Decolonial Healing, Remembering Connection - Keynote Speech at the Global Inspiration Conference 2024.

Aug 21

Hannah Kendaru Keynote Speech at the Global Inspiration Conference, the Netherlands, 2024 - An annual event hosted by the IBF.

I invite you to breathe. I invite you to soften your shoulders, your belly if you can.

I invite you to look around the room that you are in, noticing the corners and the edges, noticing where the door is and where the windows are. Look all the way behind you if you can. And as you look around, I invite you to discern the level of safety you feel right now. And there is no morality connected to the level of safety, there are no shoulds - let yourself notice. And soften your body in accordance to the safety you feel.

I will start with my prayer - I invite you to soften your eyes and your eyebrows and to soften your jaw.

If all shadows seek to separate, our mission is always to repoint the compass into closeness, into unity, into solidarity, into coming together. This is the path.

Your life is a ceremony, always attend to your own ceremony. This is a year of resilience. Hold true to your roots, remember your vision. Remember your strength and your inherited wisdom.

Honouring the earth within our bones, honouring the soil underneath our feet and sky above us.

Honouring the waters in our blood and the fire in our hearts.

I am grateful for the courage to walk towards the roar. I can do hard things. I can withstand the heat.

Holding in the same vision, the transformation of my self and the transformation of the world where personal pain is collective pain and collective pain is personal pain.

I sit with hatred until I feel the fear behind it.

I sit with fear until I feel the fierce love behind it.

I sit and listen to silent whispers of gratitude from my ancestors and my future descendants.

I am the daughter of volcanoes. We are born for these times, born for this chaos and ready to ride the lava as the ground breaks underneath me.

5 mins: Intro

My name is Hannah Kendaru and I use she/her pronouns. I am an Indonesian British Breathwork therapist and teacher. I was invited to talk at the Global Inspiration Conference 2024 by Mariët on the work that I do, on the courses and training that I created and it is an honour. It is an honour to be here, on this stage amongst the pioneers of this work. So firstly, I would like to say thank you to those that have carved this path in the breathwork field. I can only do this work because you have done yours, so thank you. I am here standing on the shoulders of those that have come before.

Now let me introduce myself in another way, to a community that has welcomed me, let me introduce myself in the fullest of ways.

I am the Daughter of volcanoes, I am the daughter of rivers. I am the daughter of palm trees and potatoes, of roses and lilies. I am the daughter of a long lineage of healers, seers, voyagers. I am the daughter of farmers and fishermen.

I am also the daughter of militants and military men. I am the daughter of divorce, I am the daughter of deep love.

I am the daughter of a long line of unloved women, of a long line of silent women, of a long line of silenced women. I am the daughter of aggressive men who did not know how to show their emotions. I am the daughter of manipulation, of control.

I am the daughter of rapists, I am the daughter of rape.

I am the daughter of exploitation and capitalism, I am the daughter of extraction and of theft. I am the daughter of war and of empire.

But I am also the daughter of butterflies and hummingbirds. I am the daughter of woodpeckers.

I am the daughter of the rain and the sun.

I am the daughter of those terrified by the Dutch, and yet I stand here on this stage.

I am the daughter of people who lost so much, and so are you…

10 min: This talk is called Decolonial Healing, Remembering Connection.

I work in a field called Decolonial healing and embodied social justice. It's an emerging field that bridges the gap between the spiritual and political. It is the field that acknowledges that freedom, connection and safety are not luxuries but should be for everyone, and it is fast becoming the next step on our journey of consciousness or enlightenment.

Before we start, I have a couple of asks from you. You, a deeply informed group of people in this room.

Firstly, I would like to invite you to soften so you can listen. There may be things that you already understand by the word ‘decolonial’ and I wonder if it may be helpful to let yourself listen to something new and if not, notice how resistance is showing up.
Secondly, be with your breath. We are in a mixed room with different races, ethnicities, access to wealth and education, access to health care and peace from war, histories and lineages and notice how it feels to have that awareness brought into the room for you.
And thirdly, please allow yourself to remember that I am on this path with you. I have experienced a lot of anger at me just for bringing this to the table, so though there may be things that are brought up for you, please attend to that in a responsible way, and no that I am in no way harming you. So please take care of your thoughts, your direction of thought and yourself.

So let us begin.

What is Decolonial Healing and Embodied Social Justice?

There are a few key fundamentals for this work:

There is a familiarity within this field of the universal law: ‘as within so without’ and ‘as above so below’. Within the embodied social justice field, we apply that law further - in a way that is tangible not only in our spiritual lives but our political ones too. And it goes like this: If it is present in the social body, it is present in our personal body. This is a quote from Dr. Rev Angel Kyodo Williams.

And the way this works for me, is the understanding that what we see in the world, and how it shows up does not exist in a silo and did not come out of thin air. They exist in our collective consciousness. They exist within us. For anything to happen between people, needs to happen between us and our bodies: Racism, oppression, violence, urgency, transphobia, homophobia, fear, scarcity, competition, sexism, anger, love, vitality, revolution - They all exist in us. This is a fundamental truth within this work.

Unfortunately, within the ‘healing’ space or the wellness industry, we have seen active abstraction from these truths, which creates a polarity that that is them and this is us. However we know that that is not true. They all exist in us, it cannot exist in the world if we don't have it.
Tilke Spoke about ‘universal love’ on Sunday evening as the basis of the therapeutic relationship. And this is no different with the work that I do, however it is an extension of the love into places we have been taught to withhold it.

We embody something called Somatic Abolitionism. Abolitionism is a term taken from the american slave history but in essence means the direct rejection of carceral systems, of cancel culture, of throw away culture, of brushing it all under the rug - out of sight, out of mind. It is a move towards deep transformative community building.

We have been consistently taught that if there is a problematic child, we suspend them, if there's a problematic family member, we don’t talk to them anymore, if there’s someone struggling psychologically, we send them to an asylum, if someone is homeless, we force them out of the places we can see them. But they all still exist, just out of sight and not our problem anymore, but they are. They’re ours.

And we do this for ourselves too. As you have learned over the years of breathwork, there are so many parts of ourselves that we have suppressed, pushed away, hidden, for it wasn't safe, or it didn't have space or capacity. And we know as breathwork therapists, how liberating that work is when we can take a deep breath to the forgotten inner children within us. However, there are so many children of colonialism within us that we have yet to tend to - children of patriarchy, children of capitalism. There are little children of oppression within us, those taught to hate, to be afraid, to want to kill or hurt, taught to glamorise, or to desire. And with a carceral system, we are taught to exile those parts of our society, which in turn means we have been taught to exile those parts of ourselves.

And so, when we learn to love the exiled parts of ourselves, we can learn to love the exiled parts of our society
And finally, we have all been colonised and are all living under the colonial imagination

I invite us to move beyond shame and blame and remember that no one succeeds under colonialism. The first peoples to have been colonised are those in middle Europe, those with white bodies - just because it was so long ago does not mean it did not happen. The allure of making it all about race is another way for us to keep fighting against each other.

But we have all been seduced, reduced or induced into it. The values of our society are no longer rooted in our relationship to the earth or all of our relations, but rooted in productivity, status, hierarchy and money. This is what it means to live under a colonial paradigm and a capitalism paradigm.

So, moving beyond identity politics, we must remember that we all suffer under it. That this work is not about tackling the enemy, the bad one over there but understanding that we are swimming and breathing the air of it all.

I am in no way equalising our wounds, our pain or our experiences. We all have different wounds under colonialism, but no one is immune to it. Which means tending to it, acknowledging how it works and how to transform it, is all our responsibility.

15 min - So what does it look like to do something about this?

And this is the magic part. We have so much to do, so much to learn. And this is what I am finding in the evolution of this work. These systems of oppression would let you sit in paralysis, sit in guilt and shame, sit in exhaustion and fatigue, but these are all ways to keep you disempowered. Do not be fooled and disillusioned. There is so much we can do.

So, I have created a blueprint, one that is emerging and evolving but what I have found to be a great place to start:

Know your social location and cultural context

Your social location is your proximity to power and privilege. Your social location is not who you are, but where you are. And know that you had no choice in that. It was not your choice or your fault, but we are here. These bodies in this room all have a different social location, you all have different accesses to power based on the systems created and this shifts in different contexts.

So what we can do is learn about how power works, learn where we are in relation to it and then actively create systems of repair in relationships. We are consistently in mixed groups, so those in dominant groups, ones with closer proximity to power, how can you create space for those historically or systematically excluded?

We have been taught through modern social justice discourse to feel ashamed for our privilege, and this is a symptom of the system - to keep those in power paralysed. In actual fact, it is wonderful to have proximity to power, the question becomes ‘what can I do with this?’ or ‘How can I leverage my power to those in historically oppressed groups?’.
The invitation here is to become active in disrupting how power works in the relationship you have and begin processes of repair.
Dismantle systems of oppression

Secondly, we need to understand how systems of oppression work. We need to become deeply and fully cognizant of the characteristics of supremacy culture and how they show up in you, at work, in your families, in your relational dynamics. Supremacy culture shows up in many ways and it's important to be able to spot it and actively create alternative, maybe even sacred, systems that resist it.
Re-Indigenise, re-connect, re-root

And thirdly, I invite you to get curious about your lineage. The abstraction of culture in late stage capitalism would have us believe that capitalism and consumerism is your culture. It is not. I invite you to get curious about your peoples and where they came from. What songs did you sing? What song did your great great grandparents sing when they were celebrating? When they were grieving?

There is a grief here when I ask that question, because for most of us, the answer is unknown and it may also be unknowable. Give yourself the grace to mourn the distance you have to your own indigeneity, to your own sense of belonging on this earth.

We are all fractured in our lineages. We have all been forced to lose our languages, lose our systems of sustainability, we have all been forced to migrate and move to survive.

We are a generation of forced amnesia. We have forgotten, and just because we have forgotten it doesn't mean that you don't belong.

Which is why there is such a desire to connect and maybe even extract from cultures that still maintain their indigeneity. There may be ways that other indigenous cultures call you because we all long to be with the earth. But notice where that desire comes from and attend to the wound accurately. I invite you to get curious about your own lands. Remove any desire for purity politics, or the first ones, or the original ones, there's learning in every generation and I invite you to find out.

Now, it is important to do all these things simultaneously. When we learn about systems of oppression and start dismantling these systems, you will start to realise that there are many values resting on them. When you unpick that, you start to chip away at your own idea of reality and you fall. When you chip away at the only pillar holding you up, and you are not cultivating alternative value systems, you will fall into the void - into the abyss. This is where we lose many of our activists to depression, to apathy, to suicide.

This is why it is important to re-indigenise, to reconnect with ways that allow you to be held by nature, by the earth and actively create alternative systems rooted in life, in beauty, in joy. So when you chip away at the pillar of supremacy culture, and those systems fall apart, you will not fall, but be released into the land, into the soil.

The world is hurting, and we know it and we see it. There are people suffering, we know it and we see it.

Which brings me to the final points of this talk: The role of the medicine person in the modern context is always in relation to what is present in our communities.

The verb ‘to heal’ means to actively attend to a wound. How can we say we are healing when we are unwilling to address the wounds of our society? How can we say we are healing if we are unwilling to address our collective shadow?

Coloniality, systems of oppression and how they show up in us is our collective shadow. If we continue to sit silently, ignoring or avoiding it, we cannot call ourselves ‘healers’, or ‘therapists’ or ‘medicine people’.

We cannot have unity consciousness without decolonial healing. It cannot be done.

10 mins - What does that look like for me?

I have a breathwork school called Inspire Breathwork. I have been teaching for many years in other schools and collaborations but felt it was important to bring this into the world. Inspire Breathwork is invested in training students in breathwork rooted in decolonial healing and embodied social justice.

This means bringing breathwork out of the white wellness industry and into spaces where historically and systemically excluded people are and this means working with people deeply connected in communities that need it, which may include: black communities, asian communities, recovery clinics, those incarcerated or formerly incarcerated, LGBTQIA+ communities, those in social housing or council housing, doctors and nurses, hospices, teachers, schools etc.

The teaching includes social consciousness, awareness of power and politics, awareness of healing within those systems and creating reparative models for healing.

The mission statement for Inspire breathwork underscores the commitment to an activist approach to wellness, where breathwork is a tool for personal and societal empowerment, fostering well-being and equity. It highlights the interconnectedness of personal and social transformation. Our mission holds the two powerful pillars within the ethos of inspire Breathwork, the first is the need to empower individuals to reconnect, rekindle and remember their inherent power within their own bodies, to cultivate belonging, safety and dignity in their own healing processes as a process of reclamation - reclamation of strength, of agency, of trust, of breath and of the earth beneath them.
The second pillar stands to represent the lens that is needed to bring change, a lens that is able discern the ways our society has developed to oppress, to belittle and to delude us away from our sovereignty. The reclamation of our own bodies and the lens that allows us to see the systems in play, allow us to be active changemakers within society and within the wellness industry.
As an individual, I am interested in preparing spaces for diversity.

Before we can ask for diversity and bring historically oppressed people into white dominated spaces we need to do the work to welcome them safely - to move beyond diversity as a box ticking checklist to say there are brown people here, but to fully prepare spaces so that they are intrinsically prepared. I am committed to working with teams, organisations, work spaces into processes of decolonial healing.
As an individual, I am also working to shift the focus of breathwork from wellness to health. I am no longer waiting or hoping breathwork reaches those people organically, but actively moving breathwork towards people. I am part of the team creating the UK's Breathwork Association with Mark Conrad and Helen Bradley to create a national body to help support breathwork and the evolution of the industry within the UK. To bring breathwork to people who need it, with strong ethical frameworks and standards of practice to work with people of many different backgrounds.
And finally, I am committed to bringing breathwork and decolonial healing onto larger stages. This being one of them, but honing my skill as a speaker to talk about these topics to festivals, conferences, retreats etc.

To breathe is always an act of liberation. The colonial paradigm has created systems that dictate who gets to breathe, and who doesn't, who gets to be well, and who doesn't, who gets to live and who doesn't. Working with the breath is always political, our health is political.

My work is to move breathwork away from wellness and into healthcare. We all have the right to breathe.

And I will close with another quote from Dr. Rev Angel Kyodo Williams:

Without inner change, there can be no outer change. Without collective change, no change matters.

Thank you.

Hannah Kendaru

Inspire Breathwork

www.inspire-breathwork.org

inspirebreathwork@gmail.com