Prentis Hemphill
“Resilience is not just about what we do when things get hard. Resilience is our birthright, it is our natural state, what it means to be alive and living. We practice resilience because it honors life and is the antidote to the confusion and conditions that have created these crises we are living through.”
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 generative somatics, 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 You are Your Best Thing edited by Brené 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 third season in 2022. Finding Our Way entered the iTunes Top 100 podcasts chart in its first week and has over 450k downloads to date.
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, their child, and two dogs, on land first loved and stewarded by the Saponi people and near where Prentis’ ancestors first arrived to Turtle Island.
Website: https://prentishemphill.com/