Cultivating collective power through tending to individual healing with Susan Raffo
Bodyworker, cultural worker and author of “Liberated to the Bone”, Susan Raffo, shares her personal story of discovering the intrinsic connection between individual healing and our collective power to shape the systems we live in.
In this episode, Susan highlights the impact of the histories held in our bodies, and with passionate and hopeful energy, offers the possibility of leaning into our aliveness as an act of social and ecological repair.
In Susan’s We As Nature story, she shares:
- The impact of being raised in a political family and her childhood awareness of the energetic relations between people.
- How her direct experience of political activism at the UK Greenham Common occupation site has shaped her.
- How the hidden histories held in our bodies create fractures in our relationships and collective power.
- The potent effect cranial sacral therapy had on her baby daughter and how this led her to become a bodyworker.
- How she came to recognise individual healing and collective organising as fundamentally the same body of work, and how her vocation has evolved to embrace and champion this.
Find out more about Susan’s work at The Healing Histories Project, REP, and on her website, where you’ll also find details of her books, ‘Liberated to the Bone’, ‘Queerly Classed’ and ‘Restricted Access’.
You can listen below or find this episode on all major podcast platforms including Spotify, Amazon and Apple
About Susan
Susan Raffo (she/her) is a writer, cultural worker and bodyworker with a personal practice who does much of her work through the Healing Histories Project, a network of abolitionist healers/health practitioners, community organizers, researchers/historians & cultural workers building solidarity to interrupt the medical industrial complex and harmful systems of care, as well as locally as a core group member of REP, a Black-led network showing up to support others in moments of crisis or urgency, with care and respect for the full dignity and autonomy of those in crisis. Raffo is the author of Queerly Classed (1997), Restricted Access (1999), and Liberated to the Bone (AK Press: 2022). You can find her writing and other work here.
Illustrations by Rohama Malik
Creative Producer & Host: Nathalie Joel-Smith
Music Composer & Sound Producer: Dom Martin
Live Event Curation & Production: Katy Molloy & Laura Tyley
Bodyworker, cultural worker and author of “Liberated to the Bone”, Susan Raffo, shares her personal story of discovering the intrinsic connection between individual healing and our collective power to shape the systems we live in.
om the family dynamics that politicised her and feminist spaces that radicalised her, during this event, Susan will share a personal story that invites each of us to lean into our aliveness as an act of ecological repair.