Prentiss Hemphill: Body Centered Healing and Justice

Teacher, embodiment coach, writer and an experienced group and conflict facilitator, who holds the importance of intimate, body centered transformation as a key to healing and key to justice.

Prentis Hemphill (They/Them) is unearthing the connections between healing, community accountability and our most inspired visions for social transformation. Prentis is a therapist, somatics teacher and facilitator, political organizer, writer and the founder of The Embodiment Institute. For over 10 years, Prentis has been working with individuals and organizations during their most challenging moments of change; navigating leadership transitions, conflict, and realigning practice with values. All of this Prentis does through an embodied approach, ensuring that our intentions and ideas can be lived out and practiced in our lives and through our bodies. 

Before founding The Embodiment Institute, Prentis was the Healing Justice Director at Black Lives Matter Global Network and a lead somatics teacher with generativesomatics, an organization committed to bringing politicized somatics to movement building, and Black Organizing for Leadership and Dignity (BOLD), a group dedicated to rebuilding Black movement infrastructure, for the past seven years. Prentis holds a M.A. in Clinical Psychology and has worked in low cost mental health clinics offering therapeutic services to marginalized people. In 2016, Prentis was awarded the Buddhist Peace Fellowship Soma Award for community work inspired by Buddhist thought. 

Prentis’ work has been featured in the New York Times, Huffington Post, and Shondaland. Prentis is a contributor to The Politics of Trauma by Staci K. Haines as well as the upcoming You are Your Best Thing edited by Brene Brown and Tarana Burke and Holding Change by adrienne maree brown. Prentis is the host and creator of the popular podcast, Finding Our Way entering its second season in Jan. 2021. Finding Our Way entered the iTunes Top 100 podcasts chart in its first week. 

Fundamentally their work is to disrupt the complacency and comfort of mainstream healing and therapeutic models and infuse what we know of justice, repair and accountability into our deepest work of transformation. Their belief is that the reclamation of feeling and relationship makes room for justice in our lives and in our world. 

Prentis currently lives on a small farm in Durham, NC with their partner, Kasha and their three dogs, on land first loved and stewarded by the Saponi people and near where Prentis’ ancestors first arrived to Turtle Island.  

“The kind of change we are after is cellular as well as institutional, is personal and intimate, is collective as well as cultural. We are making love synonymous with justice.”

PrentisHemphill.com

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