“Trauma healing is possible inside of violent conditions but we need to be doing it as a collective. What makes it work is that we are healing as a group together.”

This week I sit down with writer, somatics teacher, and fellow ex-therapist Kai Cheng Thom for a conversation about the possibilities that emerge when we stop trying to heal alone.

We talk about why we both walked away from traditional therapy, what the body knows that clinical models often miss, why shame can only mend in relationship, and how groups can metabolize rupture and come out more connected than ever.

RESOURCES:

ariseembodiment.org

kaichengthom.com

IG:@kaichengthom

Little Deaths Salon

Reconnecting with Land, Ancestors, and Liberation Through the Body: A Free Webinar for White Therapists, Healers, and Practitioners

Donate to Namaygoosisagagun First Nation wildfire relief fund

Lost Together is produced by Marika Heinrichs and Becca Rich. Our music is by Cristoffer Moe Ditlevsen, Mixed by SC Dillon. Sound Engineering and Editing by Marika Heinrichs.

This week our glossary entry is on Healing Justice.

Episode 5 of the podcast touches on the intimacy of healing objectification through relationship — with land, ancestors, and each other.

If you haven’t listened yet to my conversation with Susan Raffo you can go back and find it in episode 5: Be Here Now: Land, Lineage, and Healing from Within the Wound

We are a member supported podcast. You can join us on Substack and pledge a monthly donation that helps us make Lost Together possible and sustainable and leave us a review on Apple podcasts, we appreciate all your support.

RESOURCES:

Kindred Southern Healing Justice Collective

Healing Justice Lineages

Care Work

Healing Justice at the US Social Forum: A report from Atlanta, Detroit & Beyond

Remember, Repair, Reconnect: Extended Workshop with Susan Raffo

Lost Together is produced by Marika Heinrichs and Becca Rich. Our music is by Cristoffer Moe Ditlevsen, Mixed by SC Dillon. Sound Engineering and Editing by Marika Heinrichs.

“The oldest meaning of neighbour is ‘all our relations’ — that which is alive, which is next to each other.”

How do we learn to practice relationality when we grew up inside a culture that taught us to treat each other as objects?

This week I talk with writer, bodyworker, and longtime healing justice organizer Susan Raffo from Minnesota Makocé, in a season when Immigration Customs Enforcement (ICE) had occupied Minneapolis.

This intimate conversation illuminates how our deepest wound often isn’t any single act of violence, but rather the habit of turning life itself into an object and inflicting that in myriad ways onto each other.

We explore how we can reclaim relationality through centring care in our organizing work, by building coalitions across deep political difference, and as lineage bearers in honouring the sharing of knowledge intergenerationally.

RESOURCES:

susanraffo.com

REP

Cara Page

Healing Histories Project

Remember, Repair, Reconnect Retreat with Susan Raffo + hosted by Marika

Lost Together is produced by Marika Heinrichs and Becca Rich. Our music is by Cristoffer Moe Ditlevsen, Mixed by SC Dillon. Sound Engineering and Editing by Marika Heinrichs.

This week our glossary entry is on Whiteness.

Episode 4 of the podcast explores the terrain of building intimacy across difference, knowing ourselves and each other more deeply, and both the costs and gifts of living a life of radical self-honesty.

If you haven’t listened yet to my conversation with Prentis Hemphill — you can go back and find it in episode 4: Being in Relationship Across Difference in Power, History, and Identity

We are a member supported podcast. You can join us on Substack and pledge a monthly donation that helps us make Lost Together possible and sustainable. You can also leave us a review on Apple podcasts.

RESOURCES:

Du Bois, W. E. B. The Souls of Black Folk. 1903.

White Racial Identity Development Model (Janet E. Helms, 1990)

Teaching Community: A Pedagogy of Hope (bell hooks, 2004)

Living in the Shadow of the Cross: Understanding and Resisting the Power and Privilege of Christian Hegemony (Paul Kivel, 2013)

Michael Eric Dyson

White Supremacy Culture Characteristics

Ancestral Embodiment Audio Course

Lost Together is produced by Marika Heinrichs and Becca Rich. Our music is by Cristoffer Moe Ditlevsen, Mixed by SC Dillon. Sound Engineering and Editing by Marika Heinrichs.

“Sometimes freedom is like, can you hold me please?”

How do we build relationship and intimacy across differences in power, history, and identity?

My guest this week is Prentis Hemphill. 

Prentis Hemphill is the bestselling author of What It Takes to Heal, a groundbreaking exploration of healing, justice, and transformation. A therapist, somatics teacher, facilitator, political organizer, and writer, Prentis is also the founder of The Embodiment Institute and a leading voice in embodied leadership and collective healing. Prentis served as the Healing Justice Director at Black Lives Matter Global Network and was a lead somatics teacher with generative somatics and Black Organizing for Leadership and Dignity (BOLD). They hold an M.A. in Clinical Psychology. They are also the creator and host of the acclaimed podcasts Finding Our Way and Becoming the People.

Prentis lives on a small farm in Durham, NC, with their partner, Kasha, their child, and two dogs.

In this episode, Prentis and I talk about the practice of building relationship across difference without appeasement or defensiveness, how to let go of identities that have outgrown us, and what it looks like to turn toward each other, honestly, in a time when so much feels uncertain.

website: prentishemphill.com

Instagram: @prentishemphill

RESOURCES:

The Embodiment Institute

Embodied Ancestral Inquiry

Focusing Book

Lost Together is produced by Marika Heinrichs and Becca Rich. Our music is by Cristoffer Moe Ditlevsen, Mixed by SC Dillon. Sound Engineering and Editing by Marika Heinrichs.

This week our glossary entry is on Transformative Justice.

Episode 3 of the podcast dives into learning to do conflict more skillfully and how this relates to a vision of community beyond punishment and isolation.

If you haven’t listened yet to my conversation with Brook Thorndycraft on growing our capacity for conflict and why it’s important for our communities, movements, and the planet — you can go back and find it in episode 3: Between Collapse and Emergence: Learning from Conflict in Turbulent Times.

We are an ad-free and member supported podcast. You can join us on Substack and pledge a monthly donation that helps us make Lost Together possible and sustainable.

LINKS:

https://transformharm.org/tj_resource/transformative-justice-a-brief-description/

https://transformharm.org/transformative-justice/

Beyond Survival: Strategies and Stories from the Transformative Justice Movement

The Wetiko Legal Principles: Cree and Anishinabek Responses to Violence and Victimization

Lost Together is produced by Marika Heinrichs and Becca Rich. Our music is by Cristoffer Moe Ditlevsen, Mixed by SC Dillon. Sound Engineering and Editing by Marika Heinrichs.

"That sense that we can just dislike each other and then dispose of each other when it gets too hard is the thing that keeps us stuck in these old systems.”

What if the problem isn’t conflict, but our inability to stay with it?

With over 15 years of experience and a background in mediation (Q. Med), adult education (MA), and Somatic Experiencing (SEP), Brook bridges the gap between systemic change and the human nervous system. Through coaching, training, and custom change processes, they help organizations transform power dynamics, psychological safety, and conflict into sources of possibility.

This episode explores why conflict is having a cultural “moment,” what actually happens in high-stakes relational breakdown, and why most of us were never taught the skills to navigate it.

In this conversation, Brook Thorndycraft shares their path into conflict work through transformative justice, mediation, and somatic practice.

At the core of this is a simple but challenging truth: we don’t get to get rid of each other. Learning how to stay, even when it’s hard, is essential to any future worth building.

bigwaves.ca

https://substack.com/@bigwavesbrook

LINKS:

Two Loops Model: complexsystemsframeworks.ca/framework/two-loop-model/

Deep Democracy: https://www.waterline.coop/

Hospicing Modernity by Vanessa Machado de Oliveira: decolonialfutures.net/hospicingmodernity/

Lost Together is produced by Marika Heinrichs and Becca Rich. Our music is by Cristoffer Moe Ditlevsen, Mixed by SC Dillon. Sound Engineering and Editing by Marika Heinrichs.

What does Land Back Mean?

This week our glossary entry is on Land Back (with some thoughts on settler colonialism too).

Episode 2 of the podcast explores the relationship between cultural reconnection and solidarity activism. We reflect on our relationship with land as both settlers and descendants of land-based traditions that were nearly lost.

If you haven’t listened yet to my conversation with Ben Reid-Howells on how reconnecting with his Scottish roots was ignited by solidarity with Indigenous Resurgence on Tuttle Island, you can go back and find it in episode 2 Deep Roots: Showing up to Justice Work with Cultural Grounding.

If you have suggestions or requests for future glossary entries, members can submit queries for our bonus Q+A episodes every month on Substack.

Links:

Land Back: A Yellowhead Institute Red Paper

Rehearsals for Living

On Settler Colonialism in Canada: Lands and Peoples

Unsettling the Settler Within - Indian Residential Schools, Truth Telling, and Reconciliation in Canada

Ancestral Embodiment Summer Audio Course

Lost Together is produced by Marika Heinrichs and Becca Rich. Our music is by Cristoffer Moe Ditlevsen, Mixed by SC Dillon. Sound Engineering and Editing by Marika Heinrichs.

“Sometimes we don't know who we're from, what lands we're from, what culture we're from, what language we're from. But that culture, those ancestors, that language, know exactly who we are.”

What happens when we try to do justice work without knowing who we are?

Ben Reid-Howells is a Scottish-Canadian community organizer, educator, Gaelic language and culture learner, co-founder of the Centre of Resilience (Bihar, India); the "Vasudhaiva [VAH-SOO-DAY-VA] Ride" Transnational Project Series; and founding director of Deep Roots Alba, an initiative for cultural regeneration, decolonization, healing and solidarity rooted in Scotland and globally connected. Ben is also a musician, wood worker, and lives on the West Coast of Scotland.

In this conversation, Ben shares his journey across continents, movements, and communities, and the turning point that shifted everything: being told to go find his own people. From Indigenous land defence movements to reconnecting with Gaelic language and land in Scotland, this is a story about moving from cultural emptiness to grounded belonging.

We explore the relationship between ancestry and responsibility, the limits of guilt, and why reclaiming land-based culture is not separate from political work but essential to it. This conversation is about rebuilding cultural roots, holding complexity around whiteness and colonialism, and remembering ways of being that were never fully lost.

https://www.benreidhowells.com/

https://www.instagram.com/deep.roots.alba

RESOURCES

Deep Roots Gatherings: https://deeprootsalba.org/

Resilient Floating Village Project: https://www.centreofresilience.org/floating-village-project

Grassy Narrows: https://freegrassy.net/

Unist’ot’en Land Defense: https://unistoten.camp/

Tom Langhorne: www.youtube.com/FandabiDozi

Lost Together is produced by Marika Heinrichs and Becca Rich. Our music is by Cristoffer Moe Ditlevsen, Mixed by SC Dillon. Sound Engineering and Editing by Marika Heinrichs.

What does Regeneration mean?

Welcome to our first glossary episode!

There are so many words and terms that we use in the field of somatics, social justice, and the politicized healing sphere that we don’t always have the same understandings around, or take the time to really explain. This can both lead to misunderstandings, and a kind of gatekeeping. I want the kind of brave conversations we’re having here to feel open and invitational so, the Lost Together Glossary was born!

Each week between our interview episodes we’ll share a word or term from our previous conversation and spend some time breaking it down, meditating on its various meanings, and I’ll share a bit about my relationship with the word or term. Think of it less as a dictionary, and more as a living document of shared language — one that is always evolving.

If you have suggestions or requests for future glossary entries, paid subscribers can submit queries for our bonus Q+A episodes every month on Substack: marikaheinrichs.substack.com/

If you haven't listened yet to my conversation with Nisha and Lua on how they are practicing Regeneration in real time, you can go back and find it in last weeks' episode.

This week our first glossary entry is on Regeneration. I hope you enjoy!

Further Reading:

Towards a deeper, reciprocal relationship with the planet Nisha Poulose

Rooted in Wisdom Lua Couto

Anthology of Regenerative Futures