This video is an introduction to Long Body Prayers, an animist somatics ritual art project and graduate thesis. This thesis will take the form of a podcast and video series to witness the relational ruptures of kin  who have been touched by colonization. 

Stemming from Haudenosaunee culture, the phrase Long Body speaks to the  indigenous awareness of the self as a living process of emergence held  within supportive webs of relationship that extend far beyond the human.  This thesis project witness the way that settler colonist kin have  become dissociated from the perception of this wider body in the absence  of a developmental welcoming of felt sense awareness, attunement to  ancestors and earth body dreaming, and the skills of emergent creative  process that shape a coherent and rooted nervous system.   

This thesis is a gift to the part of me, and maybe the part of you, that  doesn’t feel like there is room for my animal body within the consensus  reality of being human. This thesis is an invocation of protecting the  wild animal that lives inside my body, of witnessing the wild animal  that lives inside your body too. Of noticing the communication, the  contact that is always happening between a diversity of wildnesses  meeting each other in each moment. Inviting a curiosity about what a  kind of relating would look like that honors the wild animal in each of us, that honors that part that is still connected, that part that  senses, that moves from the river beneath the river, the mycelial root  system that creates the microclimate of the forest. The part of us that  still knows how to feel that we belong. The part of us that claims our  existence, here in this moment, in this context, our feet fully touching  the earth.   

You can learn more about the project and look out for future episodes by visiting www.earthpoetedgeweaver.com/longbodyprayers