This month I am thrilled to announce the launch of my new multilevel platform: Black Octopus Society. Black Octopus Society will draw together and draw home all my Resmaa.com somatic abolitionism offerings, courses, apps, the books and practice books, music, and merch; the Cultural Somatics Institute; and The AddiEun Foundation: all the spreading tentacles of what my team calls “The Resmaaverse.” This will not just be the home of my work and offerings; it will be a space for communal gatherings, partnering and practice.
Why Black Octopus and why now?
For similar reasons that Somatic Abolition is more important than ever. As I wrote six years ago, we’ve earnestly tried to address white supremacy with reason, principles, and ideas — using dialogue, forums, discussions, education, and mental training. Clearly, this isn’t working as well as we’d expected. We’ve tried to combat white-body supremacy by appealing to the “better saints” of whiteness. We’ve done protests and there’s nothing wrong with protests. We’ve done de jure integration and there’s nothing wrong with integration. we’ve done DEI and there’s nothing wrong, inherently, with DEI efforts. Those efforts were and are important, but those tactics that my ancestors used are like trying to get out of the way of an asteroid: you’re still going to get impacted one way or another. The purpose of Somatic Abolitionism is to temper and condition the body, so you have space to deal with the impacts of oppression in a generative, life-affirming way.
White-body supremacy, racism, sexism, homophobia, transphobia—all the structures of oppression try to thwart the impulses and works of Creation. Somatic Abolitionism is a part of Creation itself—not a new thing. It’s my take on how Creation works. I want us to slow down, pause, and work with the energetics of these impacts rather than leaning back on the comfort of the day, whether that be spiritual bypassing or intellectualizing.
Because I have been de-platformed in the past because my work was taken as an “attack” on white people (rather than a reckoning with white-body supremacy) it’s also more important than ever to create an online home for Somatic Abolitionism, where people who are serious about liberation can learn, practice, argue, and love on themselves and others without a neutralizing filter.
Black Octopus is the container and incubator for all of that. It must be co-created with people and communities who want to work specifically with the ideas and practices of Somatic Abolitionism. There is no such thing as a “good Somatic Abolitionist” in the sense that people might describe a “good Christian” or a “good Muslim;” it’s only “Do you practice? Do you get your reps in? Are you conditioning and tempering yourself? Are you looking at how things function instead of how you want them to function? Are you identifying and confronting those oppressive ideas that we’ve all breathed in and ingested?” Black Octopus is my attempt to create a place where people can engage with those principles and practices.
If you haven’t already, come by https://blackoctopussociety.com and see what we’re building here. There are many levels of engagement to meet the needs of people who are just starting to learn about Somatic Abolitionism and through to people who are engaged in deep practice. This is the time, and this is the place.