radical roots

Responsive Body’s radical roots are the core values and grounding ideas we use to anchor our organization. These roots provide the foundation from which all things grow, that we’re committed to fortifying, and is what continues to sustain the nourishment and core growth of Responsive Body.

1ST ROOT: RADICAL INCLUSION

We believe in Radical Inclusion: Radical Inclusion is a term used to describe shared spaces, actions, philosophies, governance, and hospitality that is grounded in the rooting principle of Loving as a vital force for life for all bodies, persons, peoples, places, spaces, at all times, everywhere.

2ND ROOT: OF BODY I AM

The Body is the core root from which everything else stems from at Responsive Body. We believe in the innate and vibrant wisdom, knowledge, power, intelligence, resiliency, and possibility that emerges from Bodies. Our Bodies are our homes, our greatest teachers, our leaders into the unknown. By placing Body at the center of all we generate helps us to see into, through, with, and between the shared experiences of what it means to be human. This centering of Body roots itself in the affirmation of how phenomenal Bodies are.

3RD ROOT: LIBERATION/BODY LIBERATION

We believe in Body Liberation: as living and being human, ‘of body’, unapologetically through our own choice-making, creative agency and bodily autonomy. Responsive Body fully trusts in body’s intelligence and our innate wisdom affirming the wholeness of the person, their experiences and their environment. We get curious about what truly human(e) ways of being are; lives that offer time for creativity, pleasure, joy, and rest and create networks of mutual support and care actualizing wellness and freedom into a lived reality.

4TH ROOT: CONTINUATION OF LINEAGE

We believe in the Continuation of Lineage: Responsive Body acknowledges the continuation of gratitude to those who have cared for our land, love, and life. We are a part of an ongoing ancestry of artists, trouble makers, liberators, abolitionists, and change makers. We stand in solidarity with those daring to do the work to create a more just, equitable, and a liberated future. It is a timeless calling together to join in sweat, through tears, of blood, to build a more just and loving world.

5TH ROOT: LOVE LIKE GRAVITY

We believe in Love like Gravity: Love like gravity means that me, you, and all of us saying “I already love you.” Absolute Love is a force, not a feeling. One cannot have more or less gravity, or more or less love. You can respond to this force any way you’d like: resist, deny, embrace, fall into, or move through it - but it is always present and consistent. It is always there, holding your feet to the earth, loving you like gravity.

6TH ROOT: ECOLOGY OF SUPPORT

We believe in an Ecology of Support: creating a mutually reciprocal network of support for those in Responsive Body’s administrative team, practitioner trainees, and wider community through embodied care, connectivity and belonging, and opportunities to practice body liberation together. Responsive Body practices and believes in the potency of ancestral technologies for economy, apprenticeship, reciprocity, and communal care that allows us to create appropriate conditions, spacing, and resources for bodies to be whole humans in environments that require performance, productivity, and creative output.

7TH ROOT: EQUITY

We believe in Equity: not just surviving but actively moving in pursuit of prosperity, abundance, thriving, growing. This includes widespread and fair distribution of resources, systems of mutuality, opportunities and encouragement for rest, repair, and recovery from depleting systems. This includes advocating not just for a living, but a thriving wage for skilled body-based laborers as well as reparations for toxic capitalism and dehumanized working conditions for female, BIPOC, LGBTQ+, and radical bodies.

8TH ROOT: WELLNESS AND ACTIVE CARE

We believe in Wellness + Active Care: a practice that champions the distribution of these embodied technologies to create change across industries, across businesses, present in contracts and tech riders. This practice of wellness and active care includes vacation pay, sick days without any pay loss, paid bleeding days, bodywork/therapeutic sessions, self-designed time/agency for task completion, paid experiments in failure, and paid rest and recovery days. Responsive Body is a community network for active care and emotional responding.

9TH ROOT: ECOSYSTEM OF LEADERSHIP AND MUTUALITY OF CREATIVE COURAGE

We believe in an Ecosystem of Leadership: Responsive Body recognizes this as a practice of circular design for leadership, non-hierarchical decision-making, and collective envisioning through cooperative dynamics and honoring the body's intelligence. We recognize that all bodies have the capacity to respond with curiosity, from an emboldened place to wonder and create while sharing the muscularity of labor through a methodical system-wide balance of efforting, resting, dreaming, thinking, creating, and playing together.