Episode 13: Resmaa Menakem and The Body Keeps the Score of Inclusion
- Georgina Brown (hershe)
- Sep 15
- 3 min read
Racialised Trauma, Somatics, and Why Culture Change Must Happen Through the Body
We often ask: Why is culture change so hard?But what if the better question is:
Where is culture change being held in the body—and what happens when we finally listen?
Enter: Resmaa Menakem—somatic abolitionist, trauma specialist, and author of My Grandmother’s Hands.
His work doesn’t start in the boardroom. It starts in the nervous system.In the gut.In the inherited tension held in our shoulders, jaws, and breath.
Menakem’s central truth is both ancient and deeply contemporary:
Racism doesn’t just live in systems or speech. It lives in the body.
And if we want to heal it, shift it, dismantle it—we must work through the body.
At BARDO Inclusive, we see Menakem’s work as essential to truly embedding inclusion.
Because policy without nervous system awareness is performance.
Strategy without somatic safety is unsustainable.
And trauma held in the body doesn’t disappear just because we renamed the EDI committee.
The Science Bit: The Body Remembers What the Mind Tries to Rationalise
Menakem draws from somatic experiencing, trauma therapy, and embodied wisdom traditions to explain this simple but often-ignored fact:
Trauma is not an event, it’s a physiological response to what happened (or didn’t happen) that remains unresolved.
And racialised trauma, whether ancestral, historical, systemic, or daily, is held not just by individuals, but by communities.It shows up as:
Hypervigilance or shutdown
People-pleasing or armouring up
Distrust of authority, systems, or even “safe spaces”
Gut-level responses that the brain can’t yet explain
This is nervous system literacy at its most radical.
Because it refuses to pathologise people.It recognises that what looks like resistance or disengagement may actually be the body protecting itself from harm it knows too well.
As Resmaa says:
“Racism is not about bad people. It’s about bodies and trauma.”
BARDO believes the brain is the body, it is part of the nervous system that holds pain that is physical.
How Menakem Supports the NIMM
In the Neuro-Inclusive Maturity Model (NIMM), Menakem’s work offers a deep somatic grounding for all five domains:
Neuroscience-Informed – trauma lives in the nervous system, not just the narrative
Trust-Building – requires more than words; it requires co-regulation and body awareness
Mindset-Shifting – asks us to move from cognitive explanations to felt experience
Bias-Disrupting – reveals that bias isn’t just a belief—it’s a somatic reflex
System-Aware – understands that systems reproduce trauma unless they’re healed from the inside out
This work invites organisations to stop intellectualising inclusion and start metabolising it.
Not everything can be solved by a strategy.
Some things need to be breathed through, shaken loose, or held gently until they shift.
Real Inclusion Requires Somatic Safety
You cannot spreadsheet your way out of white body supremacy.
You cannot “safe space” your way out of ancestral grief.
You cannot skip the body to do culture change.
What you can do is:
Create space to pause and feel
Learn to track the signals of your own nervous system
Build capacity to sit with discomfort, grief, rage, and release
Cultivate a leadership culture that values slowness, regulation, and repair
Somatic inclusion means making room for all of it—the shakiness, the numbness, the ancestral memory, the rage that scares you.
It’s about returning to the body as a site of wisdom, not threat.
Try This: A Resmaa-Inspired Somatic Check-In for Your Team
Start your next session with 90 seconds of stillness.
Invite people to simply notice:
Where is there tension?
Where is there openness?
What’s the temperature of the room, emotionally?
Ask, not performatively, but with presence:
“What’s your body asking for right now?”
You don’t need to fix anything. Just witness.
This builds collective nervous system fluency, which is foundational for cultures of real belonging.
But first you have to build a cultuer of psychological safety where this kind of activity is embraced and not performative.
Want More Resmaa? Start Here:
My Grandmother’s Hands – required reading for embodied racial healing
The Quaking of America – trauma, politics, and collective reckoning
Notice. Shift. Rewire. – somatic practices in bite-size form
Interviews on On Being and Therapy for Black Girls – powerful and poetic conversations
Reflect:
Where in your workplace is trauma being misunderstood as resistance, disengagement, or “not a good fit”?
What might shift if we made space for bodies to tell the truth, even before the brain catches up?
Next Up in the Series:
Episode 14: Tara Brach and Radical Acceptance: Self-Compassion, Inclusion, and the Brain’s Deep Need to Belong
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