Rootwork was a collaboration between Lumos Transforms and Healing Justice Ldn, supported through the Joseph Rowntree Foundation Emerging Futures programme.
Created in response to rising instability, polarization, burnout, and fragmentation across social change ecosystems, Rootwork explored a simple but consequential premise: systems do not transform themselves, people do. If we hope to build more just, liberatory futures, we must attend not only to strategies, structures, and institutions, but also to the internal and relational conditions from which those futures are imagined, organized, and sustained.
This series brings together reflections from participants, partners, and collaborators across the UK who engaged with Rootwork. Together, these pieces explore what becomes possible when embodied practice is brought into the work of social change, collective resilience, and the long project of liberation.
In this conversational reflection, Sai Murray and Saphra Bennett explore education, racial justice, intergenerational resilience, and the ways embodied practices reconnect communities with knowledge already carried in their bodies.
In November last year No More Exclusions (NME) Leeds, and Migrant Action co-hosted the Leeds leg of the Rootwork tour. Sai Murray and Saphra Bennett, from NME Leeds, met up over a herbal tea to discuss: why they were keen to partner on the event; how politicised somatics can aid in – and against – the schooling system; and the importance of honouring the survival techniques of our elders and ancestors.
Sai
I’m here with Saphra, and we’re representing NME Leeds, who co-hosted the Rootwork event with Migrant Action. So to begin, why did we want to be a part of this event?
Saphra
Having come across Nkem‘s work a few years ago and training with the Embody Lab, it felt really important to bring this work to Leeds. There are very limited options for Black and Brown folks to access this kind of healing within the city, as many spaces tend to be white-centered using quite Eurocentric language and means of expression. To build on the resilience that we already have, but working it through our bodies is essential in these times.
Sai
And we know that Nkem does offer a racialized analysis. I first experienced Nkem’s work through Anchoring Resilience during lockdown. There was a lot of tension, a lot of factions, exasperated by Covid, in a couple of the groups I was working with during that time. That video and a subsequent engagement with Lumos Transforms training really cemented the need for empathy, the need to understand where people are in the spectrum of fight, flight, freeze. So, yeah, I was excited for us to host Nkem in Leeds and to partner with Fidelis and Nova from Migrant Action to deepen that learning for our communities.
Saphra
From NME’s perspective, this event also made sense as our work is about stopping exclusions completely. Minimizing the impact that state violence has on primarily Black and Brown bodies, the long term impact that this has on those involved in the education system and being able to offer tools and means of physical healing.
Sai
And you did have your own child in the space which again emphasises that this work has to be intergenerational, that we learn from, and alongside, our youngers and our elders.
Holding cell in former slaving port on Gorée island, Senegal
The necessity for thinking intergenerationally incites in me the experience I had when I visited a former slaving port on Gorée island, Senegal. What really impacted me was the three holding cells: one for men, one for women and one pen which was much smaller – you had to stoop down to get inside – labelled “recalcitrants”. For the stubborn ones, defiant ones, those who resisted. You could just imagine the violence of even being forced into there. And because I was there on a retreat, doing Kemetic yoga, this really impressed upon me how somatics is ancient work, how wisdom contained in hieroglyphs models these body techniques, and that throughout all our history, we’ve had to rely on breath. Not to even mention the horrors of the Middle Passage: the confines, the horror, the terror of that experience, and how much breath, how much rhythm, how much contorting body and adapting would have been necessary to survive.
Saphra
Even as you were saying that, my body was having a physical reaction. The amounts – over generations – our bodies have had to come through. The education system dismembers us, cuts us off from what we truly know and believe in ourselves from the moment we are birthed into this society, the lasting colonial legacy of the traffic in our enslaved ancestors. This work is slowly unpacking that and allows us to re-member, connect back.
We have a felt sense that something’s wrong. Being able to feel it and work through that to get us back to the place of re-imagining: the dream space, connecting with our internal sense of hope and possibility that I feel can only come from the information our body gives us. This society does not afford us to do the things we need to do, like shake and scream. Just hundreds of years of repression in our muscles, tissues, our bones. We definitely need to have more spaces of expression and release.
Sai
And as Nkem reminded us in the session, this is not just a human thing. It’s a mammalian instinct in terms of tremoring – we have a natural reset that we can call upon. Those words: re-membering and dismembering. I love that framing because, as you say, what the education system does is divorce our head from body. Eurocentric Cartesian logic. Section. Divide. We’re dismembered from trusting our feelings, whereas, we intuitively feel, we know, that individual healing has to be part of community care, community healing, Ubuntu.
Saphra
Absolutely. I think one of the many decisions to take my child out of that system was anger. The real anger and rage I felt at just the simple thing of him needing to go to the toilet and being policed. We spend years teaching them to “listen to your body, trust yourself”, and then they get put into these spaces where they’re then told, “No, don’t listen to your body. You’ve got this window of time”.
Sai
There’s so much value in these alternative spaces, true education. And for my own children who are in education, I do see that as a form of childcare – which needs constant debriefing from – but I am very prepared to bring them out if the systemic violence versus balancing the ability for us to work tips over.
Nkem also mentioned the wellness industry that this work counters – the co-option of words and concepts. So schools may introduce meditation, mindfulness, well-being days… but is there a real understanding of the violence of the system itself on an everyday level? When there’s still punitive practice – which we know is racialised and not accommodating to different cultural and learning needs – then it only goes so far.
Saphra
Exactly. Children’s bodies are reactive. Well, all of us, are having an awakening to what our bodies are naturally communicating. I don’t think it’s any coincidence that we are pathologising very real behaviours that are acts of resilience. We’re learning that it’s okay to shake or have a twitchy leg: that’s information to take in. People are now seeing that this is how they show up in the world; this is how my body is reacting to the ongoing violence that we’ve had to succumb to for so long. We’re seeing the crumbling of society, everything that we’ve known to trust, and at the end of the day, what we have is ourselves. Our bodies give us the information that this isn’t okay, this is wrong, and we have to have the tools to be able to trust and follow that. But as you’ve alluded to, a lot of us don’t have choice. School may be the only option but it deprives us of choice to be with our children in a way that maybe we want to, but are not equipped to. All part of a very well curated ideology.
Sai
It’s also worth acknowledging that we did have some elders in the room, because there is certainly a growing awareness about well-being and somatics, which maybe wasn’t there for our parents generations, you know, that stiff upper lip, a migrant culture of working twice as hard, sacrifice, battling just to be seen. We definitely have to honour what our elders went through to give us a place in this country, which often didn’t include being able to rest. And we see the toll of that. We see so much burnout from elders and our contemporaries, and the effects of violence that they’ve just powered through. It’s so important that we are able to connect this work to some of the practices and survival techniques that our elders already have.
Saphra
Yeah, bring back the Blues, bring back the shubs. Bring back the real joys of Carnival. The dancing, the music, the release. Going to church every Sunday, wailing and crying and singing and shaking and speaking in tongues is all a part of our rich history, and which even though it has been attacked and eroded, it’s within us. The joy elements as well as the fight and the resilience. We have to recognize the shoulders we stand on.
Sai
You’re right in pinpointing the deliberate attack on our spaces so shout-out to the venue, to Oblong and Woodhouse Community Centre, and all these vital spaces that provide vibrant hubs for community.
Saphra
For sure, and those buzzwords of accessibility and inclusion in their truest form can offer the ability to engage with communities that already know this stuff. It comes back to that re-membering. Spaces for somatic practice or healing can cost a lot of money, they’re very financially exclusive. So allowing people to come together and to re-member together allows for greater resilience, long term community building, and getting back to that sense of what is possible here with the resources that we have to live stronger, healthier, happier, safer, secure lives.
Sai
Definitely. And, a success of this event is, not least the knowledge that was shared from Nkem, but also the community building: being introduced to the other people and groups hosting this tour in Sheffield, in Glasgow, Bristol. Our partnership with Migrant Action which NME Leeds is deepening. Our learning from tailoring the language to the communities that we know.
Saphra
From left: Sai Murray, Saphra Bennett, Nkem Ndefo, and Fidelis Chebe.
We’re also super grateful in NME for those organizers that have been doing this work for decades, and their ability to re-engage is dependent on having the resources available so that they can show up. Even if that means a hot meal or paying for transport, because this work is geared towards burnout. The toll it takes on our being has to be acknowledged. The people that are on the front lines are giving up a lot, and doing it on very little money inevitably creates physical stress, which is the thing we’re trying to counterbalance. So yes, this needs resourcing, otherwise we’re just repeating the same cycles of harm.
About the authors
Sai Murray (he/him) is a writer, poet, spoken word and graphic artist of Bajan/African/English heritage. His work addresses issues of self, societal and ecological repair and seeks to highlight the often concealed yet myriad interwoven relationships in our fast paced consumer world. Sai is a founding artistic director of Voices that Shake! which published an acclaimed trilogy documenting their pioneering pedagogy. He is founder of Liquorice Fish art/activist promotions; a fellow at the Maangamizi Educational Trust and a former trustee of The Racial Justice Network. His first poetry collection, ‘Ad-liberation’ and his novella, ‘Kill Myself Now: The True Confessions of An Advertising Genius’ are published by Peepal Tree Press.
Saphra Bennett (she/her) is a highly skilled facilitator, trainer, programme leader, Art of Hosting practitioner and independent consultant who believes in the power of conversation, connection and collective learning to support wellbeing and social change. With over 20 years’ experience across mental health, education and community development, and a Master’s degree in Childhood Studies, she creates inclusive, trauma-informed spaces where people feel safe to be themselves, share their experiences and explore what matters most.
Drawing on both lived and professional experience, Saphra works at the intersection of wellbeing, equity and participation. Rooted in deep listening, compassion and co-production, her work spans mental health, recovery-informed practice, racial justice, gender equality, leadership development and community engagement, helping people build confidence, connection, belonging and hope through strengths-based, participatory learning.
