Ep. 044: Dr. Deborah Heifetz and Dr. Martha Eddy

Deborah Heifetz moved to Lake Orta in northern Italy one year ago with her collaboration partner and husband, Frieder Krups, to apply their respective lifetimes of knowledge, experience and activist engagement. Together with local Italian change-makers, they are supporting their newly adopted geo-region to become a prototype for human scale, community-based sustainable development. 

Transcript

Hello, podcast friends. Wow, what strange, nerve-racking and global times we are living in, certainly underscores how interdependent we all are this global pandemic. One of the things that I've repeated so often in my time teaching, collaborative negotiation skills and conflict resolution skills is that crisis has both danger and opportunity in it. Our global pandemic can certainly exaggerate both the good and the bad. I heard somebody quote @Milton Friedman, the very conservative economist, who said something like “ only a crisis actual or perceived produces real change. When that crisis occurs, the actions that are taken depend on the ideas that are lying around”. So certainly for autocrats and for, as Riane Eisler would call them, the people with the domination worldview, this will be a chance to grab even more power. And those of us with more of a partnership worldview, who are interested in a deeper, more enlightened global democracy as a pathway to a world beyond armed conflict, will be thinking about how to use this crisis moment to focus on and facilitate the emergence of that new world. I like the quote in this podcast, it's one of our signature quotes, “The best way to predict the future is to create it.”

So I've been I've been connecting with so many of my friends I think a lot of us who have access to the internet, thank God for that, and asking them what in their view is the lemonade coming from the lemons. And I think so many people that those that are not on the front lines or are not healthcare workers and are not specifically impacted, personally impacted by Covid 19 are talking about how much they appreciate the slowing down the cleaner air, the ability to connect with friends and family, even if it's electronic. For me, it's all of those things. And also I've had an opportunity to work on this book that I'm writing, I finally have a draft, the working title is Women Negotiation and Power: Dismantling Patriarchy, One Negotiation at a Time, and I'm also creating online an online workshop series. So stay tuned. My goal ultimately is to create a real course but that probably is a year away.

But now to our current episode. We believe that at the peace building podcast that the most impactful peace building initiative we could undertake is to empower women. And we've talked about it a lot on this podcast. We've interviewed a lot of guests about this. We think it's connected to, oh boy, the the obscene amount that spent on militarization, climate change, identity group polarization. racism and discrimination and on and on and on, it’s a core and very profound issue, which we will continue to highlight in our interviews on the podcast.

Our podcast today is focusing on negotiation skills for women and the body. This topic evokes a lot in me, everything really feels like it starts in the body. Coming back to the body is so critical for women to feel powerful in negotiation, and for all people to reclaim what my last guest Thomas Hubl called the hurt feminine principle. I'm so excited about my two guests in this episode, Deborah Heifetz and Martha Eddy, are both dancers and embodiment conflict resolution experts. Deborah is a mediator, a YPO, forum facilitator and movement analyst. She has a PhD in social anthropology and MA in dance and a BA in genetics from MIT (Correction: Deborah Heifetz graduated from Berkeley, not MIT and received her genetics degree from Berkeley). She served as a special advisor to the crisis management team of the Israeli police, developed the concept non-mediated peacekeeping from her ethnographic study of gender and Israeli Palestinian security cooperation during the Oslo years of 1994 to 2000, and acted in Track II Israeli -Palestinian negotiations. She's Laban movement analyst and integrates the therapeutic systems of somatic experiencing a tool to heal personal and collective trauma. She currently lives in northern Italy and together with her husband and local Italian changemakers, they are supporting their newly adopted geo- region to become a prototype for human scale, community-based sustainable development.

Martha Eddy also has her PhD and is an author, researcher and worldwide lecturer at the Geraldine Ferraro School of Social Justice and Movement at Marymount Manhattan college where she coordinates the body science and motion program in affiliation with the biomedical and the dance scholars. Her book, Mindful Movement, The Evolution of the Somatic Arts and Conscious Action addresses the history of the somatic education, the body as experienced from within, in other words, plus newer trajectories of social somatics, eco-somatics and embodied peace education as well as violence prevention. She has also held positions in kinesiology, dance and body mind Cultural Studies at Columbia University NYU, Princeton, San Francisco State University and SUNY over the last 35 years. Her research is on the role of embodied conflict resolution and peace education in schools with youth and now extends to working with any person or group wanting to understand the role of the body in negotiation.

So a few highlights from this episode.  I woke up at three in the morning before I had this interview with with Deborah and Martha and wrote down these thoughts about negotiation and the body as it's shown up in me.  First that it feels like everything -- that the feminine is the body that that my body didn't belong to me for a lot of my life, and my sexuality also didn't belong to me. The phrases “I want” and “I need” which are such important phrases in negotiation and conflict resolution, I wasn't supposed to have wants and I'm not sure about needs either. I was supposed to serve, and I was supposed to accommodate. It was it was hard for me to have a clear connection to my “yes” and my “no”, particularly to my “no”. And I'm aware that if not connected to your “no”, it's really difficult sometimes to walk away from a negotiation which is fundamental to power. I didn't feel safe claiming value, a popular negotiation concept, because I was taught so deeply that I was supposed to let a man do that. And I'm not whining or complaining. I'm just observing at the depth with which these ideas live in my body.

As I recounted these to Martha and Deborah Martha shook her head in agreement that she says that what I said feels pretty universal to women, that she's not aware of many, if not any cultures that uplift the strength and value of the female, such that the female body or our experience as females in the body, comes forth as power automatically. It's just like swimming upstream to find our power and reclaim it. Another thing that stands out is Deborah's statement that her first trauma was being born a female. She had three older brothers and a very patriarchal father and mother and says that she was inherently less valuable. I like this. I was the whipped cream she says on the cake, but I didn't want to be the whipped cream. I want it to be the cake. I want it to be where the action was where the real politic was.

Another thing that stands out is Martha talking about the influence of her gender-fluid parents, her father who had sexual relations with men and liked gardening, her mother who liked to shoot out windows with her BB gun, and her very sensitive brother, who was not allowed to be the way he was in the very “bro” and rough climate of Spanish Harlem.

Martha comments on the importance of women reclaiming strength, where there's privilege of access to equipment, that young women who literally can pull their own body weight up, have a different kind of agency, a different kind of ability to self protect. And she talks about, for women in particular, we need to self-assert, without hiding, to step, forward to stand up. These words mean something she says. And she goes on to talk about the depth of what this really means.

And Deborah, commenting and how the body is a central location for social change that it all begins with the body. So, I hope you enjoy this episode and the depth of which these two talk about the body and how it shows up in negotiation for women specifically. I'm also looking forward to my next two episodes after this Kristina Lunz is the Co-founder and Co-director of the Centre for Feminist Foreign Policy, and a repeat guest, Dean Foster of Intercultural Global Solutions. He and I are going to review the main intercultural dimensions through the lens of gender, so stay tuned for that. I think it should be super interesting.  So thanks for joining us. And please enjoy this episode with Deborah Heifetz and Martha Eddy.

Susan: So Deborah, Martha, thank you both for joining us on The PeaceBuilding Podcast. It's really a pleasure. I'm excited to do this episode. And it's a crazy time. So hello to you both. Thanks for joining us. How are you today?

Deborah: Great, great. It's really a joy to be to be here together with two wonderful women.

Susan: And you Martha, you're right in the epicenter. You both are in the epicenter of this crazy situation. Deborah, you're in Italy, northern Italy.

Deborah: I'm in northern Italy. Really, and I'm in the epicenter Europe. Yes, I am indeed.

Susan: And Martha, you're right in the heart of New York City.

Martha: Yes, I’m well aware of Debra's situation. . .  one of my medical friends said, Just wait two weeks, you'll have it too. And he's in Italy in northern Italy. So it's true.

Susan: Yeah. So I don't know about the two of you, but um, well, I did want you to share even though I'm going to be sharing as you know, your BIOS, at the when I introduce you both after the fact. I do want you to say a bit a bit about what you do and how it's related to this. But I wanted to just say that last night, and in the middle of the night, I as happens to me, but I woke up you know, this topic evokes a lot in me, I realize it evokes a lot in me and It probably has a lot to do with why I do the work I do in the world. And I, I like our title, “The Female Body and How We Claim it for Power in Negotiation”, although we still might want to change it, but that seems like a good title. That's when we landed on. So, but I, I wanted to have you both. Just launch in I, you know, I think you know, I'd like to hear from you a little bit about what you both do. What planted the seeds in you to be, if you relate to the term peace builder, I don't know that some people do, some people don't. But a little bit about what you do, and a little bit about what got you to this moment in time where we're having this conversation.

Deborah: Well, at the moment, what I do is, I facilitate, groups, and I facilitate and I coach, I do embodiment coaching, I functioned as a mediator, and I do that in Italy, we've moved to Italy as a place to do human scale sustainable development, and to try to create a model for peaceful and sustainable coexistence and local resilience. Now in a very specific geo region. That's how I got to where I am today, in this location, but the trajectory of getting here from California to Tel Aviv to Cologne to northern Italy, is a story. So

Susan: yeah, and just even what you just said, Now, we could spend the rest of the episode unpacking that like what's empowered, what's #embodiedleadership. Although you said so many, what's a sustainable, I don't know the language that you use about a local sustainable location.

Deborah: human scale and human scale is very much In our topic, because we begin human scale by beginning in the body. Yeah. To what is what is feeling full? What is tangible? What is integrative? How do you see a system? and development is a systemic question. And not sort of incremental or not dissectable parts that aren't interconnected.

Susan: Yeah. So really thinking about things holistically. Exactly. Yeah, I always one of my favorite quotes, you know, is #JohnMuir, the environmentalist, you know, “when you pick up anything in the universe, you find that it's somehow hitched to everything else”, you know, I love that quote. And Martha, just get your voice in here a little bit about about your work.

Martha: So I am very much in the embodiment field too I've been leading a program called #dynamicembodiment for 20 years. And basically how it connects to #peacebuilding was, I would say, a pull, a calling where I was working on my doctorate, actually it goes back further. My mother had just died. And I came back to New York to be with my father. And I said, if I'm going to do the things I really, really want to do in life. They would be threefold. One is get a doctorate. The other What do I want to do if I'm in New York City again, I was living in Massachusetts in western beautiful Western Massachusetts. Get a doctorate, study akido some more and track a person whose work I really respect and that was #LindaLantieri, a good friend of mine. And she was doing work teaching anybody from kindergarten to high school students how to do #conflictresolution. And so I did that I came to New York, I got into a doctoral program, I started the conflict resolution work in the schools with #educatorsforsocialresponsibility. But then, and I did some, like, I know when I yeah, and I know, you know, Linda and the roots of her work. And from there, it really became important to me that when I did my dissertation, which is on the roots of violence prevention, and in particular how to teach skills to middle school and high school kids, and how not to blame them for violence, but to look at violence systemically. I said it has to include an embodiment component that that work, the work in the body had preceded that doctorate another 25 years, so I could not be doing research that didn't involve some kind of understanding. How can we use movement body, how to use body awareness in our violence prevention work.

Susan: So I am think I'm going to launch in to the body part and our topic and just hopefully weave everything in and get the best from both of you that we can in our short time together. But you know, I wrote down in the middle of the night last night some thoughts and here they are, here they are, maybe it'll just evoke stuff in you. And about negotiation and the body, as it's shown up in me, I guess one thought is that it's everything somehow it feels like everything. When I think about first, the feminine is the body. That's one thought. And you don't need to respond to these but I'm just going to tell you the thoughts,  my three o'clock in the morning thoughts, the body, that that my body didn't belong to me for a lot of my life. I was taught that it wasn't really mine. my sexuality wasn't mine, my body really didn't belong to me. “I want” “I need” which are such critical phrases in negotiation and conflict resolution. I wasn't supposed to want actually. And I don't know if I was supposed to need either I was I was supposed to serve I was supposed to accommodate which obviously also connects to negotiation. And I was I was also not it was very hard for me to have a have a clear connection to my “yes” and to my “no”, particularly to my “No”, I mean. And so, you know, if you're not connected to your know it's really difficult sometimes to walk away which you know, if you have power in a negotiation you have to be willing to walk away. Well, I didn't have a strong connection to my Yes. And to my No.

I didn't feel, well this is This is about #claimingvalueinnegotiation. I didn't feel completely safe, really #claimingvalue. Because I was taught so deeply that I was supposed to have a man do that. And I'm not whining or complaining. I'm just saying it's, I see the depth of how this lives in my body and how I've had to do a lot of work to extract it. That it's not really safe to have, I had a maybe I'm seeing a lot so maybe I'm gonna Yeah, maybe I'm not going to keep going because I think I've said a lot and I really want to get your voices in here and but I'm guessing that they're things that I've said that you connect to and as #movementtherapists, dancers, people that are also conflict resolution people, peacebuilders, people that are deeply connected to the body and to #feminism. I guess I'm wondering what all that evokes in you.

Martha: I said yes, with body language to every sentence that you said with a nodding of the head, all rings so true. And I do believe it's pretty universal. There may be some Amazonian cultures that still are hidden away somewhere on this planet,

Susan: but universal to women. You mean to women?

Martha: Yes, thank you for that clarification. But I'm not aware of cultures that really uplift the strength of the female, and the value of the female, such that the female body, or our experience as females in a body, comes forth as power just automatically. It's climbing uphill, it’s swimming upstream to reclaim it. So maybe that's part of our title was “reclaiming” our power, finding it and then really unpacking what got in the way, which means touching into either the myths or the customs and habits in our household, or in our many cultures, whatever those formative cultures were, that established a sense of not feeling safe, a sense of not being good enough, a sense of service, a sense of holding back on gut responses, such that and I can really relate to not even knowing what we feel. So I'm just echoing what you're saying right now. I can tell one kind of concrete story as a #movementexpert, which is my own experience of not being able to say no, was, um, I use the word unpacked, I'll use it again unpacked in a movement class, where we were studying reflexes. So reflexive responses, like if you're touching something that's hot, your hand moves away. But there are other types of reflexes. And one of them is perfectly evocative for this talk, it's called #protectiveextension, which means that when a child starts to fall, their hands go out to catch them. I can't tell you how many children I have worked with over the years that don't have that and that is not a gendered thing. That could be either little boy or little girl. It's a problem though. And their parents are nuts because they have to put helmets on their children. They have to do all sorts of things to protect this child who doesn't have the reflex. So here I was in a class, it was specifically in #bodymindcentering with #BonnieBainbridgeCohen. And she was helping to stimulate our reflexes, and I didn't have them. And it was partially because in #contactimprovisation, which is a form of dance, we're taught to just let them all go. And again, as you said, the body is female. Well, every profession that relates to the body is also female, nursing, teaching, caregiving, but also dancing. And the whole art of dance is you know, there are definitely male dancers and most choreographers making a living happen to the male, talk about that. But, but in general, the world of dance is a female world. And I have to say that even movement therapy and somatic education is predominantly female. So long story short, it took people really like scratching my foot for me to be able to find and I'm going to be specific because there are a lot of different reflexes. There's the protective extension, but there's also something called flexor withdrawal and flexor thrust. So when someone scratches or tickles, you, you can pull back in and curl up in a little ball and hide, that one can easily but the thrust is the kick, and the kick was gone. Wow. And so that to me is what came back actually with Aikido. The first time I had to strike somebody, I couldn't do it. They could strike me, but for me to give them the gift of a hit that they could then self-protect to took quite a lot of me working through.

Susan: I really relate to that being growing up in a household where I had a brother who was tormenting me physically a lot, and I don't think I would have dreamed to kick him. I definitely curled up in a ball

Deborah: I actually was a tomboy. So I actually loved one of my prime moments is in kindergarten, I could give a boy a bloody nose, you know. So I actually had a lot of joy in using my physicality, but not but not in claiming my needs. And I think that that to feel entitled to have needs when against a certain you were selfish if you had needs, that was my message. But I think for me, I have a little bit of a different kind of take on how I've applied this to my work because my work in the peace feel really preceded my arrival into Europe. It was when I moved to Israel and I did my work on studying the #OsloPeaceProcess. And there I was inspired by a time when I was in the process of a, after I did my PhD I, I was part of a #TrackIIdiplomacy. we were sitting with a group of Israeli generals and Palestinian generals, and we were sitting around in a place of East Jerusalem. And we're trying we were in a discussion on the nature of the borders between Israel and Palestine. And so we were trying to come to an understanding about what would be the related needs. I use the word needs, because needs are evocative emotions, not interests. But were they related deeds of each side? And so I did this. I inspired them after a half hour being frustrated, I asked them, let's imagine that the Israelis write down what the Palestinians need, and the Palestinians write down what the Israelis need. And so they rolled their eyes but they indulged me. And at the end of 15 minutes, we came back and we exchanged the Israelis what we thought the Palestinians needed. But the Palestinians discussed with the Palestinians needed as well. And it was very telling because the understanding of negotiation is that least from what Palestinian negotiators explained to me, that once you reveal that you have understanding about the other person's needs, you lose your position. And so strategically, it wasn't, it wasn't strategic to, to engage in that type of compassion, empathic exchange. But afterward, the Palestinian came up to me said, I just don't understand. You know, sometimes I don't know who my enemies are. So in that feeling, full place a different Palestinian general once said to me when I was in the field, I don't understand Israelis, Israelis think without feeling. Now, of course, that's not true Israelis are very feeling full people. But the idea of connecting thinking and feeling as a non-binary relationship that is an integrative relationship. That's been the basis of everything I've been thinking about ever since. How do we create models? How do we create ways  of integrating the felt sense, the embodied sense, the lived experience, which includes sensations of the body, and emotions of the body, and thoughts of the body? I mean, thoughts are not disembodied. Thoughts are also in the brain, right? They're all part of one system. But so how do we integrate the brain and that's what brings me back to the female experience and the exiled body of what it meant to me to be a woman, what it meant to me to be a little girl.

Susan: Sometimes, you know, I think even what you're talking about the idea of getting into the shoes of the other side and understanding what their needs are, is a very collaborative negotiation process a more, you know, and I would say, a more feminine process. but of course, having worked with people all over the world, I mean, everybody has the same categories of needs, categories of feelings, whether they're in some kind of win-lose style, sounds like the Palestinian person in that instance, of the Palestinian group was very much in an adversarial frame. So that was hard for them to, to do that kind of perspective taking but even if it's hard to do that strategically, it certainly doesn't mean that they don't have those same needs and feelings for sure.

Deborah: Absolutely.

Susan: So Deborah going or either one of you but going you know, just the getting into the body and the feminine even further. You started to make reference to your own, I think your own story around this, I think,

Deborah: well, part of my life trajectory has been part of my training has been in #somaticexperiencing and #traumahealing. And as I began to go into my own understanding or self compassion, I realized that my first trauma so to speak, was being born female, that that to me was the first existential piece of suffering. Because to be female in my family of three older brothers and a very patriarchal mother and father was inherently less valued and so while I was the you know, the cherry on the cake or the whipped cream on that Cake. I didn't want to be the whipped cream, I wanted to be the cake. You know, I wanted to be where the action was I wanted to be where the real politic was. So, and the sad part is that everything that was interesting to me was considered feminine was considered female and therefore it inherently less valued. So, plus the problem of being a very sensual person, and sexuality and pleasure are dangerous. So, so for me, the claiming my exiled body, claiming myself as a girl as a female has been a long story that, in the 60s when I was growing up, it was the combination of the feminist movement, and the anti Vietnam War movement, peace movement, which was really the beginning of my trajectory into the question of being a peace oriented or a peace activist. And so at the time I was watching the civil rights movement. But the feminist movement was something that I noticed got me very, very angry. And I didn't like to feel all that anger all the time. And so I kind of shifted over to thinking more about racism in a larger sense. I was more interested in the civil rights movement, per se, even more so than the anti Vietnam War movement. Then when I went to Berkeley, in my first year at Berkeley,

Susan: I feminist movement, can you angry What are you angry about?

Deborah: No the feminist movement triggered the vehemence of my rage. I was so angry all the time that I became miserable. Because I was angry all the time. And I didn't like myself for being angry all the time because it was so easy for me to go there. So I never had a problem expressing my anger. My anger was my way of surviving. So but when I got to Berkeley, and then I began to get more directly engaged in the movement. I remember the first I got home one time with my brothers. I have these three older brothers, right? So my, my eldest brother, I said, All women I remember sitting at the table said, All women are my sisters. And my brother looked at me and he said, Oh, yeah, is Ginger Rogers, your sister, and of course, immediately shamed. You know, how could I associate with Ginger Rogers. She was a dancer, exposing her phallic leg, you know, this beautiful long dancers leg. She was known for her body you know women danced half naked, while Fred Astaire was dressed. So immediately there was this disconnect to being shamed, one for associated with the feminist movement, to Ginger Rogers. Well, of course, I should be proud of Ginger Rogers, she was powerfully interesting woman who was a spectacular dancer. But instead, I retreated, and embodied the shame. And then ended up going back to Berkeley and studying instead of things that perhaps were more interesting to me, I studied, genetics, because and then I ended up at MIT studying neuroscience, I mean, completely things that have no interest to me. Oh they're interesting, but they're not my, my gift, let's say. But this, this disconnect of the human of the female body, and, and the shaming of associating with it. Is is I think I'm not alone in that experience.

Susan: No. It's something that I I think just the more that it's been it's talked about and given voice. I think the more that it, it hopefully will be lifted for a lot of women all over the planet.

Deborah: my first year in grad school, I was I was, I was, I have an undergraduate in genetics but a master's in dance, right. So I did this master's degree in dance and I was performing with the choreographer and at UCLA and i had No dance experience because my father didn't allow me to take dance lessons.

Susan: Why was that?

Deborah: Because he said that I was a really good dancer, but he was afraid. He was afraid that I would be a What did he call it like one of those dancers that do modern stuff, which you know, and then I would be like a showgirl. So he was totally afraid of my sexuality. You know, and, and so and was created another split, like, oh, sex is dirty, and you know,

Susan: well, and we know I mean, certainly the erotic is so much the core of women's power and so much something that has been controlled and kept from us. I think #AudreyLorde, you know, was so poignant on that front, and I guess so many religions have done a lot to control female sexuality. Right. And so there's a reclamation of that too, and certainly a real curiosity in terms of negotiation about, I think a lot of women are thinking about how do we reclaim that core power that we have that is not about pornography, but the essence of who we are, in many ways.

Deborah: And it's about the essence of who men are as well. I mean, that's why this you know, I've been working on this needs model, and that I'm writing up and the, the first motivation to writing the model was, to talk about needs and emotions within the same sentence, like #MarshallRosenberg, but also to put physical liveliness into the conversation of conflict resolution, and of human motivation that causes human suffering. So by looking at physical liveliness and the juiciness and both the problematics of power and pleasure. And as part of the piece of conversation was really important to me, I encountered that when I was teaching at the #Instituteforcounterterrorism. I mean, you would learn about suicide bombers who would wrap up their private parts? No, I'm an American company. So we're a little bit more prudish in the US.

Susan: Well, the podcast is not American company, just so you know.

Deborah: Okay. It's okay. Yeah, no, no. So then they would cover your cover up their private parts, the male suicide bombers, because they So that they could be intact in heaven. Well, I mean, it's tragic to think that the repressed sexuality could only be enjoyed it happened in Paradise, the extent to which so much of human suffering revolves around on undigested sexual pleasure are directed in This sanctified way, as is one of the reasons why I put physical likeness in this map.

Susan: Yeah, that's quite a statement. Yeah. Martha anything. What are you thinking?

Martha: Lots of things. I mean, I think starting from our personal stories is pretty great. And I, on reflection, I mean, I didn't know this as a kid, except I felt it. I actually grew up in a gender fluid household. I had a father.

Susan: Yeah, yeah. And maybe what do you even mean by that? Just so that's what

Martha: I'm going to describe because that we didn't have that word in the 1950s. But I had a father who we knew had had sexual relationships with men. And I had a mother who was the tomboy and we knew it. She talked about it. She said her favorite thing to do is go out with her brothers with a BB gun and shoot at people's windows. Break the bone. Go, mom. Yeah, go mom. And actually there's quite a story. So they Each in there. My mother was 22, a graduate of Smith College as a scholarship student, right. So her best friend was Mimi Haskell who was also in the scholarship house. So she's got one Jewish friend. She's got one Armenian friend, she ends up in New York to go to seminary because she has a vision while she's waitressing on Nantucket Island, that she's to do interracial work. So I have this mother who at 22 in 1948 moves in Manhattan to work in East Harlem, which was not completely Latina and black, but I would say 85% it was still considered integrated because then again, you

Susan: go mom,

Martha: again, go mom. So you got this idea. So mom's got this thing. Pop, wanted to be a farmer. He loves gardening. He's the one that taught me to garden. He's the one when I would come home from college that would put a bouquet in our room from his garden. He's the one that sent little pretty cards. So well, things were pretty mixed up in a great way for me, and I do love that. And I think for my brother too, and honestly, I often will say when people say, you know, kind of what made you a feminist because I still use that word, believe it or not.

Susan: Many of us do it. So

Martha: yes, we do. That it was seeing my brother suffer as a gentle and kind spirit in a male body. So my early experiences of injustice were wow, guys can't be gentle. I can be fiery, I can do that. I grew up in Spanish Harlem. I grew up in the ghetto. I have you know, I had that non American Wilds bad soap mouth. But my brother couldn't be gentle without getting beat up. So these are the kinds of things that were formative for me. And when I said before that I kind of ended up doing the conflict resolution work as a pull. I'm pretty sure it was because I was. I grew up in a violent neighborhood. I didn't have a lot of violence against me, but I was around it all the time.

Susan: But by gender fluidity, you basically you got that the rigid typical stereotypes about male and female were kind of the reverse

Martha: And I was even watching Why can't my brother be that reverse a little more? And why is he being ripped apart by other boys for being a really nice person?

Susan: So okay, you too, you know, again, that our topic -- The body well the female body and how we reclaim it for power and negotiation. What are your thoughts for women, first and foremost, men too, but really women, given all of this, given your individual histories, given what we know, given what you know about the body? how do we, how do we integrate? How do we move forward? How do we how do we really use our wholeness to be as influential and as impactful as we need to be at this women need to be at this point in time on our planet, it is so essential, and how do we do it?

Martha: I'd love to say two sentences and then throw it to Deborah to really share her model because I think it's important, but my two sentences do bring us to the here and now and just, for instance, last night listening to an African American the zoom webinar on the effects of Corona virus on people of color here in the United States, and there's so much to share there, but the piece that connects to what we're talking about is just how much the home health aides and the nurses are being told to risk their lives.

Susan: Right. They're saying they're mostly women.

Martha: I'm sure they're all women. I mean, you know, we're talking 98%. I mean, maybe it's 95. But you know, it's a, we're talking about women, and we're talking about intersectionality. And how poverty these are the most low paid kind of jobs as home health care aides. They are mostly people of color, often immigrants, sometimes at risk of losing their ability to stay in the country. So in any case, this group is of service. And what's really interesting is we are more dependent on them than ever, and yet they're not getting basic needs met, and They're even being asked to risk their lives by just putting bandanas over their faces because nobody has masks, you know, these kind of things. So I guess I just want to highlight that, that it's that that piece that you talked about, about service of this life that's defined by service versus by, you know, desire and need, has driven a system that works very nicely for a lot of men. And so the more we can band together and negotiate around our needs is really great. But I think Deborah needs to now just jump in and really just share what she's been thinking.

Deborah: Well, I mean,like we talked, you know, we've talked from the very beginning, it's really hard for us to know what our needs are. For many of us know, some people are, have a sense of more entitlement than others. But to be able to talk about them is really one of the gifts of #MarshallRosenberg's work with #nonviolentcommunication which is, which has really brought the language and the simplicity of emotions needs and making requests to the table. But for me there to make it a bit more coherent was it was a challenge and to see that there was a relationship between feeling the confusion about why our apology is so important, like, why do we need to apologize to each other? But why do some of us have more vulnerability around being seen or being understood? Or why are so many of us likely to give up our autonomy in order to feel loved? And so you know,  this model that I've been playing with I've been working in designing tries to give a handle on that question on at least to talk about and to see how, how we have these inflated and deflated needs that make us more incapable, make it harder for us to be sensitive to each other and to have the compassion to each other, to properly problem solve and to go into conflictual situations and, and to see what's underneath the surface. So, for example, if you've grown up with some with a deal with my, my husband has this I mean, he's, he's a he's a German man who grew up in the 50s in Germany. And, his challenge was in dealing with a rather challenging upbringing so to speak, okay, it was a bit on the aggressive side and he had a very difficult time. Now. Part When he dealt with it as saying, I don't need anybody. So lots of people come to the conclusion when they've been traumatized or treated in a way where you can't trust love, that you just give up on love. And so, he became very much strong on the autonomy piece being autonomous and going after his, his own needs first. Now, somebody like that has a hard time to see when someone is has a difficult time asking for their needs. And so being able to give a language to that dynamic is can be very helpful both to people and to negotiators, to sift out what is not being said. It could be getting the apology, it could be asking for larger airtime to be heard. It could be it  giving people a sense of agency to exert their will, I have a client who has had tends to have too much anger all the time. He's just angry all the time. And so what he's angry all the time is because he basically deprives himself of exerting his autonomy to getting what he wants. So creating the space for him to be able to articulate that clearly to his to his wife, to reduce the anxiety level, and to ask him, well, what's the status of your physical aliveness today, which, of course, brings us back to our conversation about the body.

Susan: So coming back to the body, because, as always, time just flies by. But I'm interested from both of you, you know, in terms of patriarchal structures and how they live in the female body, and again, my focus is on I'm gonna keep my focus more on women at the moment than then men. Definitely. It's both, but how do women go about getting patriarchal structures out of our bodies? How do we do that?

Martha: I'd like to highlight one sentence that Deborah just said, which is, how do you go into a conflict and see what's under the surface. And I do believe that paying attention to the body is one way to do that, and a powerful one. So we are trained to do several things. Both Deborah and I are certified movement analysts. So we actually are trained to observe the body and its movement, and not to interpret right away, although we do know and you know, particularly maybe as white women, in that, in whatever culture we're in, we have to really see what our perspective is for viewing. But for sure, we're able to say what the movement is without interpretation. So let me give an example. Let's say someone's shoulders are really hunched and they're looking down, someone might say You look depressed every week. That's the interpretation. Rather will say, Oh, your shoulders are hunched and you're looking down, can you tell me more about what's going on for you? So it's the beginning actually, of digging into the feelings, and not assuming, this is a huge part of what we do. It's just that's just the observation phase, but it impacts everything. So in my dynamic embodiment model, we're just using observation at a multi sensory level. So we're listening to tone of voice. We might be touching in the pre Corona  world we might doing hands on a 10 assessment based on the tension levels in the tissue. But we're just being with what we're seeing, feeling experiencing. It's a witnessing process. And then my particular model and it's probably really feminine is to then support what's working well. So that to me is about bringing up the agency. Because everybody's got some glimmer. I mean, I've been with people that have been really beaten down with years of either domestic violence or sexual abuse, but there's some spark at least that got them to my class or to a session or whatever it might be, that we can find, you know, that just is alive. And that's that what is the alignment in life alignment. And so supporting that bringing it to the fore, giving it voice so that people do feel some empowerment again, women in particular, I find it's huge. And then the final stage would be what I call so it's observed support and then finding options. It's really the creative play, what do I want to do differently? Maybe I want to scream and I've never screamed before. Maybe I want to be gentle because I've actually been overly angry and really assertive and constantly undermining my own desires, because I keep watching it by not knowing how to modulate my emotions. So I hope that's a beginning. Oh, yeah,

Deborah: I'd like to build on what Martha said, because this idea of agency is core to this work. And I think that by beginning with the body, is the beginning of re wiring your own brain. It's the core of neural or neural plasticity, that we create patterns through practice, that changes our brain itself, and therefore our behavior and the way we act, the way we perceive, the way we feel. So for me, landing at the body is home is where we can begin in exerting our agency. And this is true for women as it is true for men as it is true for anyone who's minority in a minority position or even in a majority position for us to be able to create relations of equivalence. We all want we all can assume the same playing field, a finding resource at home. And that home space is not always comfortable. There's a whole lot of shadow when there's a whole lot of pain there. I mean, thethis is the beauty of Martha's doing and repatterning work is how, how can we rework ourselves take self responsibility for the very victimhood we may feel, and maybe experienced from the outside. But how do we reproduce that victimhood on the inside and that's where we can exert our inner power. And, and why beginning with the body as the central location for social change, is where this perspective for meis the place to begin.

Susan: Yeah, I will say I've been. I'm one of those people that's always working on myself. But in the last number of years, I think my upbringing was not to get angry. Well, in the last number of years, I've had these great vehicles for really releasing anger. And I have grown an inch and a half. I can't believe it, but my three times the doctors have affirmed that it's like, Wow, I've grown. I'm now five foot eight. five foot eight. Yeah, I was always five foot seven my whole life now. I'm five foot eight and a half. It's like, Whoa, that's interesting. Yeah. So yeah, so we were coming to the end, and I just want to give the two of you a chance to say whatever final words stand out. It's such a short time we could just talk forever about this topic. And because I do think, probably it all begins with the body But in terms of the body influence the title of this the female body and how we reclaim it, for power in negotiation, any like Final thoughts and also how to reach you if people want to learn more about your work.

Deborah: I'm inspired by you know what, what Martha said about her brother, and the feeling fullness of a man being having so much suffering and challenges as a boy. And I think that hopefully our generation or the generation I have three sons, and the ability for them to be able as this Palestinian general told me to think and feel at the same time that we can use our feeling fullness and think at the same time and so for me, the, that integration is The key to holding the complexity of what the corona virus is opening us up for us in becoming compassionate that our behavior is going to potentially impact the death of someone else in such a direct way, that that opening, that being able to hold the complexity of a non binary world is what at least in my work, what I'm trying to achieve in the teachings and the trainings and the consulting and in the end and the model that I've been exploring, will try to contribute.

Susan: Thank you. Thank you.

Martha: I think for me, most of the major kind of themes have been stated. I think the one thing I want to restate has to do with reclaiming strength. And in particular, as an educator. I know that When I was a child, we didn't have monkey bars. And so women didn't learn to like pull their own bodyweight up. And I really see that we have a new generation where in some places where there's the privilege of access to equipment, that that those young women that really can literally pull their own body weight with their arms have a different kind of agency, a different kind of power, a different kind of ability to self protect. So I'm just really getting to the physical level that the more we can be aware of how we train ourselves and our bodies, whether it's post years of rape or even a single date rape, or whether it's post abuse, or during because some people are going to be in it while they have to learn this or while they're learning. That part of what we I've been doing even with the coronavirus, a lot of my dance classes right now. My movement Awareness classes have been about how do you close for self protection and take time and as you had us to close our eyes and then come out of it with breath support and strength of that sort, but then and this is embryo logical. How do we contact our mesomorph our actual muscular strength? What do you mean is Embry illogical What do you know there there's the endoderm, which is more the organ self which we would say is more the feeling self. There's the ectoderm, which is that thinking self, so bringing together the fact that I have, you know, needs where I eat and I take care and I rebuild my cells when they die or when they're attacked. But I also have a brain and nervous system that's responding and paying attention to outer cues and inner cues. But then there's the mesoderm, which is the middle layer, which is our muscles and bones. And for years, our world has been exercises just about muscles and Bones. But we in this more sophisticated way are looking at when do we need to do the feeling work in the body that's maybe more organ based? When do we need to do the work that's really about heightening awareness, whether it's bringing down hypervigilance, because that's often the case, but also bringing interoception paying attention to the inner cues of the body. And when is it that we just need to feel strong and balanced? And for women in particular, I think we've been sensitive and organy and going with the flow and accommodating and that your spine moving right now. So people that are listening may not know but I'm like wiggling my spine and adapting in a way that's very different than just being presentational and claiming space. So that's another theme of how we claim space.

Susan: In other words, to actually move, to Self assert

Martha: To self assert without hiding to really step forward or to stand up. I mean, these words mean something.

Susan: yeah, yeah, they're everything really I grew up. Like I said, I grew an inch and a half there.

Martha: so as part of this discussion about strength, one of the key things then is to also get to the pelvis, and the pelvis is our creative center. But of course, it's been kind of commercialized, if you will, as a sexual center and for women, that has meant a loss sometimes of true sexuality and Again, just moving to service. So we want to reclaim our pelvis for whatever we want. If we want it for service, fine, but if we don't, if we want to use our pelvis to take a walk, then that's fine too. But I've been involved as, as the head of the feminist women's health collective, we've seen kind of every kind of disease of the pelvis, and as women to be able now more than ever, with the potential loss of the right to abortion, all these kinds of pressures on what we do with our sexual lives, just has to be part of this discussion. That's all I want to say.

Susan: Thank you both so much, really appreciate your time. And I'm going to be as you know, I post your, your BIOS and your contact information on there. And I really thank you both also for all the amazing work you're doing in the world. And hopefully we can create a more a world that that is very different from many of the things that have been happening in the past so

Deborah: Bravo. Thank you very much. Ciao, ciao.

Susan: Okay, till we meet again, bye. Thank you.