Rehearsing the Future

The night was one of 63 free offerings from Rehearsing Freedoms, a festival of arts, culture and movement-building that took place in London in fall 2023. Grounded in the visions of disability justice and abolitionist movements, its program sought to dismantle structures of violence and, in their place, build community-based structures of care and healing.

“We needed to have a public conversation about what health and healing meant,” says Farzana Khan, co-founder of the nonprofit Healing Justice Ldn (HJL), which produced the festival. ​“We needed to strategize for communities that aren’t seen within the public health system, or erased and ignored, so that we can build public health infrastructure that serves our communities.”

As a political strategy, the idea of healing justice was conceived in 2005 by the Kindred Southern Healing Justice Collective to ​“intervene and respond on generational trauma and systemic oppression, and build community [and] survivor-led responses rooted in southern traditions of resiliency.” As an abolitionist and anti-capitalist framework, it rejects practices that only dull the pain of capitalist modernity. Instead, it seeks to transform the impacts of oppression on our body-mind-spirits.

HJL recognizes that systems of domination, like racial capitalism and imperialism, marginalize human beings. Those systems rank our bodies by productive capacities, and those of us judged to be sub-optimally shaped or wired are deemed ​“disabled.” They direct our energies beyond healthy limits, toward capitalism’s imperative for at-all-costs growth; once doing so breaks us, we are cast aside. Racialized people, immigrants, working-class people and people of other marginalized identities suffer most, our pain shrugged off as inevitable on the path to progress.

The evils of capitalist modernity have become impossible to ignore. Since 2020, the world’s five richest men have doubled their fortunes while almost 5 billion people have become poorer. Rates of depression are skyrocketing; nearly one in three U.S. adults is diagnosed with depression in their lifetime. Anxiety is rampant, significantly impacting the global disease burden. To treat depression and anxiety, authorities like the World Health Organization promote psychotherapy and medication.

What does it mean to live in a world organized around greed and violence that then asks us to adjust ourselves to better endure its harms? What if the imbalance is not — as Western culture would have us believe — in individual brains, but in our collective psyche?

“Many users and survivors of the psychiatric system argue for the right to access non-medical and non-Western healing spaces, and to frame their experience as distress and not depoliticize it as ​‘illness,’” observes Dr. China Mills, head of research and disability justice at HJL. If the disease is cultural, then the West’s over-reliance on pills to dull pain can actually undermine the ability to stop what hurts.

Instead, we must ask what our pain demands of us. This question animated Rehearsing Freedoms. The name draws from Ruth Wilson Gilmore’s assertion that we must ​“rehearse the social order coming into being.” Gilmore described abolition as ​“life in rehearsal,” an ongoing, active process of practicing for a more just world. While political education is vital, it is sustained political practice—how we live our ideals — that will shatter broken structures.

As an approach, abolition seeks to end oppressive systems while building alternatives rooted in care. Public institutions — including police, prisons, psychiatry, housing and education — often reproduce state violence, then punish people for the distress they cause; the impacts on marginalized communities are lethal. Racism increases the rates of disease among communities of color while shortening life expectancies. Between 1999 and 2020, the U.S. Black population experienced over 1.63 million ​“excess deaths’’ compared with the white population, representing more than 80 million years of potential life lost.

To overturn this death machine, Rehearsing Freedoms set out to demonstrate the possibilities of life-affirming infrastructures, drawing from the imaginations of communities most harmed by injustice. Doing so required reclaiming the ancestral practices of the global majority which Western powers have long suppressed.

Whether by destroying sacred sites, imprisoning spiritual leaders or imposing assimilation-education systems, colonizers know that controlling a people requires first attacking their spirits. As Westerners awaken to the moral bankruptcy of capitalist modernity, they are turning to other cultures’ spiritual technologies: yoga from India; meditation from Hindu, Buddhist and Sufi traditions; plant medicine as held by Indigenous communities for millennia. But those profiting from these practices are largely not those who have stewarded them. Take the global market for meditation apps. Now valued at $5 billion, eight of the top 10 companies are American. This raises not just moral questions about appropriation, but practical barriers to these technologies being wielded for liberation.

Wellness culture, which is predominantly white, often lacks critical political analysis of the roots of collective distress and frames healing as an individual, consumable product. For marginalized communities, this is a double wounding; our practices are celebrated as our people endure ongoing violence. Our traditions are co-opted to create privileged bubbles of calm amid widespread suffering; thus sustaining our oppression.

Given this history, Rehearsing Freedoms centered practitioners who were of the global majority or disabled. Workshops on politicized tai chi, urban herbal foraging, traditional crafts and working with plant allies celebrated the healing power of folk traditions. ​“A lot of those histories remember us to each other,” says HJL’s Khan. ​“They connect us to the living world and remind us of our interdependence. Folk stories are remembered by everyone; they hold a collective body. If one part gets injured, we heal through the whole. There is medicine in accessing the wholeness of a collective psyche that’s been punctured, wounded and atomized.”

I arrived in London for Rehearsing Freedoms on Oct. 18, 2023, the day after an explosion at Gaza’s al-Ahli Arab Hospital killed at least 500 people. I was on a panel that night about narrative organizing for social movements, but given the tragedy, HJL decided to shift the session’s focus to narrative organizing for Palestine.

A key thread of that night’s conversation focused on the capture of mainstream media and how to combat dehumanizing, hypocritical narratives. Politicians were weaponizing complexity to delegitimize righteous rage, and the mass media was parroting shallow pro-Israeli talking points to justify genocide.

After the panel discussion, I invited reflections from those gathered. One hand shot up. ​“I am part of the mainstream media,” the man started, ​“and I don’t know what to do.” I was taken aback by his nerve, given how we’d piled on his industry and that he was one of the few white folks present. Joe was a producer at a major television news network. He was ashamed of its content but felt trapped. ​“All my colleagues are walking zombies. By following ​‘if it bleeds, it leads,’ we’ve become dead inside.” The system seemed too big, the dynamics too entrenched.

The room launched into a discussion about how to move in a world where we are all complicit in injustice. The conversation was nuanced, full of generous sharing and witnessing. It had none of the black-and-white finger-pointing that dominates social media. For while those algorithms reward incendiary rhetoric and flattening prescriptions — ​“you are wrong, you must change” — social transformation demands the opposite. It requires willingness to be uncomfortable and to meet each other in the mess: ​“We have wronged, we must change; let us do so together.”

That October, when most organizations were hemming and hawing over their positions, HJL was unequivocal in its support for Palestinian liberation. Beyond issuing statements, it shifted the festival program and mobilized its networks to make its support tangible. Herbalists mailed custom blends to support nervous system regulation; health workers volunteered their time to provide psychosocial support. Together, they showed that solidarity is not one-time statements but ongoing, communal practice.

The insistence on collective practice was inspired by Fred Moten’s work on improvisation. Influenced by Black radical traditions and jazz, Moten sees improvisation as a way to resist dominant power and foster collective agency. ​“We want to be able to experiment with clarity and to improvise, because our communities have so many unknowns coming,” Khan says. ​“But the only way we can be competent and skillful is if we’re in rehearsal together.” Just as jazz musicians rehearse to learn each other’s styles and create shared vocabulary, which allows them to create extraordinary improvised music, liberation workers must, too, rehearse how we challenge entrenched norms. Only by doing so can we, in times of turmoil — when greed and conflict seem most tempting — choose generosity and love.

HJL’s courage and emphasis on collective improvisation inspired others, like Joe and those gathered that night, to summon their own courage in how they showed up. Integrity begets integrity; love breeds love. These are the building blocks of the future.

“Reflect on past experiences where you did not have power,” instructed Nkem Ndefo. ​“What thoughts, emotions or sensations arise?”

I was at a Rehearsing Freedoms workshop exploring lived realities of power and powerlessness. Within my small group, a woman shared how her workplace made her feel powerless. Another nodded, then recounted her own struggles. Despite trying hard to focus on their words, a tightness gripped my chest. Memories flickered across my mind: age 6, watching my mama collapse in despair. Age 17, fighting off a man twice my size. Age 29, pleading with World Bank officials in Abuja to do the right thing. None of these situations had gone the way I hoped. Now, at 40, I saw flashes of tiny dust-covered hands extending out of rubble, bereaved mothers howling anguish, toddlers trembling from unfathomable horrors. I felt myself slipping away. The darkness was too powerful; all our organizing and fighting suddenly felt futile.

I approached Ndefo and shared how I was feeling. After a few diagnostic questions, she instructed me to chug two bottles of water and take a brisk walk outside, swinging my arms as I went. I did as I was told.

As I marched round and round the parking lot, pumping my arms, I battled images of ancestral powerlessness, failed campaigns, personal violations and ongoing horrors. ​“I have power, we have power, I have power, we have power,” I chanted, willing myself to believe. On my fifth lap, the tears came. By the seventh, I was wailing — for all we have failed to stop, for all we could not overturn. As my heaving subsided and my breath steadied, I realized I no longer felt so painfully impotent. The paralysis had left my body, allowing the fight to return. Resolve widened my chest; I’ll be damned if I let them win.

Months later, I asked Ndefo about the experience. What, exactly, had happened?

“You were collapsing and being sucked back,” she explained. Ndefo sensed that past experiences of powerlessness had pushed me toward dorsal vagal shutdown, also known as ​“freeze.”

“Whatever was in your past had pierced into this time, it was like a black hole pulling you back.”

Her water-chugging prescription helped stimulate my vagus nerve, countering my heightened activation and allowing me to settle. Walking kept me mobile and present, resisting the pull of the past. Arm-swinging facilitated bilateral stimulation, a technique used in eye movement desensitization and reprocessing therapies to reduce the emotional charge of traumatic memories.

While deceptively simple, these tactics worked. I returned to the building feeling tender and fired up. I ran into Sarah, an Iraqi artist and organizer. We held each other as we cried and strategized, discussing tactics from targeting weapons manufacturers to shifting cultural conversations. I noticed that, unlike 10 minutes prior, I could feel and think at the same time. I held grief without collapsing. My thoughts were clear. I felt connected to cosmic wisdom and knew how to channel it.

Ndefo is a pioneer in politicized somatics. Her work helps people access agency in how they respond to the world, whether in tackling daily stress or sustained oppression. For marginalized communities, whose emotions and behaviors are policed by dominant culture, practicing such choicefulness can be revolutionary. Stereotypes like ​“angry Black woman,” ​“Asian ice queen” and ​“feisty Latina” delegitimize and trivialize the anger felt by women of color, undermining our power. And when marginalized individuals seek power, we often mimic the ​“power-over” models we’ve suffered — where a few hold power and enforce the subordination and compliance of the many — further perpetuating harm.

To build power for liberation, we need a different way. ​“When a person tries to access power from a nonsettled place, it will be grasping and controlling; it will look like selfish power,” Ndefo says. In ​“fight,” power-seeking turns aggressive and domineering; in ​“freeze,” individuals cede their power, acquiescing to an unjust status quo.

But when we access power from a place of dignity and agency, Ndefo explains, our innate, mammalian sense of interdependence is activated. We want to use our power to support those around us; we align our individual power to collective well-being: ​“It’s not about me, me, me; it’s about us, us, us. It’s the me within the us.”

“To vision futures,” writes Prentis Hemphill in What It Takes To Heal, ​“is to conjure something that sits outside of your time and circumstance while being firmly rooted in the moment. To listen for the calls of what is not yet here but is waiting just in the wings.”

Rehearsing Freedoms taught us to imagine the futures we deserve and to practice the radical love and visionary organizing that will get us there. The stakes couldn’t be higher; our planet and our humanity are on the line. For at the heart of every crisis — political polarization, climate collapse, criminal inequity — is sociopathic disconnection, from one another, from nature, from universal wisdom. To manufacture our consent, the political-media-business machine distracts us from suffering — both others’ and our own, which are one and the same. We keep up with the Kardashians more than with our neighbors experiencing houselessness. We glorify obscene wealth, willfully forgetting that extreme accumulation is impossible without extreme dispossession. We slumber in collective amnesia, erasing histories of genocide, colonization, enslavement, imperialism and the ongoing pillage that undergirds ​“the good life.”

The staggering scale of intersecting crises produced by dominant culture is precisely why we must conjure and practice alternatives. ​“Because we do not have the military, money or might of the aggressors, we’ve got to be so intelligent and resourceful in how we attend this fight,” Khan says. ​“We must be profoundly creative and connected. We must access more of our humanity and our wholeness than the deeply atomized oppressor that could only enact those forms of violence because they’re so dismembered themselves. We must keep rehearsing and fighting in real time.”

Amidst all that seeks to crush us, we must rehearse how we attend to our grief. How we dismantle disabling systems. How we build life-affirming infrastructures. How we reconnect through folk wisdom. How we face crises without collapse. How we improvise liberation. Doing so is how we build power. It is how we remake our world.