of intersectional movements. There are others (eg Forward Stance), as well as many offshoots and overlaps; for the purposes of this essay I’ll use the two to generalize kinds of contributions, but the characterizations are not meant to be definitive or (mutually) exclusive.
Healing justice, writes Aurora Levins Morales, “began as an investigation into how we can hold the traumas of deep and painful injustices and heal from them as we fight to end them.” It emphasizes holistic healing rooted “in the sensual, cellular, local, relational, mycelial, historical, ancestral, evolutionary.” Politicized somatics also includes healing methodologies, though its focus is “to produce the following five embodied skills …that will concretely magnify the power of our participants and movement partners: Commitment, Connection, Coordination, Collective Action, Conflict as Generative.” There is a lot of anecdotal evidence about the power of transformative practice for individuals and groups, as well as some formal evaluation; the field could use much more. My focus here is the way in which these modalities contribute to movement’s strategic elements.
At its most basic, successful transformative practice increases, in Working Families Party’s Maurice Mitchell’s terms, “resilience” and “emotional maturity” in the movement ecosystem. Building embodied emotional competency—e.g. shared understandings of how the nervous system works under pressure—has helped activists better manage conflict and the intense challenges of organizing. This can look like better self-regulation and group process, for example learning about different limbic coping patterns. (My nervous system goes into fight and yours go to flight—when shit goes down we do really different things or You tend toward alarm and I tend toward denial and before we knew that we used to find each other really personally and politically alienating, but it turns out we are very aligned, just have different reaction tendencies.) Politicized healing, says Briana Herman-Brand, is “the process of liberating our choices from our survival strategies.”
At its most sophisticated, transformative practice can also inform tactical repertoires and capacities. In this powerful story from an interview, Che Johnson-Long of VisionChangeWin describes how she incorporates somatics in her security and direct action trainings to broaden range and nimbleness:
There was a time when I was doing security support work, and training in Durham. And it was directly related to when the Confederate monuments started getting toppled by organizers and activists. There was a huge…Right-wing backlash. And so when I went out there to support folks around direct action security, organizational security, I would start these trainings by sort of explaining trauma. Some of the science of trauma. Talking about fight, flight, freeze, appease. And really beginning there to say, just as I was told many years ago in my first somatics course, that when we’re on the streets, we are practicing what we know. And what we know is often these trauma responses…. And so doing safety, or creating a safety squad, or a tactical team, all of that is about reshaping how we do our trauma responses. That’s an orientation that was never taught to me before learning somatics. That was not how I came into this work at all. But I found it really useful, especially in cities where they had just had a major right-wing attack. People…just couldn’t feel their feet or their legs or the ground or anything. And I find that…the shallowness of breath, the way that you just lose oxygen to your lower body, I mean, it literally makes it harder to think clearly. It literally takes away our ability to use our brains effectively. And so having people settle—the way that I was settled—around these trauma strategies [is] really smart. And also, we can’t be one trick ponies in the streets, especially if you have always used your fight and that has saved your life many times. But then you are the police negotiator and you get on the streets. That fight likely can’t be your only tool as a police negotiator. You may need a strong “appease”…..There’s other tools that we want to draw from for the sake of our survival….What matters is what’s embodied…You have to be able to feel enough of yourself to make choices about how your body moves.
In this application, transformative practice works hand in glove with movement strategy, not only bolstering individuals but also providing the embodied skills to build movement differently.
Lessons from the ecosystem
In this section I identify four lessons from the first generation of transformative practice in the context of transformative organizing. I imagine an audience made up of both materialist strategists who are (rightfully) nervous about the proliferation of feelings talk, and also healers and practitioners who are (rightfully) concerned about the lack of emotional and social intelligence in the movement ecosystem. The lessons are in the service of finding the sweet spot in which becoming more strategic and more whole converge instead of compete.
Lesson One: Transformative Practice Does Not Solve (for) Structural Issues.
Much of what is hard about movement involvement is hard for structural reasons: the gathering of people disproportionately impacted by oppressive systems in non-profitized movement organization under neoliberalism with a shrinking safety net, in a time of thinning solidarity and political communication increasingly filtered through social media, against a backdrop of climate catastrophe and rising authoritarianism. It is important to name these material origins of what is often described in exclusively cultural or psychological language—ideological limitations, relational breakdowns, inability to deal with conflict—so as to identify how contemporary arrangements encourage the cultural fallout we experience today.
Transformative practice is frequently asked to solve larger structural problems that exceed its mission and capacity. For, writes Hemphill, “Healing and self-care on their own are not solutions to what we face.” Movement can’t “self-help [its] way out of capitalism [and] white supremacy,” says Mitchell. It is important to be clear about what transformative practice is and is not designed to do so as not to get distracted or to set it up for failure. It can be a balm, it can be compensatory, it can improve, it can provide what Haines calls “transformative booster power,” but it cannot replace or solve the current condition we are trying to change.
Lesson Two: A Healthy Ecosystem Has Biodiversity.
A healthy movement ecosystem needs many elements, among them: strategy, organizing, political education, organizations and organizational development, leadership development, and healing. In the daily life of movement activity, these critical components often seem to be at odds with each other. In the last generation, as the capture of movement work by non-profits has become nearly total, strategy and organizing have frequently been replaced by organizational development and coaching. Similarly, because people are hurting, hungry for intimacy, connection, and belonging, and because mainstream wellness is a massive, familiar, and overlapping industry, the world of cultural and emotional work can also feel more accessible, meaningful, and effective than organizing.
Organizing, organization, and healing have different aims, different logics, and different rhythms. In many ways they are in tension with each other, and often in downright contradiction. Organizing has urgent swells, draws heavily on tactical antagonism, can be hard on the body and psyche, and is frequently fraught with issues around governance among people who are gathered voluntarily and committed to equity. Organizations have a mission, deliverable obligations, and employment hierarchies. And deep healing can include periods of decompensation or incapacitation and transference. Noble attempts to do two or even three of these at the same time have been sometimes powerful, frequently challenging, and at times harmful. The different lanes end up competing with each other for people, resources, and time. Exacerbating these tensions, as philanthropy discovers transformative practice, it is already funding it as the less threatening face of activism.
“A healthy ecosystem has biodiversity” means we need to think about these contradictions at the level of the ecosystem, be attentive to cultivating all the elements it needs, and get clear about what each element can and cannot do. This is not about re-siloing holistic arts and organizing, but about thinking more carefully and collectively about their integration.
Lesson Three: Transformative Practice is about Growing Capacity for Movement Building.
Transformative practice is about supporting individuals and collectives to be the most holistically effective movement participants possible without sacrificing either means or ends (while resisting purity standards!). Put differently, modalities like ritual or embodiment contribute to movement building when they contribute to movement building. They have many other worthy ends, but it is when they are linked in a theory of change to movement goals that they become transformative practice.
Shakiya Canty and Christi Clark describe how their organization, “[i]nspired and informed by practices in LeftRoots,” defines resilience as “‘our ability to navigate hard internal and external conditions in ways that allow us to meet our political and organizing commitments.’ Resilience, in this sense, is a political act of resistance. It is not endurance that teaches us to perform at the cost of our health and perpetuate hegemonic norms to prove our worth.” Neither does this political understanding of resilience mean prioritizing comfort or feeling good at the expense of “‘the self-determined, liberated futures that we deserve.’” Transformative practice is about helping individuals and collectives deepen and broaden their ability to do effective, values-aligned movement work in ways that do not sacrifice them in the process. This alignment is deeply strategic activity, necessary because, as Hemphill says, “our visions don’t yet match our skill….And that’s been the question that I’ve been in, like how can our [skill actually match our vision]?”
Aligning vision and skills is hard work, and transformative practice is still emergent and experimental. There is a vast array of approaches, modalities, practices, and philosophies that identify as movement or movement-adjacent transformational work. This means there is not (yet) agreement on terms, standards, protocols, objectives, or theories of change. The field is filled with opportunities that could be called “healing justice lite,” which cloak themselves in vaguely political language but may not have a theory of change connecting them to larger systemic change.
Healing justice lite can be pleasing, restorative, and culture-building. It may also be superficial, a distraction from meaningful change work, or even harmful. Practitioners need depth, rigor, and clarity about what they are offering. People who hire practitioners should also have discernment about what specifically they are looking for: Conflict resolution? Conflict skills? Trauma-informed leadership development? Trauma-informed healing? Organizational culture work? Restoration? Movement leaders distinguish transformative practice from mainstream commodified self-care by the way it exists at the nexus of personal growth, community wellbeing, and movement capacity building. Many approaches to self-care or healing can take people out of commission for social change work, pitting the personal and the political against each other in a zero-sum framework. These are tensions with no easy answers, for both healing and movement are important; clarity about the tension is a good place to start.
Movements Heal, But They May Not Heal Me Personally Right Now
“The material conditions need to change,” says Malkia Devich-Cyril, founder of the Radical Loss Project, “so that [all of us can truly feel] better.” That’s what movements are for. “But in the meantime,” they continued, “my [Panther] mom always said ‘strategy for then and strategy for now.’” Transformative practice is strategy for now if and because it will help us get to then. Transformative practice includes healing, but that does not mean that every—or even most—movement-affiliated space(s) should undertake work at the most intense end of the transformational spectrum.
In his important 2023 article, Mitchell warned against what he called “unanchored care,” which was “[a]ssuming one’s mental, physical, and spiritual health is the responsibility of the organization or collective space.” Understandably, activists who find in movements more humane values and principles than they’ve known in other places expect them to meet their emotional needs or to be what strategist Ejeris Dixon calls their most intimate “political home.” While movements are aspirational configurations, seeking to bridge the gap between our current conditions and the world we’d rather live in, they are not yet enlightened spaces, nor do they have unlimited resources. They are vehicles to get us where we need to go. There is a difference between cultivating a caring culture and being able to offer the deep healing work that so many of us need. We must be clearer about what movements can and cannot provide to manage expectations and prevent mission creep.
Toward this end, many leaders have called for better understanding of the distinction between trauma healing and other kinds of transformative work such as leadership development, organizational relational work, or culturally relevant ritual. Many have particular concerns about doing deep healing or spiritual work in movement organizations that are places of employment because they believe it violates consent practices and supervisor/employee boundaries. Several senior healers I spoke to who had initially encouraged a progression from organizational cultural work to organizational healing have also concluded that there should instead be stronger boundaries between them, with different settings for different kinds of activity. They support doing rich emotional skills-building in organizations that acknowledges and may come up alongside trauma, but does not venture in. Dixon put it this way:
I think that while healing and embodied practices can be helpful, we should be careful how and if they are inside organizations—as opposed to within our movements. I especially don’t think they should be enforced inside of nonprofits. I think that’s another error. I think there’s just some coercive, spiritual-ish happening. Everyone needs their own path toward healing—and you especially don’t want your supervisor having opinions on how you are or aren’t healing. I think there’s folks like me, burnt out, broken-bodied organizers, who… are okay with some boundaries—okay with some boundaries around what organizations should and should not provide.
In the service of maintaining movement lane distinctions and avoiding unanchored care, while still tending to our communities and supporting those most impacted by oppressive systems, the Left needs a much bigger, deeper, wider net of politicized healers across a broad range of modalities who are available for healing work with a strong understanding of oppression, power, and culture. “If we’re organizing around state violence and we believe those most impacted need to be leading, there’s no way to really do that unless you address trauma, it’s just not possible,” Mark-Anthony Clayton-Johnson of Dignity and Power Now explains. Activists and organizers who need deep healing work should be lovingly offered resources, and we need “long-term infrastructure for collective care” to ensure that everyone can get them. We could also use a return of politicized healing support groups that are issue-specific, both with and without trained healer facilitators. Perhaps organizations might provide some time and funds for employees to get the support they need, much in the way they provide skills training and other benefits. Transformative practice is never a substitute for health insurance, childcare, vacation time, etc.
Transformative practice can nurture strategic skills that have direct implications for power building, such as alignment, contradiction, and conflict.
Alignment
In the eight years that have passed since the first election of Donald Trump, movement leaders have doubled down on strategy, specifically on building a united front with an inside/outside game that can resist movement factionalism. Within hours of the November 2024 election, the Working Families Party and its partners invited some 200 groups to co-sponsor the next in its series of mass calls, seeking to gather the broad anti-MAGA coalition, and preempt despair and splintering. Transformative practice offers embodied skills to support alignment from the individual to the group to the ecosystem.
Alignment, says Hemphill, is getting “most of yourself to do the same thing at the same time. If we can’t get most of ourselves to do the same thing at the same time, how are you going to….do it with others? Embodiment is about building power and doing it with others,” especially under pressure. Xochitl Bervera of Near Futures Projects understands the cultivation of embodied alignment to be a kind of “counterculture-building,” where “increasing alignments of values…operationalizing values into our work” is how new cultures are made. Transformative practice has an instrumental role to play in deep canvassing, tent-widening, and other kinds of bridging that anti-authoritarian movement building requires.
Contradiction
Transformative practice seeks to build capacity to relate to complexity and contradiction beyond conventional binary approaches. The ability to hold and navigate contradiction is politically necessary for Monifa Bandele of Malcolm X Grassroots Movement and the Movement for Black Lives, because “[t]here’s a world that we want to achieve, but it’s not here now. We have to use the tools that are here in order to survive, in order to dismantle. So there’s this constant tension.” “Contradictions,” explains Haines, “are the felt pressures of more than one thing being/feeling true. This can produce an impulse to polarize, position and separate…..Somatically we can learn to expand our ability to be with complexity.” Alicia Garza, co-founder of Black Lives Matter, describes the value of turning toward contradiction instead of jumping to resolve, repress, or polarize it. Often, she says, “there’s a lot of information in [what we experience to be contradiction] about what we long for, and what we might move together around.” Turning away from dualistic approaches to difference means sometimes the individual or the group “can actually hold both [sides without] a need to resolve” or to choose between what feels like mutually exclusive positions. “There’s possibility,” she says. “Then it’s like ok, how [do we proceed with all of the information]?” Dixon explains the value of relating more expansively to difference at the level of the ecosystem: “I don’t know what either/or thinking serves, except for another Leftist disagreement that just keeps us from winning.”
Conflict
Exploring more creative ways of approaching apparent contradictions is not the same as avoiding conflict or hard choices. But it is related to broadening capacity for conflict. There is a lot of talk in and around movements about how much conflict there is these days, implying both that there is too much and more than in the past. But movements are webs spun across difference and difficult terrain; a quick scan of movement histories reveals they are almost always forged with and through conflict. ACT UP scholar Deborah B. Gould observes “Conflicts do not destroy movements…conflict and debate are a primary means by which movements analyze the political terrain and figure out what to do.” Today’s trouble with conflict may be not that we have too much, but that we don’t have enough of what generative somatics called “generative conflict.”
Other scholars note the decreasing capacity for navigating conflict under neoliberalism in an environment overdetermined by social media algorithms that select for conflict. Yet functional conflict is essential for building both solidarity and strategic rigor. As movement consultant Yotam Marom says, “Conflict avoidance has not only been hurtful to the relationships on my team; it has negatively impacted our ability to form good strategy. Avoiding conflict has meant saying yes to everything instead of prioritizing and focusing, so that we didn’t have to fight or argue…. It has meant shying away from making hard decisions.” Increasing movement capacity for navigating conflict is not simply to improve vibes, but to deepen ideological and strategic exploration and earned cohesion.
Lesson Four: Coordination Across the Ecosystem.
The corollary to A Healthy Ecosystem Has Biodiversity, is Coordination Across the Ecosystem. Many strategists and organizers lament that many transformational practice leaders do not have the level of political education they need to align transformative practices with movement work without functioning at cross purposes. Similarly, many practitioners wish movement strategists and organizers had more knowledge of the logic of the body and psyche in order to more skillfully and expansively design and enact their strategic plans and tactics without losing people and efficacy in the process. Greater fluency across movement roles, analyses, and methodologies has the potential to bring greater coordination. As Che Johnson-Long’s example above of applying politicized somatics to direct action training suggests, some of the most exciting possibilities ushered in by transformative practice happen when people who are skilled in both transformative practice and organizing bring embodied knowledge of the two together in designing tactics or training organizers. Better communication across the ecosystem bolsters depth and efficacy.
Conclusion
One bit of good news in this bleak moment is that there is convergence happening between what visionary movement leaders have been saying for years about building a bigger Left movement tent, what scholars of authoritarianism tell us is essential for navigating fascism, and the specific offerings of transformative practice toward these ends. These offerings include providing boundaried, politicized spaces for deep healing; replacing purity politics and a reductive identity politics with the skills and values of aligning across difference plus better accountability practices; deepening intellectual and embodied capacity for holding contradiction; and rebuilding conflict skills. Together these go a long way toward cultivating the genuine practice of solidarity as “the recognition of our inherent interconnectedness, an attempt to build bonds of commonality across our differences….rooted in the acknowledgement that our lives are intertwined.” Transformative practice is not a substitute for solidarity; together with political education and good strategy, it may help to make it possible.
Author’s Acknowledgements: Support for this research was provided by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation. The views expressed here do not necessarily reflect the views of the Foundation. I am also grateful to Malkia Devich-Cyril, Staci Haines, Briana Herman-Brand, and Paul Tarini for feedback, Jay Shepherd for research support, and all the organizers who shared their brilliance with me: Monifa Bandele, Xochitl Bervera, Mark-Anthony Clayton-Johnson, Ejeris Dixon, Alicia Garza, Prentis Hemphill, Mia Herndon, Che Johnson-Long, and Maurice Mitchell.