I respectfully acknowledge that the lands where I work and reside (New York City) are the ancestral homelands of the Lenape and Canarsee people. I take to heart the longstanding significance of these lands for the Lenape and Canarsee nations past and present. I honor with gratitude the land itself and the native stewards of this land who were violently displaced as a result of European settler colonialism over the course of 400 years. I pay respect to Elders past, present and emerging, to the Ancestors, and to the profound wisdom and beauty of the land that holds, sustains and homes me.

I acknowledge and honor as well that the lands on which I was born and raised, the lands that have shaped me from the inside out, and that I believe have called me to Biodynamic Craniosacral Therapy through resonant origins (the state of Kansas) are the ancestral homelands of the Arapaho, Cheyenne, Comanche, Kansa, Kiowa, Osage, Pawnee, and Wichita nations. I also acknowledge and honor the Cherokee, Chippewa, Delaware, Iowa, Iroquois, Kaskaskia, Kickapoo, Munsee, Ottawa, Peoria, Piankashaw, Potawatomi, Quapaw, Sac and Fox, Shawnee, Stockbridge, Wea, and Wyandot nations who after 1830 were displaced from their ancestral homelands and given land in the area today known as Kansas.

I believe that historical awareness of Indigenous exclusion, erasure and cultural appropriation is critically important. I am committed to healing from the violence of European settler colonialism and working to overcome their effects and my contribution to them in my personal life and professional practice.

In addition to acknowledging that I live and thrive on stolen land, I am commited to giving a minimum of 1% of my annual salary to Voluntary Land Taxes.

As a white, cis, middle-class, able-bodied, college educated, non-immigrant woman, I am in the processes of learning, listening, building awareness and consciously undoing the biases and oppressive thoughts and behaviors that come with the conditioning of my social position and family system. I am grateful to Grace Sanghyun Nam, a fellow Brooklyn Waldorf School parent for her gentle, yet persistent shepherding of my husband and I towards the People’s Institute of Survival and Beyond’s (PISAB) Undoing Racism workshop of February 2020 led by Milta Vega-Cardona, David Peters, Trish Farley and Grace.

To say that this workshop was transformative for me only begins to scratch the surface of the self-examining, reckoning and healing that it has set in motion in the deepest layers of my being and ancestral matrix. One of the areas I began to examine the most following the workshop were the values, attitudes and culture of my somatic practices which at the time were predominantly centered in the teaching and practice of the Alexander Technique.

Prior to the PISAB workshop, I was aware that the Alexander Technique was both white-led and predominantly practiced by white people, but I was not able to identify and articulate the extensive how's and why’s of that, nor was I able to identify the deeper layers of how I was perpetuating white supremacy and other oppressive, body norms baked into the culture of the Technique. I was able to see F.M. Alexander as a racist, sexist, colonial, cis, white man, but I saw his technique (passed on to me mostly through white, cis women), and myself and my teaching as differentiated from those things. It was only after the PISAB workshop that I could see the work and my own normative biases more clearly. I then began a deep and detailed process that continues to this day to undo white supremacy and other normative oppressions living in my body, myself, my movement, my ancestry and in my teaching and healing practices.

As my journey into healing expands and deepens with the study of Biodynamic Craniosacral Therapy, I take this commitment to reducing harm, supporting, and loving all expressions of body and life force with me. I acknowledge that although what I am learning of BCST today has been codified by white men such as William Garner Sutherland, Roland Becker and Franklyn Sills, through A.T. Stills “the father of osteopathy”, the lineage of Biodynamic Craniosacral Therapy is intertwined with Native North American healing practices particularly those of the Shawnee and Cherokee First Nations peoples. I’m committed to learning more of and from these roots and uplifting them as an essential nature of this practice.

You can read the statement from BCTA/NA regarding BCST’s lineage here.

And further read the article by Ruti Wagaki, on decolonizing the practice of BCST here.

People, Workshops, Trainings and Projects that have influenced my own social justice healing work.

1. Vega-Cardona, Milta, et al. “Undoing Racism Workshop.” People’s Institute for Survival and Beyond. 8 Feb. 2020, Brooklyn, New York

2. Ndefo, Nkem, and Dr. Rae Johnson. “Embodied Activism.” Embodied Philosophy, 2020. www.embodiedphilosophy.org/embodied-activism

3. SURJ. “A Home for White People Working for Justice.” Showing Up For Racial Justice , 21 June 2021. www.showingupforracialjustice.org/

4. Williams, Rev. Angel Kyodo, et al. “OUR VISION.” Embodied Social Justice Summit, 2021. www.embodiedsocialjusticesummit.com/our-vision

5. Williams, Rev. angel Kyodo, et al. “EMBODIED SOCIAL JUSTICE CERTIFICATE.” THE EMBODY LAB, 2021 www.theembodylab.com/embodied-social-justice-certi cate

6. Carson, Ariel; Einstein, Tracy; MacDonald, Alice; White-Ayón, Sarah . “Undoing White Supremacy in the Alexander Technique.” 1st edition. e-book. (project in process).

Rev angel Kyodo williams, Sebene Selassie, Lama Rod Owens, Tich Naht Hahn, Resmaa Menakem, Milta Vega-Cardona, Nkem Ndefo, Dr. Sará King, Dr. Rae Johnson, adrienne marie brown, Prentis Hemphill, Francis Weller, Staci K. Haines, Buddhism, Taoism, Traditional Chinese Medicine, bell hooks, Audre Lorde, Angela Davis, Tara Brach, Sonya Renee Taylor, Shamanism, Yoruba Religion, Lewis Mehl-Madrona, Susan Raffo, Pyeng Threadgill, Luciana Achugar, Antonio Ramos, Alexander Technique Liberation Project, Non-Violent Communication