Stella Wren Ramos Says There's A Better Way To Be Productive

Let me start this by saying, it was a hot and sexy summer 2023. I have been dancing, I have been swimming, I’ve been playing basketball and so much more! As the heat wanes, work has started to pick up again which means that cortisol levels are getting a little high, I'm not gonna lie. I’m looking forward to the cool down but it also makes me nervous as I tend to spend less time outdoors movin’ and groovin’.

Just as I started to get worried, here came an email from the Feminist Center for Creative Work announcing a Soft Skills Summer School workshop with dear friend Stella Wren Ramos. The title “Somatic Approaches to Organizational Systems” intrigued me immediately and I signed up for the Zoom meeting almost immediately.

A week later, I signed on to a video chat room with people from all over the country, and dare I say the world with whom I shared the same curiosity. As soon Stella began to speak I could see the eyes of fellow students, in their respective digital boxes, light up at what she shared. We spoke about the importance of listening to the body’s response to work and the environment in which said work is practiced. So many resources were shared and a whole new world opened in front of me. I thought to myself “Of course there is a more sustainable way for me to do things!”. To say the least, I found this course life-changing. Today, I find myself using what I learned and I think so many of us need those skills to live better and healthier lives around and outside of work.

After the workshop, I received the prompt from byline for this month's edition and it was so clear I had to feature this significant experience so I hit up Stella to talk some more.

Here is a transcript from our recent exchanges!

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Sacha Medjo: Thanks for agreeing to interview with me today. I learned so much at your “Somatic Approaches to Organizational Systems” workshop and truly admire you for your beautiful way of teaching. I’m super excited for you to share your journey to creating this workshop and a bit about yourself. Let’s start with a little intro.

Stella Wren Ramos: My name is Stella Ramos, and my pronouns are she/her/hers. I’m originally from Seattle, Washington, and moved to Los Angeles in 2017 to attend Occidental College — where I graduated in 2020, studying Religious Studies + Environmental Ethics with a focus on Indigenous Futurity and Subverting Settler-Colonialism.

Sacha: These are such cool areas of study. My current work intertwines those last 3 subjects, I’d love to talk about this more post-interview! More importantly, it seems like you juggled a lot at school. I’m curious to see how this mindset transferred into your present life. Could you tell us a bit about your current work setup?

Stella: I joined the Feminist Center for Creative Work (FCCW) team in 2020 as the Programming + Press Intern, and have stayed on since in my positions as Programming Manager and Administrative Assistant. Both roles require a lot of creating, managing, and producing — which relies heavily on flexible and abundant organizational and administrative systems. Luckily, I love organization, and I joke often now that I’m a Professional Virgo, as I’ve been working additionally for 2+ years as a Studio Manager and Creative Assistant with individual artists and creatives, which was a natural progression from my work with organizations such as FCCW. My goal through this work is to support the logistical frameworks, creative visions, and long-term dreams of artists and creatives with an efficient, generous, and grounding approach!

Sacha: I love the term Professional Virgo for you. It’s interesting how nowadays, more and more people have their hands in many bags. I too have a day job accompanied by other ongoing gigs, like writing for byline wink wink. For me, this means that I’ve spent a lot of time focusing my mind on certain tasks without including my body in the processes and recently it’s started to come back and bite me. That’s what led me to your course. I had heard about somatic relationships in the body but had never truly explored them. What is your personal history with somatic practices?

Stella: My creative work is as a writer and dancer. Growing up dancing lent me towards having a strong connection with the embodiment of feelings and how my mind and body connect, and I became passionate about learning more about the intrinsic relationship between emotional states and physical experiences from this. I'd say my personal, creative, and professional pursuits are all now pretty entangled with somatics in how I problem-solve, conceptualize feelings and information, and approach the world around me.

Sacha: Mmm I see… And how did this lead you to design the course?

Stella: When I was encouraged by my wonderful colleague and friend Mandy Harris-Williams to approach this Professional Development workshop, I spent a lot of time thinking about what types of organizational or systems-based training or workshops are widely offered, and how I could approach the topic in a way that felt personal and nuanced. The actual moment of realizing the angle I wanted to take came from a phone call with my mom after I got out of a dance class. As I was discussing my compulsive list-making habit and talking through it with her, I realized the emotional impact of organizational systems in my personal life, and from there went down a massive rabbit hole on how our nervous systems, which are somatic-based, are entangled with how we approach systems of organization.

Sacha: Yes! I had a lightbulb moment during the workshop when observing how different tasks can affect my anxiety and how the anxiety then might manifest itself as a stomach ache or sudden sweating. You also mentioned something called “Felt Theory” which spoke to me while reading over the resources you provided. Could you give the readers a quick breakdown?

Stella: I first encountered Felt Theory in an Indigenous Feminisms course in college, through the writing of Dr. Dian Million, and it sparked a strong resonance and curiosity in me. This work addresses how personal narratives, in this context particularly Native American women's personal felt experiences, are defined by emotions. We don't just think about our histories, we feel them. This model subverts the dominant mode of approaching scholarship in academia, and the ways settler-colonialism is implicated in scholarship. It also introduces a significant model for asserting the powerful truths located in the mind-body connection.

Sacha: Amazing, thanks! And I want to add here some more people and references from whom you’ve drawn this wonderful knowledge for the readers to check out.

Prentis Hemphill

Marie Michael

Leah Lakshmi Pipezna-Samarasinha

Generative Somatics

Embodied Liberation

Now we know how somatic exploration came into your life and it’s made me curious about how the practice is intertwined with social issues encountered in daily life.

Stella: Systems of oppression rely on severing the connection we have with our bodies and creating a system of hierarchy based on the division between “mental” and “embodied,” attempting to systematically devalue “traditional Indigenous ways of knowing” which include the felt, the spiritual, the collective, and the embodied. This attempt can not be separated from the project of settler-colonialism*, which seeks to “destroy to replace.” The attempted systematic devaluing of centering somatics, or internal physical perception, experience, and knowledge, is a project of settler-colonialism.

Through somatics, we can assert body knowledge as an equally valuable form of information and guidance to that of mind knowledge (which can never really be fully separated from the body, although this can be felt as a result of dissociation which is a coping mechanism for state violence). Dismantling oppressive systems includes engaging with the body and the techniques we need to learn to collectively respond to social and political injustice — which has a deep and profound impact on the body. Somatic work is really integral to movement-building and has key overlapping organizing politics with all liberatory and abolitionist movement work — including recognizing worth outside of capitalist notions of productivity. *Settler colonialism does not refer to a moment in time, but a structure of enduring and intentional social orders and ideological processes reproduced to continue this logic.

Sacha: See, that’s what I’m talking about! I feel and see that the way we work now is more often than not embedded in the continuation of colonialism. This whole idea of the mind having power over the body and the dismissal of ancestral indigenous knowledge has always incorporated human life as a whole. Wow, wow, wow… I want to encourage people reading this to explore their journey with somatics. What are some essential questions that you think are worth asking oneself when beginning?

Stella: Why are you approaching this work (What's your liberatory goal or desired trajectory? What would you like this to move you closer to? Where in your body do you feel different emotions (joy, relaxation, excitement, contentment, frustration, fear, sadness, shame, etc.)?

What are the body-centered care or grounding practices you already rely on (these might be as intentional as taking a cold shower when feeling out-of-body or as passive as drinking warm coffee in the morning)?

What's your most common nervous-system response and where in your life + work do you see this activating?

Sacha: Great questions! I’m going to use them too. Final question for you: What are some tips and tricks you can give our readers?

Stella: My best overarching tip is to be incredibly open, soft, and generous with yourself through somatics-work, and to remain curious as you do lots of intake into your mind and body and start locating all the spaces of connection between the two in your life. I've found breathwork to be a really gentle way to approach this and a particularly beneficial body-based interruption to have in my toolkit (some of my other favorites are cold water, sunshine, comforting textures, or pleasant tastes). Moving through life open to and interested in somatics has shifted a lot of the way I simply take note of and meet different emotional experiences across my life (as simple as the Sunday scaries or as complex as heartbreak). Building a community around this life approach, through conversation and storytelling about somatics, as well as the support structures in my life such as friends, family, and therapy being rooted in this world with me, have really pushed me along and held me through this often challenging, but always beneficial, approach.

Sacha: Thank you so much, Stella! Readers, below are some more resources from the course and a photo of Stella’s newly released Zine titled Touched like a Solid Thing which she recently showed at the Printed Matter LA Art Book Fair. You can purchase it by reaching out directly to her or me!