Flowing into Alignment with Camille Djokoto

In this interview with my friend and somatic therapist Camille Djokoto, we explore the concepts of balance, flow, alignment, and yielding, and our journeys navigating racial oppression and re-connecting to ancestral and intuitive wisdom through the body.

This episode includes a guided somatic practice by Camille Djokoto who leads listeners through a practice to sense into alignment in our beings however that may be showing up for you in this moment.

For more info on Camille Djokoto, please visit https://camille-djokoto.com!

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Transcript

Camille Djokoto: Thank you, yay! I’m so glad this is happening, first of all. So, I’m Camille Djokoto, and I am a politicized healer, I’m a Registered Psychotherapist, and a dance and somatic movement specialist. I go by she/her and they/them, and I work at a company I started called Embodied Therapy Toronto.

Anabel Khoo:  Amazing! I was just thinking about how we first met. It was just something I was thinking about when I was putting together some questions for the interview, because I remember meeting at a somatics skills training… 

Camille: Yes!

Anabel: …and I remember exactly where we were standing when we had to pair up, and yeah there weren’t a lot of people that I felt drawn to… I felt really safe with you…

Camille: Same!

Anabel: We were in like this corner, like hiding…there was like a little wall area that we were hidden behind…

Camille: Yeah, it was nice and cozy.

Anabel: Yeah, so I appreciated that, and I remember we were talking about our training background, and how … I think it was pretty early on when we shared how hard it was to be in predominantly white healing training spaces… and that’s how our friendship began!

Camille: Bonding over our trauma, trauma bonding, hey! No, but you’re right though, I think that was a huge part of it. It was a predominantly white space, there were very few visibly racialized folks in the group and you and I were two of them. And that’s it right, that’s been the course of my experience, and I’m so glad that I had you and we were able to bond, but also to be able to validate the experience that we were having. Because I think that when you’re in somatic spaces geared toward somatic learning and somatic pedagogy that’s so steeped within a very a white dominant culture, you’re also invoking the nervous system which is quite a vulnerable thing. And when it’s all being done through a very particular lens that has nothing to do with acknowledging—the roots of that have nothing to do with acknowledging the humanity of your body as a person of colour, as a Black person, it’s tough. So, I think that was a part of—for me, a crucial part of my nervous system getting to feel safe, and to be able to find enough spaciousness, and with that, then allowing my interest and curiosity to be there. And for my brain, my nervous system to be able to process the information in the space that we had paid so handsomely to be there for, right? So, I think that kind of, you know, as we call it, that co-regulation, that you and I being able to be there and to feel one another and to provide some support for one another was so important. It was so important for me, it was very special, and we got to learn more about each other, and become friends, which is really cool. 

Anabel: Yeah, it was the beginning of--- also, you know, having extended time to just process stuff, like, there was so much to process and I feel like in other contexts there’s maybe more of a casual getting to know you, whereas we kind of immediately had so much difficult stuff that we were processing in our systems and our spirits. I’m just grateful for that moment. So, there’s so much to talk about… everything you just said could lead us in many directions. But I thought as a starting point for, I guess this interview, just starting with this idea or this concept or practice of “alignment.” Because we were chatting a couple weeks ago about this. I felt like we didn’t talk for a while because of the pandemic and then we reconnected and it felt like it was an alignment, like we were talking about it, but it felt like we aligned once more. It was a nice feeling, so that inspired me to bring that in. So, I don’t know if you’ve been thinking more about it, or if you want to say a bit about how you would describe alignment, what that means to you, either conceptually or like as an experience? 

Camille: Mm-hmm, it did feel like a sense of alignment. I do think it’s a holistic process and it feels very much like a somatic experience in my body, and I think there’s all this intellectual kind of way of speaking about it and language… but for myself I do think it is about balance. That alignment truly is about coming a sense of balance and I think that we have… I reflect on the wonderful teachings from our Indigenous peoples living here in Tkaronto and we talk about the balance of our spirit, emotions, our psyche, our body, and mentally… it’s really important. I think about it as homeostasis. You know we’re constantly taking in a lot and we need to be able let go, and when we are literally in the body, the process of our bodies metabolizing and finding homeostasis is a life-sustaining process. It’s no joke, it’s like literally to stay alive our bodies have to be able to find this process of continuously balance what we need to let go of, what we need to process and break down, what we need to take in, what we need to release, and how we need to be able to receive. 

And so for me, that process of balance is about alignment as well. Being able to let go, knowing when to let go, knowing when to say “no”, knowing when to rest, all that kind of stuff, and also being able to receive. Being able to be in communication and contact, and when it’s safe, and when it’s possible to do so, being able to open and take in more of things that I need. I think alignment is a holistic process of wellbeing, of taking care of ourselves so that we can open when the opportunity is available to us and when it’s safe and it’s functional to do so. And when we can close, when we can free ourselves or liberate ourselves, let go of things that aren’t serving us. So, I kind of look at it like that, this process of homeostasis and balance, and I feel like I can feel that at least in my nervous system and my body, I feel settled when I feel like there’s a sense of balance. And particularly, a spiritual aspect of that too. I’ve spent time in my life feeling very much not within alignment with myself and that was because that aspect of life wasn’t really online for me, it wasn’t a place where I was really allowing myself to go, and so that was a big piece for myself of what I needed to feel this kind of homeostasis within myself. And I think it’s different for everybody, right, there may be things that might be under, or over, that we have to much of, too little of, but just reflecting for myself about what that is, or what I need to achieve my own sense of personal alignment. 

Anabel: Yeah, it sounds like that balance is also so full of movement, like it’s not just one thing. Like alignment isn’t just like--- it’s not a rigid kind of alignment that you’re describing. It’s really flowing, and it’s attuned and there’s a lot of freedom and choice that gets to be there in a way that isn’t a problem, like it’s actually like “this is the point”, to be able to receive, to say “yes” when you feel like it’s safe, when you feel like it’s right, and also to say “no”. And that whole movement, like moving through this, is what can feel settling. It’s not really just jumping into a static kind of “ok, now I’m settled, now I’m aligned” and nothing else is happening inside me or around me.

Camille: I like that concept of like flow, like I think of a wave coming up and down, and up and down, and I think that’s an important piece of how I experience alignment, that it’s not a static thing, it’s certainly moving. I think when we find our rhythm, like our unique rhythm, that that’s how we feel a sense of balance in our self. When I think of rhythm, I’m thinking of music, movement, dance, I’m thinking of all these ways in which expression is available to us. Yeah really love that concept. 

Anabel: Something we were chatting about earlier was—in line with alignment—was you reconnecting to your intuitive and spiritual knowledge, and how water has been showing up for you in some ways lately. That reminds me of the flow and the rhythm kind of energy of alignment. I don’t know if you have any exciting water-based sharings for us? 

Camille: It’s so interesting because I do really feel that. There’s something with… I was telling you just the other day, just visiting the ravine, where the water was bubbling, where there were these flats and the water would kind of drop a couple degrees down from these rocks like a mini waterfall, and it would continue on. I found myself just gravitating to those places where there was this bubbling and babbling of the little brook or stream of water. Like that’s where the life was, and it was just calling me. It’s interesting because I found over my time either formally finding somatic programs that I’m training in, or if it’s through my own healing practices, they all have led to water. So, I have kind of accumulated this intuitive wisdom, as you said, for myself and my own body and my truth and knowing, and there’s something very deeply felt in the healing property of water. There’s something very specific about the quality of flow, that quality of that movement, that up and down, of being able to go around, the malleable-ness of flow. And there’s something really healing in that for me, this concept of that. 

I wanted to share with you that—so as I’m self-studying and learning about Dagara cosmology, it’s a West African cosmology, that brings into the elements of earth, it talks a lot about that, and how through your birth year you can be aligned with different elements and what that means. It’s so interesting, because the water sign that I’m consistently drawn to and in my other astrological sign, as a water sign, the concept of water is “yielding.” And “yielding” has been this concept in the past several years of my life that keeps coming up to me. It’s this idea of water being able to yield in terms a way of prevailing. A way of being able to get around, a way of being able to overcome. For me that concept of “yielding”, I practice it in somatics all the time, it’s the concept of how we receive support. The action of how we receive support. And I really believe that with enough support, that is the foundation for all the other types of movements or expression that we need to engage in our life, when we’re trying to effect transformation or change, or action. It’s something that keeps showing up for me, and so water as a prevailing force, as something that’s meant to be healing and that I use as a healing element for my own medicine and it’s something that with enough support of it, I find myself in a place where I’m really able to find this sense of resiliency, and find a sense of liberation. So yeah, I just keep coming back to water, I don’t know, that is what it is for me. 

Anabel: You know, you were one of the first people who introduced that to me as a transformative somatic concept, like “yielding,” like really letting yourself be held, letting yourself be supported, and how for so many of us… it’s like that is really hard. It’s so hard. It doesn’t feel safe, you know, if you’ve been either let down, disappointed, abandoned, betrayed, like all these different ways we experience not getting support, it’s just so… you know it sounds so lovely, but it’s also so challenging. 

Camille: It’s challenging and it’s so valid what you’re saying, it’s real, man. I’m sure you do as well, but I’ve worked with a lot folks, you know, where we talk about racialized oppression in particular and this concept of “yielding” when, as we both know, there are real ways in which our bodies, our lives, the lives of our people are constantly under threat, and persistently so. And so, it’s not a popular theme to bring up, when we talk about that, because it’s kind of like “what the heck, I need my armour.” And so I think you bring up a good point, it’s not about our defenselessness, it’s not about disarmouring, it’s not about showing up in spaces which require our functional vigilance and a hardening of self, it’s not about taking away those skills at all. In fact, in essence, it’s an understanding that “it’s not for you, it’s for me” and that’s what I try to get across. It’s not for you to show up and say it’s a yielding over to the other. And for some other bodies, it may very well be, when we talk about cultural dominance in this society and of folks with a lot more privileges than others, we all need to be mindful of yielding in that manner. But when I talk about it as a process of resilience building and as a liberation practice, for me it’s really about what I get to give to myself so that I can imbue myself and empower myself enough to be able to show in the way that I need to be to meet this situation. 

And it’s about--- it’s a practice of compassion, and when we think about self-assertiveness, pushing out into the world to meet something, to have force--- Well the first thing we have to do, is to kind of yield into receiving the support that we need to be able to push off from. So if we’re constantly in a fight state, or needing to meet situations where there’s conflict because of circumstance or whatever, but we don’t’ have enough support, it’s a very hard place to be in, and consistently in my experience, leads to exhaustion and burn out. So I think about it that way, that yielding is compassion and it’s a place where we’re giving ourselves enough then we are imbued enough with enough energy to be able to come out and to meet and be able to have enough within us to be able to take on, or be able to endure, or go out to do what we need to do. So, I think of it as a filling up of self. And that’s what I love about the concept of yielding within Dagara cosmology, that’s what it’s about. This sign is quite powerful but does so in a way… where you’re not really seeing how it’s coming, it’s not in a big in which its power is being telegraphed, but in the end, it’s quite powerful. And so that’s how I think about it. I’m not sure if that made sense…

Anabel: Oh my god, it made so much sense! It was so beautiful, I was just silently—my eyes were sparkling with excitement and joy! I loved what you said about… I think that’s really going to stay with me, I think every time I drink water, I’ll be thinking “yes, I am imbuing myself with support” with life, you know. Water is truly life, and it’s—I mean, we need all the elements—but yeah there’s something really powerful specifically about that type of energy. I also wish we were… you know I’m imagining us in a liminal space where we’re in a magical pool of water… you know I think we can make that happen in real life…

Camille: I know! We’ll have to do another one of our island visits. 

Anabel: Exactly! I feel like we do have a lot of conversations around water. Last time we were chatting, we were really excited to talk about intuition and inner knowing and reconnecting ancestral elemental based healing practices that feel… I don’t know, it feels hard to connect to those things, because I know them deep in my soul, and yet I’m so disconnected or I feel like being diasporic—and for a bunch of other reasons, I guess I don’t want to name them all—but like you know it’s so hard to feel inherently connected when there isn’t like “oh here’s the library of knowledge… the major textbook you need to know your ancestral healing practices” you know “here you go, it’s for you, you get a copy when you’re born” you know for a lot of us that doesn’t happen, because of colonial violence, different circumstances, we don’t really get that. 

Camille: Yeah we were totally talking about that the other day, and I had this experience that was like “Yessssss! I need to talk to Anabel about this!” So again, through a six degrees kind of thing, you had totally put me on to the embodied gatherings that Resmaa Menakem was offering and that led me to discovering the wonderful Amber McZeal who talks about decolonizing the psyche. And oh my gosh, and so I was listening to her speak the other day, and she was talking about epistemicide, as in the genocide of knowledge, the genocide of cultural knowledge specifically in relation to what she was speaking about, and just went “phewwwwf!” [sighs] The genocide of knowledge, the genocide of your knowledge, of your knowing, of your intuitive knowing, your wisdom, and that just I mean… that’s exactly what we were talking about the other day, this idea of the process of approaching somatics from an Indigenous perspective versus how we are taught in much of the pedagogy of somatics training programs… just what we were saying before about how when we met each other… that really touches on a place where this intuitive knowing and wisdom isn’t being honoured. It’s being devalued and historically that being able to be in touch with your own spiritual, cultural knowledge… when that is removed and erased and taken away from you, that over time, that can feel like a sense of loss, and breaking in the spiritual process. 

So, I was just reflecting on the conversation we had, because I think that we were both talking about this, but what I was saying was that a lot of my practices, spiritual somatic practices that I have been re-engaging over the past few years have been culminating to re-establishing that connection. Of remembering for myself, a remembering of that kind of intuitive wisdom in my bones, but putting that back together, this kind of fractured parts of self, and that it’s such a huge piece in this spiritual journey, which is essentially the practice of somatics. Being able to really self-validate my process of knowing for what’s happening inside my body in relationship to the world, and it’s been so eroded from systemic institutions, socially, historically, family lineage, intergenerational trauma for so long that it became a point where I was first starting to engage in my own spiritual knowledge that it was so difficult to accept. It was as if I was looking to receive validation or permission, it was as if my own knowing or my connection with my own ancestor, my own people, was something I would question often, “Is this actually happening? Is this actually my knowing?”. And it was just like “wow! This is what happens,” this is now even to the point where I’m looking for this information, I’m still so steeped in this kind of response, I’ve been groomed into this response of belittling it, of doubting it, of not believing quite in it, of looking externally for validation. 

Once I realized, no, that is me needing to be invested in the deconstruction of my own personal colonization, this is how I engage in the re-Indigenization of--- this is me coming into contact with my own intuitive felt sense of wisdom within myself. And with support, with support of spiritual elders, more time in community, consistent communications, expanding my spiritual literacy was very important for me to develop the strength of my relationship and this aspect of what I needed to create balance spiritually in my life to get me back in touch with my own knowledge. And I think that that is such a huge piece for me at least that I’ve come across working with other Black folks, other racialized folks, and for myself, is that reconnection with self, to your own internal wisdom and knowing. And that comes through being able to be reconnected spiritually, ancestrally. So yeah, sorry, I feel like I just said a lot there, like I went on a journey within a journey. But that’s what my process was, and that’s what it makes me think of, when you say that.

Anabel: Yes, what is being alive other than connecting to your felt sense of inner knowing? 

Camille: And when that gets taken away, when that gets eroded, how difficult that becomes of over time, to be able to trust the self. I think that with a lot of reasons why I believe folks are drawn to the practice of somatics, or re-engaging it, is to re-establish a felt sense of connection within the body, with oneself, of trust within trusting the body… How can it feel like a safe place again? And yet, there’s this really big piece around the practice of somatics that… I don’t know, in a lot of formal pedagogy I’m unable to find the support of how me, in my body, I get to come into full connection with my wisdom. And the piece that was missing was the ancestral piece, that piece of intuitive wisdom and knowledge and where that comes from. 

Anabel: It requires probably a different level of accountability when sacredness is brought in, and I think that requires a whole paradigm shift. So probably most programs are like “uh I don’t think we can do an entire paradigm shift, so maybe we won’t do that part” but that part is… and it’s true, it’s a long-term project, but it won’t really reach you on a deeper soul kind of level. It’s so important for people to trust that there’s so much more knowing beyond formal education, to say the least. But there’s so much fear and this really intense terror that exists when we try to trust that inner knowing or that felt sense, but yeah, I loved the way that you are really working with trust in a way that also holds space for trauma.

Camille: With the right people, with the right support, in the right way, we can bring in cultural attunement and like you said, sacredly honouring the historic value of that for many folks in which this kind of severing or erasure of that has taken place for so long. And understanding that many people have you know, are still interested and have been still preserving that connection. I think that until we make a little more space, as you articulated, that it’s a larger paradigm shift in these larger institutional ways. But in the meantime, the support we have in community space, and with one another, that we can start addressing that, start including that. Because I think that it’s so important for folks who are interested and willing to be able to have a space that honours this sacredness of that intuitive knowing. 

And it’s such a difference for space is held for me when somebody is holding space and telling me “you already know this,” “it’s in your bones,” “it’s not something you have to go out and learn and be validated that you’ve done it the “right” way, it’s within you.” There’s something so powerful about this idea that I already have this intrinsic connection. Oh, there’s something in me that’s powerful, there’s something intuitive and wise already here, and I just need to practice a little bit more how to become more attuned to it. And I think that that was such a big piece for me that had been missing long ago and over time I’ve been creating more space for and attuning to and practicing. In the meantime, that’s a place with the right folks and the right way and the right communities and all of those things that we have… the work that’s available for us to do in the somatic kind of space. And again, also acknowledging that our Indigenous peoples, our ancestors, have already been doing somatics for centuries and these practices already exist, and much of which have been borrowed or essentially taken to create these pedagogies that have now been repackaged and resold to us and the “right” way of how we engage in somatics. But a lot of these are derived from cultural, spiritual practices that have existed from time, and that still exist and still are being practiced, but we just may not have as strong of a relationship to.