As many of you already know, I have been working with Anjali Taneja and Cara Page for the past eleven years on a project focused around a medical industrial complex (MIC)  timeline to support the transformation of this system towards something that always but always centers collective safety and wellness. We write about it here. I have spent 18 years building and deepening a practice that starts with craniosacral therapy and that includes all kinds of trainings and approaches to working with how the individual and the collective body hold and pass on trauma, as well as how we build and deepen our glorious connection to life. 

There is no end to learning how healing practitioners can become more deeply an integral part of justice work, which is both about how we do political work and about who becomes healers and how they understand their healing. This is about generational change - and it’s about protecting and supporting and centering and loving those whose people never forgot the inherent connection between healing what happens within our bodies and healing what happens between us, whether at the local kin level or at the level of systems and culture. We know this disconnection, this separation is a wound that comes from western Europe, a wound that shaped and created white supremacy, capitalism, private ownership, and the idea that the body, the land, and spirit are all separate from each other. Dangerous dangerous foolishness. 

It was Cara’s idea and she shared it with me and Anjali, and then we talked with Caitlin and Nora, and then others came in with ideas and resources and we ended up with this. Fortification COVID-19 Edition is a conversation the three of us (Anjali, Cara and Susan) got to have with multiple guests, curated and hosted by Caitlin Breedlove and grounded in our evolving spiritual mandate in and beyond COVID-19.

Each podcast overlaps with the one before, starting with episode one, “Past: Rooting in Histories: We Have Been Here Before”, featuring Anjali Taneja and “TL” Lewis; co-hosted by Cara Page and Caitlin Breedlove.  We reflect on these questions: How do historical harms and abuses of the state and the medical industrial complex elevate the ways in which communities are criminalized? What are the historical roots and wounds of disease-based capitalism  in the U.S.? What has community dreamed and manifested based on these pasts? What do we need to know or pay attention to as this disease- and disaster-based economy uses this pandemic to fuel policing, surveillance, xenophobiic and eugenic ideas? To what end will COVID19 be used by the state against marginalized communities?

The second episode,  ‘Present: What is emerging in COVID times?’ asks what is emerging in COVID times; co-hosted by Anjali and Caitlin featuring invited guests; Michelle Morse, Francisca Porchas Coronado and Jack Tchen. Here, the conversation asks: what is the present economy of care and the economy of healthcare and what is being disrupted in this economy? Where are the fractures? Where are there new connections among different healthcare and healing systems and practices? What are you seeing that’s generative and transformative in the present moment? What was already there on the ground that is deepening? What are you seeing that’s transformative along and between borders?

And the final episode, “ Future: Spiritual and Political Mandates for our Future” looks at our spiritual and political mandates towards the future, bringing together co-hosted by Susan &  Caitlin in conversation with guests Erica Woodland, Shira Hassan & Cara Page. We ask, where is this present moment taking us? What can we radically imagine for our future survival knowing what we know now? In times of crisis, seemingly impossible ideas become imaginable. What does or might the economy of healthcare, the collective practice of care, look like on the other side of this? What is your best and worst case scenario? What is the spiritual mandate of this new time? What is our charge moving forward?

You might have already seen news about this in social media or via email. We released the podcast episodes on Friday but the discussion guide that goes along with the episodes wasn’t ready until today. I wanted to wait until the guide was out because it’s the two things together that make me wiggle: the fact of the conversations, which are powerful themselves, and then the offering for you, the listener, to reflect, to wonder, to zoom your people together and talk about what you heard. 

There is nothing new about the moment we are living in. This moment has never happened before. Both are true at the same time. We put this together because we, like you, want to ask all of these questions together. We want to be at the ground level of impact but also look at that impact from the perspective of history and the numerous potential futures. We do this because we want to center and lift up collective strategies of safety and wellness that understand trauma and resiliency, that center personal and collective dignity, and that are not afraid to tell the truth about violence and harm, particularly as it impacts People of Color and Indigenous communities; Queer and Trans; and people with disabilities.

You can find the podcasts here:   iTunes / Spotify / Stitcher / GooglePlay and you can link to this website where information about all three episodes as well as bios about the contributors can be found. There is also a link to all three transcripts separately if you only want access to the print version.

Profound gratitude to Caitlin, Nora and Wazi Maret, who make Fortification possible.  We are thankful to Auburn Seminary and the Unitarian Universalist Association that supported us to be able to pay people for their participation in this project. 

And finally, we are thankful to all of you who are on the front lines, whether you are caring for the bodies of those who are impacted by COVID-19 or you are caring for the bodies of those whose struggles started before and will continue after this epidemic. We include those who are making sure that we have food to eat and who are fighting to make sure that people can keep or have their homes, their relationship to their kin, and their safety and wellness. We also include the artists and creatives and healers who are finding ways to help us each feel and remember that we are resilient and powerful. Always.

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Yeah, some of this text is from an email we sent out to our MIC timeline contact list so if you are on both, you are not seeing things. It’s what is in our heart and so bears repeating.