Prentis Hemphill: Becoming strange to the normalcies of this world (Ep447)

Written By kamea chayne
“If you are yourself, not constrained, if I get to see the creature in you and I get to show you the creature in me, what would we build? Who knows?”
— Prentis Hemphill

What is at stake if we bypass the “inner” work of personal transformation while we rally forward in the “external” work of dismantling systemic injustice?

What does it mean to imbue wonder, mystery, and magic within movements for collective liberation?

And what if these troubled times actually require us to become strange to its often-normalized values, worldviews, and ways of be-ing?⁠

In this episode, Green Dreamer’s host kaméa chayne is joined by Prentis Hemphill, who curiously invites us to honor and unleash the full, weird, and majestic creatures within us.⁠

Join us as we unravel the messy layers of healing our humanity in this modern world — including an interrogation of the ways that social media and AI have been distorting our very real human needs for connection.

We invite you to…

 

About our guest:

Prentis Hemphill is a writer, an embodiment facilitator, political organizer and therapist. They are the Founder and Director of The Embodiment Institute and The Black Embodiment Initiative, and host of the podcast “Becoming the People.” For the last ten years, Prentis has practiced and taught somatics in social movement organizations and offered embodied practice during moments of social unrest and organizational upheaval. They have taught embodied leadership with Black Organizing for Leadership and Dignity and generative somatics and served as the Healing Justice Director of Black Lives Matter Global Network from 2016 to 2018.

Their work and writing have appeared in the New York Times, the Huffington Post. They are a contributor to “You are Your Best Thing”, edited by Tarana Burke and Brene Brown, “Holding Change” by adrienne maree brown, and “The Politics of Trauma” by Staci Haines. They live in North Carolina on a small farm with their partner, child and two dogs. Their debut book What it Takes to Heal published in June 2024 through Penguin Random House.

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interview transcript

Note: Our transcripts are minimally edited for brevity and clarity as references only and do not have word-for-word accuracy. Please view them as open invitations to dive deeper into each resource and topic explored.

Prentis Hemphill: I joke that the title for the book is a little bit misleading. I do try to speak to that question of “What it takes to heal”, but I also try to trouble what we even understand as “healing”. Healing is the restoration of relationships. It's not about the pursuit of perfection. It's not about conforming to ideals or externally meeting a standard. It is ultimately about the way that overwhelming moments fracture our relationships with ourselves, our ecosystem, and each other.

Healing, to me, is the process of reclaiming and re-inhabiting our relationships by expanding our capacity for safety, belonging and dignity.

Which I think are kind of the dimensions in a way of human expression. 

So that to me is healing, and it's a process. It's not a thing you do finally or at last, but it's a way of living your life and being oriented to the things that happen in your life. So, healing is not a destination in my book. I wish it were. Sometimes, it'd be a lot easier. 

Kamea Chayne: I appreciate this invitation to see it as a process and not this thing to ultimately get to. One of your motivations to write this book comes from having worked in movement spaces and seeing firsthand how the dynamics that people are trying to do away with are sometimes being brought in and replicated. 

The chicken and the egg question comes in here: You recognize the both/and— that we need to change power structures and conditions, and at the same time, we've also already been changed and shaped by our conditions. And so we need to do our work because we might be embodying values of the system that we don't align with. 

So I want to ask, what is at stake if we don't take this both/and approach and if we only focus on the structures and the system without holding up a mirror to ourselves?

Prentis Hemphill: What's at stake is we can't effectively change things. We can't effectively meet our needs if we don't understand that the difference between internal and external is slight. So I think it's for us to imagine that if we can change the world only by external work, we’ll be confused about why our relationships are so painful. Or why we see belief systems that we don't believe in coming out of us or through other people. We’ll be confused if we think that there's this clear delineation between internal and external.

We’ll be confused if we think that healing is only an internal process, that it has nothing to do with what we create or build together or how our world is organized.

If we think it's only an internal journey, we'll also be confused at how suffocated we become by our conditions and by what is happening in our world. So for a long time, I felt this debate between internal healing or external change work. And it felt like a false argument. The conditions of the argument didn't make sense to me because it seemed like both/and, which might seem overwhelming to us, but in a way, I also feel like there's a liberation in understanding that too. If it's a both/and, then it's not so much about, “How do I do this here and then go back to some place of comfort?” It's actually about living the full expression.

It's about how I am with myself. It's about how I am with my child, friends, or partner. It's about how I create. It's about listening to my conjurings and visions. It's about collaboration. It just is the work of life then, if the lines aren't as clearly demarcated. So yeah, I think what's at stake is that we can't move forward if we don't understand that.

Kamea Chayne: Or we might become the very things that we're trying to compost. I think this is also an invitation to look at the self differently. So I know you've critiqued Western modes of psychotherapy in terms of how it doesn't have the tools to look at the larger context and interrogate power or shine a light on relationships. And a core part of your work is connecting all of these dots, and connecting, as you just shared, the self to the collective in terms of healing. 

I think you share a similar sentiment, but I've been curious to expand how we even define the self and look at how if we understand the self, not as these individually bounded entities but as interdependent and entangled with broader communities—then it kind of blurs the binary of selflessness and selfishness. And then any work on this more expanded self is then necessarily also tied to the collective. So it's not an either/or. 

How have you thought through this when people individualize the concepts of trauma in mainstream systems or healing in more mainstream spaces, especially in a system that often likes to pit people against one another?

Prentis Hemphill: I think this is another place to do our best to escape the limitations of binaries. Because I think the self, or we, are created in and through community. Everything that I come to know about myself and how I develop has to do with my relationships, human and non-human, that develop me, that change me, that grow me. So even who I am as an individual, not to mention ancestral or historical forces that are in my tissues that are acting, is already a collective experience. 

And I don't think in a way it is possible to throw out the individual as we’ve been taught because

Each of us is a unique constellation that has arrived here with our own will, volition or choice.

There is something to the experience of the individual. So I'm made through relationship, and there is this thing that I can will inside of me that you can influence and touch, but I experience it. It is experienced in this vessel, in this being. 

In a way, I also resist the binaries of that because I think there are elements of us that adhere to the way that we understand “individual.” And I also think we've completely misunderstood what the individual is. The individual is also very much a collective experience

Kamea Chayne: We have to honor the self as well and not pretend like it doesn't exist. Something that I have highlighted is your quote that “Boundaries are the distance at which I can love you and me simultaneously.” I think that’s just a beautiful remembrance to not forget about ourselves because that is also important in all of this work.

Prentis Hemphill: I think the self is an important place of learning. If we understand ourselves as collective beings, the self is a particular side of learning. And I think we have to honor that and respect that and know that there is a uniqueness to our experience. It isn't the only thing that is happening, but it is one of the things that is happening.

Kamea Chayne: And something else that struck a chord with me from your book is this quote where you write, “In conflicts, our survival instincts get activated. It serves us to know this as we navigate crises rather than to pretend that our bodies and emotions are not part of the equation. We can learn how to feel and listen to our bodies' reactions without acting them out or becoming them.” So, a continuation of these threads. 

This hit me very hard for personal reasons, and I sent this to my therapist. I think it's crucial at the movement level because sometimes we just don't have the friendships and relationships that we might need for ourselves at the moment. So in conflict, even when we try to model after something different, we might not have that be reciprocated and not have our feelings of frustration and hurt and pain or rage and other things be validated. If all this adds up, it can make us feel very alone and also take a toll on our well-being. 

So I think as part of the work, I also wonder how important is it and how can we better learn to show up for ourselves and learn to affirm and honor our bodies and their reactions and sensitivities, so that we don't let it pile up undigested and then possibly get unintentionally acted upon in ways that can perpetuate harm.

And just to add another little piece to this, I think “politeness politics” refers to something different, but what is the nuance here if people see this call to look within and address our reactivity as a kind of policing the how of social change?

Prentis Hemphill: I think people will have critiques of everything, and those critiques can be really useful. I think it’s about increasing awareness. When you increase awareness, you increase the possibility of choice.

And the more reactive that we are, the more we may feel like we are in choice, but we keep choosing the same thing.

And that keeps choosing the same outcomes. And we get stuck in a rote, knee-jerk kind of reactivity that we might end up calling a personality in some ways because it's so familiar. We use it all the time.

So I think mostly what I'm pointing to is not privileging some emotions over others but saying that when we can't be responsive, when we are stuck in a habit that is reactive to another point in time, we've lost our choice, and we've lost our presence. We're no longer here in this moment—with its unique options, opportunities and lessons. 

That's what, to me, the work of embodiment is about.

[Embodiment work] is becoming more curious and aware of who you are… What your habits are, what you’re stuck in, what questions remain unanswered, and what needs remain unmet.

Feeling into your experience and honoring what is felt is enough to enter this moment more fully. So, for a lot of people, our bodies are pretty mysterious. We may not even hear what's happening inside of us: the little contractions tightening, bracing, numbing and vacating.

All these little moves are being made to keep us safe or to have us present as who we think we should be. There are all these things happening, and the more we have practice and understand who we are when we relax, when we're not trying to get a past need met in the present, when we're not trying to be who we think we should be, when we feel ourselves as we are. There's just so much there. That's where our actual lives are.

And a lot of us put on a script or a costume and say, “This is me, I'm gonna defend the sense of who ‘me’ is”. “I'm gonna defend that in all of these encounters with people, as opposed to a more permeable, purposeful, flexible me that can be in a relationship”. I'm not saying this from a place of having figured it out; I'm saying it from a place of deep exploration. But a lot of us are alone in our relationships.

So when we talk about relationships, people are like, “Okay, I'm gonna get a lot of friends”, or “I know a lot of people”, but that's not necessarily a relationship. You can be completely isolated and around people. But relationality has to do with a certain level of permeability and expression.

Kamea Chayne: That's a potent realization, that sometimes we can be surrounded by people and have a lot of friends but still feel so deeply alone. So, that's important to listen to as well. 

And there's a part of the book where you talk about noticing where you were holding tension within your face and kind of learning from that. I'd be curious to hear you talk more about this invitation to notice our bodies and what information we might be able to glean from that.

Prentis Hemphill: There's a funny realization I had years ago when I started doing somatics. What I understood about myself was when I felt pressure and that pressure could have been something I want to do, some work that I want to offer, even if it was making new friends, I always had this impulse to flee. That was present for me, available for me. I was ready to run whenever I felt pressure.

I started doing somatic work, and there was this awareness that I suddenly had of all the different ways that I would run away. I run away from distractions. Sometimes, I'd physically get up and leave, or there were all these different ways that I escaped closeness. And I started to do this work and I started to stay in more. I would say this is a place where I want to stay. So I'm going to stay. And I noticed early on that I would stay in places, but I would notice my feet would just turn out just a little bit [laughs]. And it was my body going, “Okay, you're staying”, but a little part of me has to escape to keep most of you here. 

It's those subtle things I would not have noticed if not for having places to practice that my body was always leaving. Even when I was practicing staying, a part of me was still trying to leave. It was just so deeply embodied in me. So there are these kinds of strategies all the time that are trying to take care of us, which we're grateful for, but can also keep us from the things that we long for—like love or intimacy, friendship, closeness. They can end up getting in the way in the end. And so that's really what this practice and embodiment have helped me understand. 

I have all these little strategies that worked for a time and a moment but now keep me away from my life. And I want to honor them. I want to bow to them and to release energy in them so that I can live more of the life that I have.

Kamea Chayne: That's such a beautiful level of self-awareness to notice these subtleties in your reactions in the moment. Just out of curiosity, did you start noticing these things yourself, or were these things pointed out to you? So maybe it's an invitation for me and other people in terms of how we begin building this level of self-awareness. Sometimes, I feel like when we react, we act before we even have a moment to detach and realize what's going on.

Prentis Hemphill: Absolutely. I think it's a combination. I was able to study somatics early on. So was in spaces where we were doing a lot of movement-based practice, which allows you to see what your habits are. I teach embodiment now. And that's really what I do with people. I give them opportunities to see how their bodies respond to pressure and to slow it down a bit and to almost make it feel like a game in a way.

But we're still noticing what's coming out of our bodies. And I got to do that. And doing it in relationship, people will say, “I noticed this”, or “your eyes did this”. It may not have a meaning, but sometimes someone would offer you feedback and you go, “right, I know exactly why I do that, I know exactly what that means.” So when we can slow it down, we have the opportunity to slow down.

I find that a lot of the stuff that we do will tell you what it's for. Even when my feet shifted out, it's not that I ever noticed that I did that, but when I finally brought awareness to it, I knew exactly what it was taking care of.

A lot of us just need the space and the safety to get curious about ourselves. And we’ll start to see the meaning in our lives outside of that space.

Kamea Chayne: Thank you for this important invitation to try to hold both more spaciousness for this sort of self-reflection and noticing and also being welcoming of feedback by others when they come as well. 

And I know there are some places where you've spoken about embodiment practices and place them in air quotes. I want to unravel that a little bit here because I think it helps us to deepen into that more expansive understanding of the self.

If we have felt a sense of ourselves as part of the community, part of a culture, part of ecology, and webs of life, then the practice of embodiment can't just stay within these personal ten-minute engagements or something. Embodiment then has to become the work also of collective transformation. 

So, how would you like to elaborate on these different layers and ways of understanding practice and embodiment for people who are in spaces of social and environmental change and who've never tuned into themselves in this way? How can people get started?

Prentis Hemphill: It was life-changing for me to have a place of practice. And what I try to create in the work that I do is offer places where people can come and practice feeling themselves, maybe for the first time. Maybe I put it in air quotes at the time because I do feel like the way that the work gets commodified in a way. It is an offering, so we want to feel reciprocity.

And people are offering labor to create these spaces.

My deepest wish is that one day, it won’t make any sense to do embodiment practices - that it becomes more infused in how we live our lives.

So that the rituals we do as community, how we move through our own lives, our morning practices, our evening practices, are about coming back into ourselves. And it won't make sense to go somewhere else and do them because our lives will make more room for them. So that's my deepest hope. At the same time, we currently live in a context where that is not true. So it makes a lot of sense for there to be training to do that.

Kamea Chayne: That reminds me of Gabes Torres talking about her dream of one day not needing therapy as these institutionalized spaces. Because ideally, they can be interwoven into community and just the ways that we are, and relate, and show up. 

Back to that question, in terms of, if people have never thought about this before, and they do have to start with more practice, how would you recommend people get started?

Prentis Hemphill: I'll take that question in two ways. One is that I think joining an organization that is doing practice where you can be guided and supported is a good way. And folks can come practice with us, but there are other organizations that people can practice with. if they feel more aligned.

When I have to explain what embodiment is, it’s so hard to get the language around it. And then, at the same time, nothing could be more simple than what I'm talking about right now. So I also encourage people to just practice by carving out five or ten minutes of your life to listen. You could listen to the tension in your body, your breath. Not your breath in terms of how you change it—but listen to your breath as it is.

Get curious about why I'm breathing this way. What is happening inside of me? What are the kinds of narratives that are running just a little bit underneath my awareness? So five, ten minutes, it can be a meditation practice, it can be a centering practice, which you can find online that folks and I have offered. Creating a space for curiosity and listening is the beginning of awareness; it’s not about control.

I think a lot of us relate to ourselves through control. So when something does arise in us or show up in us, we immediately try to figure out, “Where do I put this?”, “How do I tamp it down?”, “How do I turn it into something else?” And that's mostly how we relate to what emerges from our beings.

Anything that slows that down, that gives you a little space to notice and get curious. Notice without changing, notice without judging or saying this is good or bad. I think it's an important foundational practice for anything else you do. It's hard to embody other things if we can't be curious. We'll just put new skills on top of habits that aren't worked through.

Kamea Chayne: Thank you for this guidance. I want to return to our early thread about relationships. This was such a central part of my recent conversation with adrienne maree brown, who I know is a dear friend and collaborator of yours. And she had emphasized in our discussion that relationships are the difference between whether we're trying to fix people versus calling people in.

And I want to build on that here with what you've said, which is that “We need to remember how to be relational with each other, how to seek and stay in relationship and be changed by relationship. Relationship is the building block of people-power." I think I approach this question now with the context of knowing how much our norms of socializing have changed with social media taking over, creating these environments and shifting the ways that people might communicate with one another.

And also recognizing the ways that social media is, or can be, really reductive in terms of being able to fully capture and translate our entire human complexities. So I do think about how maybe we're collectively becoming less fluent in body and emotional language, relationships and conflict resolution, because maybe relationships are starting to feel more disposable in many ways.

But given how important relationship building is for people-power. What have you been sitting with on these matters?

Prentis Hemphill: It's interesting, this era we're in where everything about us gets sold back to us, and it comes back as an illusion, or mirage. 

Our longing for connection often gets hacked by these social media algorithms and likes. But underneath, there is a very human need for connection and belonging. 

And it's gotten intercepted by the rules of capital, and it gets warped. And we lose, like you said, our kind of fluency in the need that's set underneath it. I'm in touch with the need, and I have some idea of how to meet that need. That has gotten interrupted.

And I see it continuing and with AI stuff that's happening. There are just so many really basic human needs that are getting kind of distorted in a way. People talk about the uncanny valley; it's familiar, but it doesn't quite scratch the itch. It's like there's something that is off about it. I think we're in that era, and we're entering more deeply into that era.

What I'm curious about is, we’re here and have been here in the social media internet world for however long—so can it make us more human, or will it just confuse us in a house of mirrors? There’s an opportunity for us to get clear about what makes us deeply human and how to meet needs that can't be replicated by a human-created entity.

There is something ineffable about the intimacy that is possible between two human beings and that we can get very close to it, but we may not ever be able to replicate it. And so, can we right now maybe realize the sacredness of those processes that make us deeply human? Kai Cheng Thom is a writer and a friend. She has a book called Falling Back in Love with Being Human.

And I think about that all the time. How do we do that right now? It feels like we haven't lost the need, but we certainly lost the clarity on how those needs get met. So we either become deeply human, which I think will make us more humane, or I think our species sort of succumbs to the illusions that we've created. And that's the big question. We're at a big pivot point, I think.

Kamea Chayne: It kind of scares me a little bit thinking about this because I see both happening. I think some people are coming to realize that I can see where this is going to lead us, and I don't want to head down that path. So it's very much a realization. And I also feel like there are people who are just marching straight forward and embracing it. 

I think part of my fear is feeling like this system rewards certain ways of being and tries to sideline other ways of being. So for people who are kind of pushing against these currents, it does not like us. And it wants to kind of push us out or make us irrelevant. So a continual question that I have is, how do we eventually disrupt these vicious cycles that a lot of us didn't choose, but here we are, so what are we going to do next? I think we can return to this maybe in our closing in terms of your invitation for us to be weird and strange. 

When I moved through your book, something about it reminded me also of Alexis Pauline Gumb's biography of Audre Lorde. I realized that I had to do with relationality in terms of your approaches in writing. Biographies typically do not feel very personal, but I could feel Alexis's presence and inspirations and personal relationship to the work of Audre Lorde. And in a very similar way, like you’ve also said, you could have written this book from the vantage point of a detached therapist and just offering analyses and guidance, but instead you've let your guard down so that we can feel both stretched and accompanied knowing that you are on a similar journey. 

And I think we can all learn and take inspiration from this in terms of how we can better show up for each other to facilitate our collective stretching and reshaping so that we can keep challenging each other and grow, but still come back to being a balm to soothe our stretch marks that we create along the way.

I'd be curious to hear what more you would like to share in regards to the voice and intentions that you've chosen to write with.

Prentis Hemphill: I just love you invoking Alexis too. Her brilliant offering is such an incredible thing at this time. Like you said, when I was writing the book, there was encouragement to take a safe distance, to perch myself up as a therapist or talk about it as a clinician. And it’s two things. I don’t want to say “I don't know anything about this”, because why would anybody read the book? You do know something about what you're sharing. But there's always that work of saying, “I know something about this”, “I have something to offer here”, or “I have some questions that have been rolling around that I think are useful to the collective”. And I'm in this with you. I'm doing this, too. 

If healing is a process, if it is a potentially lifelong one, there's no place for me to hide in my safety around reflecting. And I wrote in that way because I wanted people to feel that it was possible. I've read books, and people talk about addressing trauma or habits, whatever it will be, and I'll think, “Okay, well, this person can do that”. Or “This is a good idea; if I'm that person, I can do that”. But I wanted to say, “Hey, I've been through things, not the worst things, not the easiest things, and this is how I did it.”

And maybe feeling my humanness in the process will keep you from putting anybody on a pedestal, putting yourself below anybody or above anybody. You will just enter the path like the rest of us, where there isn't that none of us, none of us human beings, are inherently above or below the other, so just enter the path with me. 

And that was the invitation. I just wanted people to enter the path, enter the journey, and know that whatever you come to the journey with is enough. That you won't win and you won't lose. And I think there's a whole life to be gained through it. Whatever it is that you learn, you will be learning for the collective. It'll be learning for everybody else. This is my life, and this is what I'm offering back. But you will walk your path, and then you'll offer something back to the collective that we all need.

I wanted to write from that perspective. I didn't want to write from above, from having figured it out.

The real work is in the muck, struggle, and vulnerability; it’s in the risk-taking and the will. I want to honor that. 

I know that's the case.

Kamea Chayne: I appreciate your warmth and your approach, and I can feel your embodiment of embodiment, if that makes sense [laughs]. And something so beautiful that you talk about is how our system tries to quantify and value life in some ways, but in ways that inevitably leave out the magic, the wonder, the soul of the planet that are truly invaluable and impactful and adds to our senses of aliveness. So, similarly, maybe our movements can also take inspiration from this sort of remembrance as well. 

How would you expand on what it might mean to imbue wonder, love, and sensuality into our movements for change to keep us grounded in our aliveness through everything?

Prentis Hemphill:  Wow, you did your research because I hear you pulling from so many different places. I said to someone once that I feel like movement has to feel like life. It has to feel like living. And by that, I mean, it's got to have room for the humanness, joy, sorrow, grief, for the love— the big mystery of it all. There's something we're up to, but we are inside of a gigantic mystery because, what the hell is going on? Some of what the movement adopts from the dominant culture and society is a rigidity, a certainty sometimes.

It doesn't mean that we don't have a clear assessment of a clear path; I think we need that. But you've got to leave room for wonder, for the thing that can't be named. We can't look at each other as units of capital. And I think sometimes with our analysis, we still borrow that framework. It may logically calculate on a piece of paper that we get there if we do this and we build this, but life created the paper. Living is bigger than the paper. There's something you cannot write down on that piece of paper that will never fit. And I think you've got to leave room for that. You've got to leave room for the mystery—it gives us so much energy because in the place of mystery, there's possibility. 

There's something I've never seen before. There's a willingness to change it all. I think movements that “win”, for whatever that means, or movements that deliver a life for more people that is connective, relational, sustainable, and reciprocal have to show what life can be. The magic, the wonder, the big questions, the power, the connection—we have to be all of those things to do it.

Kamea Chayne: I feel moved by this invitation to leave space for all the things that can't be reduced and framed, can't even be properly described in this conversation because we can't capture it in words in our limiting language.

We are coming to a close for our main discussion, and I would love for us to land on your invitation for us to be weird because this time and this status quo world requires for us to be strange to it. And I find this very validating because I do feel weird in so many ways.

Also, I resonated with your call for us to experiment and make things up as we go because embodiment in a broader sense is culture. And cultures are ever-changing, but, as you say, may also have been assimilated and co-opted. So sometimes we might no longer have access to the rituals and traditions and practices that we need. 

So as we close down here, what would you like to add in terms of giving ourselves this permission to be weird and permitting ourselves to not necessarily know what exactly we need to do but to experiment and make things up to meet these times?

Prentis Hemphill: I love that question. I just think it's time to get weird. And by that, I mean just to be ourselves as much as we can and meet each other as ourselves.

I think of myself as an unlikely embodiment instructor because the somatics teachers I knew or that had names were thin, tall and white.

It is still telling us this is the ideal body that we have to achieve. This is what it means to be embodied. And I wanna be embodied as me. I wanna be here in this body and this experience. 

Even as I do my healing work, I realise that at the core of me is still a curmudgeonly kind of person, and that's not going away. It's in there, it's just my flavor; it's my take. It's what I bring to life. It's my imprint. It's my signature. And I wanna be that. I wanna meet people who surprise me in how much they are themselves, and how much I haven't met anyone like them before because they are letting their light shine through honestly. 

So I think all of us are strange, actually, but I think we're walking around desperately trying to be normal. And normal keeps creating these weird, constrained, extractive worlds. I'm curious, and I don't know the answer. This is where it goes to the mystery of it all. I don't know what the world becomes when we're all a little stranger, a little weirder, but at least the basis of it will be a little bit more liberated. If you are yourself, not constrained, if I get to see the creature in you and I get to show you the creature in me, what would we build? Who knows? We've gotten to the end of this kind of normal.

So I think it could be an opportunity for us to understand more about what we are, how strange and how majestic, how weird and how loving, how creative we can be. I think, yes, we move towards justice. And yes, we move towards liberation. And I'm not certain what we create, and I think that's okay. I think we have to just humble ourselves a little bit and say, we're gonna create something we've never seen, felt or known. But it starts here with me being in a relationship with myself, being honest, and me giving you room to be yourself too.

[musical intermission]

Kamea Chayne: What has been one of the most impactful books you've read lately or publications that you follow?

Prentis Hemphill: I always revisit two essays, “A Letter to My Nephew” by James Baldwin and “Uses of the Erotic” by Audre Lorde, every year.

Kamea Chayne: What is a personal motto, mantra, or practice you engage with to stay grounded?

Prentis Hemphill: When in doubt, get weird.

Kamea Chayne: And what is one of your greatest sources of inspiration at the moment?

Prentis Hemphill: Children, everywhere. Children that I know, children all over the world, children in Palestine, everywhere. I love children.

Kamea Chayne: Well, Prentis, it's been a huge honor to share this time and conversation with you. Thank you so much for all you do to inspire and move within each of us. As we wrap up here, I would love for you to share anything upcoming that you have for this year that you'd like to share and any final words of wisdom that you'd like to leave with us as Green Dreamers.

Prentis Hemphill: In 2025, I will be hitting the road again and going on a practice tour. So, I will be taking the book around the U.S. But this time, instead of doing kind of traditional book talks, we're gonna do days of practice where 100, 150 people are gonna come together and do some practice together, embodiment practice together. So please look out, I will be announcing which cities at the top of the year. 

And that's mostly what I'm doing. I think my podcast is going to come back, “Becoming the People.” Otherwise, see me at the grocery store. I'll just be doing regular people's stuff, like all of us.

Kamea Chayne: Any final words of wisdom you'd like to close off? 

Prentis Hemphill: Have moments where you construct yourself less. Give yourself a little more space, a little bit more breathing room in your skin before you put yourself together in the morning or at night. Be a little undone; leave a little bit open. And mostly, just keep feeling.

 
kamea chayne

Kamea Chayne is a creative, writer, and the host of Green Dreamer Podcast.

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