Shante' Sojourn Zenith
Goddard College
Student
Eagan, MN
My vision for my graduate studies is to deepen my embodiment of earth-rooted attunement so that I am moving through the world from my connection to the wider earth-body. I am exploring the way in which connection to the organismic intelligence of the wider earth body allows for witnessing of stuck places within the cultural nervous system so that unmetabolized ancestral grief can be reintegrated as medicine for life.
My research question is:
What support can I learn to access to root me into the wider earth-body so that I can offer myself as a conduit for healing within the cultural nervous system?
In my first two semesters, I brought my poet's imagination to complexify discourses of nervous system regulation and transformative healing/justice through interwoven conversations with embodied, ecological, ancestral, and imaginal ways of knowing. In the first part of my third semester (I went half-time this year), I deepened my studies into animist somatics and embodied poetics through titrated embodiment practices focusing on cultivating secure attachment to body, land, and ancestors. I also deepened my research into embodiment through studies with the Ritual as Justice School and Liz Koch’s intensive workshops exploring core awareness and the psoas as primal messenger of the ecosystem.