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Across the past year, and now as the murder trial of Derek Chauvin unfolds with Minneapolis in fresh pain and turmoil,

I return again and again to the grounding insights of Resma Menachem.

He is a Minneapolis-based therapist and trauma specialist who activates the wisdom of elders and very new science about how all of us carry in our bodies, the history and traumas behind everything we collapse into the word race.

We offer up Resma's intelligence and new on changing ourselves at a cellular level, practices towards the transformed reality, I believe most of us long to inhabit.

So one of the things about the animal part of the body is that even though you are in this room, this nice place, there is a part of the body, right?

That's saying, yeah, but what else is going to happen?

Yeah. Even though you know nothing is behind you, right? Letting the body know it actually helps some pieces. Now if you get reps in with that, not just do it one time or just when I tell you to, right?

What you may notice is that you may have a little bit more room for others, literally for other things to happen that can't happen when the constriction is like that.

I'm Christopher Tippett and this is on being. Resma Menacum has worked with US military contractors in Afghanistan as well as American communities and police forces.

His New York Times bestselling book, Part Narrative, Part Workbook is My Grandmother's Hands, racialized trauma and the pathway to mending our hearts and bodies.

I sat across from him in our studio in Minneapolis right before lockdown in February 2020.

You know, I am curious. I've read you and listened to you. I'm always curious like, you know, what people's passion and calling become and it feels to me like it's right here in the title of the book, your grandmother's hands.

That's it. My grandmother, the women in my family, you know, I have this sense. So when the idea of humaneness came about, the first representation of that was the black woman.

Now I'm not fighting nobody about that. That is for me where it starts.

And so my grandmother and my mother and the black women in my life have always been that protector and that nurturer and that person that would get at your butt, right?

And say, yeah, you can do it. And let's keep moving and my wife, right?

And so for me, my grandmother and the story I talk about with her hands is that piece around creation and emergence, even in the midst of anguish and horror.

Yeah. So describe her hand.

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