EP 190 - Somatic Futures: Speculations of Embodiment - Rodney Frederickson

 
 

A conversation with Rodney Frederickson who is a design futurist, abstract artist, storyteller, philosopher, game designer, martial artist and an occasional poet about his case for somatic futures.

Interviewed by: Peter Hayward

More about Rodney

Transcript

Peter Hayward: The term design futures has crept into our lexicon over the years. And nowadays someone can say they are design futurist and we can all nod our heads like we understand what they mean. But do we.? Do design futurist's, just make the future same safer by extending the present into it. Or can they embrace or even love uncertainty?

Rodney Frederickson: I'd never thought that before. So I feel like there was something about this notion of falling in love with uncertainty, along with the practices of painting, like I'm doing the alchemy during the day, and these little drop ins of these futures are little pinholes in the ceiling where the light can come in a little bit.

And the more I went into learning about futures and signals and drivers and, creating alternative futures, it dawned on me like, Oh, there's an alchemy here. I can weave this into my alchemy,

Peter Hayward: Hello, I'm Peter Hayward and that is my guest today on FuturePod Rodney Frederickson who is a design futurist, abstract artist, storyteller, philosopher, game designer, martial artist and an occasional poet.

Peter Hayward: Welcome to FuturePod, Rodney.

Rodney Frederickson: Thank you, Peter. It's great to be here.

Peter Hayward: Fantastic. I'm looking forward. I'm sure this will be a very interesting conversation.

Let's start with Rodney Story. How did you become a member of the Futures and Foresight community?

Rodney Frederickson: Yeah, I appreciate the question. As I highlighted in my “Where's the body? the case for a Somatic Futures” presentation to the JFS community of practice, Futures has always been in the periphery for me being a digital designer for over 23 plus years.

I had the Speculative Everything book when it came out. I had Bill Sharpe's three horizons book. But it (Futures) was on the side, just out of curiosity. but it wasn't until, I went to the Omega Institute in Rhinebeck, New York, as a personal retreat to heal from some of the trauma of a car accident that happened prior to the passing of my father and I was looking to just not so much get away, but just to go deeper in.

And the word that kept coming up for me was, I need to go create. So as an abstract painter, what I mostly brought with me was art supplies, journals. And I was like let me bring a little thin book. So I was like, oh, Bill Sharpe's Three Horizons. I had already read it, but let me bring it with me.

And I feel like that juxtaposition of healing, being in an environment that I'd never, Been before, it was a huge campus next to a forest, there was a lake, there was a cafeteria, a library. There was a type of place where you can join programs or you can create your own. So my personal retreat schedule was wake up, Zazen (zen meditation), go eat, come back, paint, go do some Ashtanga yoga - if I could grab a studio, go to the Ram Dass library, read, study, write, lunch, go to the Zen stone little meditation building there, go meditate again. It was this rigorous schedule of this inner work that was happening. And out of the blue one day, the phrase “Design Futures” had just came to me.

And my initial reaction was to dismiss it because I was like, I'm not here to think about work or career or anything else except to just create. But after a few moments of trying to push it away, I became a little suspicious and I was like, wait a minute, I'm here doing all this inner work and these deep practices and this little whisper comes up out of the blue? I was like, maybe I should hold on to this a little bit. Maybe there's something here. So my way of leaning into it was to, let me take a Coursera course on future thinking. Let me try it out. Let me see if this is a passing fancy or if there's something here.

So I would do one of the courses and learn about signals and drivers. And just intuitively, I felt like the snowball is picking up snow as it's rolling down the hill - there’s something here. I don't know what it is, but there's something about this design futures. So after my stay, after about a week, I go back to work and at my job, I tell my coach, I said, this phrase design futures came up for me and she has said, Oh, you got to talk to my friend, Phil Balagtas.

I said, who's that? He's a futurist. And he was a co founder of the design futures initiative. I'm like, Oh, what's that? And so long story short, I reached out to him, introduced myself. He's Oh, I know Susan. She's a good friend of mine. He happened to be running a facilitating futures workshop. So myself and another colleague from work attended, it was a two day virtual event.We did that.

And that's when it hit me. I was like, I need to dive into this deeper. And then the Designing Sustainable Futures program had come out, the first of its kind, it was hosted by a Institute of the Future and POLI.Design out of Italy. But when I looked at the price and I was like, Oh, this is almost like four or five grand -is it worth it? What am I doing? But my gut was telling me like any trepidation that I'm feeling - if I was driving down the street, this is a yield sign, not a stop sign.You can't see what's on the other side of this until you pass through it. And I dove in and that eight weeks was just, life changing.

Peter Hayward: There's a lot to step back and unpack there, looking back at prior Rodney, what do you think that was about? In other words, when you were doing the inner work, why did this notion of the importance of futures emerge from that?

Rodney Frederickson: That's a really great question. To give you some context of me, because I feel that this is what attracted me to futures, on the surface, I've been an information architect, interaction designer, creative director, I’m a certified bartender -but I don't drink, I'm a martial artist -I help teach kids sometimes. I've designed my own original abstract strategy games. I've used the DJ music. So all these things on the surface look very disparate, very not related, but it wasn't until my thirties when I tried to trace back the thread and the continual persistent thread was alchemy.

I'm always drawn to things where I can take things that are very different -it could be an idea, it could be an herb, it could be sounds or visuals, and put them in the pot, so to speak, stir it and create something new and be created anew along the way. That’s the transformation piece. So I feel like when I was reading Bill Sharpe's Three Horizons, I had an epiphany one day. He was describing H1, H2, H3, whatever, and again, I'd read the book before. But I challenged myself - If somebody came up to me and it was like, okay, Mr. Design Futures, what is it that you do? What had come up for me? It was like I would probably say, “I help you fall in love with uncertainty.”

And I'd never thought that before. So I feel like there was something about this notion of falling in love with uncertainty, along with the practices of painting, like I'm doing the alchemy during the day, and these little drop ins of these futures are like little pinholes in the ceiling where the light can come in a little bit.

And the more I went into learning about futures and signals and drivers and, creating alternative futures, it dawned on me like, Oh, there's an alchemy here. I can weave this into my alchemy, and which led me to getting certified at the Houston University Foresight Program Bootcamp, doing the Foresight Essentials Program at Institute of the Future, meeting and talking to Sohail Inayatullah and Jake Dunagan and all these people.

My interest was never to become a futurist per se. or a so called foresight practitioner. I wanted to learn the alchemy from different perspectives to find out where it breaks and to weave it into my alchemy. So yeah, I think that's the long winded answer.  

Peter Hayward: One of the things I learned, Rodney and I, is this paradox of Uncertainty and control, that quite naturally we think the future is better if we have a measure of control over it. If there is certainty then there is no emergence, there is no novelty, there is no freedom. If the future is writ, or can be controlled, or foreseen, then nothing you do really matters.

Rodney Frederickson: What I love about that is what's coming to mind.I think there's a term in Taoism called Wu Wei and I could be saying it wrong. Sometimes it's translated as effortless where it's less of a sense of a willfulness and more of a sense of allowing. And I feel like from my experiences as a self taught abstract artist, as a designer and my involvement in my 20s and Zen and Sufism and martial arts and yoga and all these things, that has become more prominent for me, the sense of allowing and serving. So coming out of the Omega Institute and when I was at my job and taking these classes on futures and I started and I built a design futures team, which had never done been done at this firm, people would ask me what is it that you're doing? And the only answer I would say is, I'm serving the whisper. I'm just serving the whisper that came to me at Omega. And I was talking to Sohail about this, and he said, what a beautiful metaphor you have, man. You're serving the whisper. He said there it is.

Peter Hayward: lovely. Lovely. So let's, if you're comfortable, can we just push a bit into some of your favored deep approaches, philosophies for doing the work. What would you like to talk to the community about at a kind of, philosophical, methodological, epistemological, ontological kind of level about Rodney and about what Rodney does?

Rodney Frederickson: Yeah, I love the question. And on the side note, Why I love this question was I was pursuing my degree in philosophy at Rutgers University and a minor in English would have focused on literary theory. So I love this part of the conversation as well.

When I came to futures and I was working with a somatic experiencing practitioner, It was counterintuitive in the sense that I would be sharing about a hard moment or a traumatic event with a car accident. And I remember one time she said to me, Rodney, could you could you pause and scan what's happening in your body because your words are speeding up?

And that was foreign to me because I had done therapy before to heal, but never had someone interject and call attention for me to see what's happening in my body. Through all the years of meditation and martial arts and yoga and all these things, this was new territory. Over time, I realized Somatic experiencing uses the imagination to help regulate the nervous system.

So it's not only, hey, what's happening in your body, but also for example - “if you could go back to what happened, who would you like to have been with you when it happened?” Oh, my grandmother. Again, the imagination to regulate my nervous system in the moment. Getting into futures, I realized  oh, futures is using imagination to speculate what might happen, probably what might happen, what I want to happen, and so forth.

And I remember when that dawned on me, I held up both hands and I interlocked my fingers, and I was like, I see these things coming together. There's an affect here to doing this work. Like whether you've watched Aliens the movie, and you've seen the thing pop out the guy's chest, and was like “oh my goodness!”, like whatever that reaction was, that same attention to the affect is a natural territory when it comes to healing - healing from memories and traumas and so forth. But we know from neuroscience that the same area of the brain that's used for memory is also used for speculating or foresight. So it dawned on me, how come that same attention isn't on what's happening in the body when we're imagining what might happen?

So I think the affect, but also seeing sensation as an inroad to what's informing our imagination. Sometimes I'll use the example - imagine you have a foresight delivery in the morning and your team has to work on it in a few hours. Team A has not slept at all. Team B has had a full night's sleep. Which team would you want?

Of course you'd say I want team B, but why? If this is all about futures thinking, why would you not want the team who has not had a good night's sleep? It's yeah because we know what it feels like to not have a good night's sleep, and sometimes it interferes, whatever, and then I would say, this is what I mean - it’s all about body!

But somehow we’ve ended up here with not considering the “body” as a whole, and I get it. Perhaps because in the field’s history, perhaps in the scope and motivation for who the work is for, organizations, governments, and so forth, I get it. I feel like the more this urge to democratize this type of stuff, the more important it is to descend from the macro level view. I feel like Stuart Candy and Jake Dunagan, with the ushering in of Design Futures started to bring it down from the level of scenario to the scene, to the artifact, to people's lives. I feel like it's such a rich opportunity to bring back consideration for the whole person in the room. I facilitated a gazillion ideation workshops, design thinking, and now some futures workshops and so forth, and I feel like sometimes, at least some of the futures stuff I've talked to folks about, you can take for granted that this is such a paradigm shift for people raised on clock time.

It's almost like saying the earth isn't flat, it's round. It's what do you mean there isn't one future, there are multiple futures? What do you, why are you putting S at the end of future? Like, why are you making it plural? But that understanding, or I like to say that sediment, hasn't hardened just at the cognitive level, at level - our whole lives have been shaped by that way of orientation. In the way we move, in the way we speak, that economic model of Capitalism has shaped us.

What's been coming up for me as an abstract artist, is that I know the visceral experience of emergence. Diving into the blank canvas, not knowing what I'm going to do or what's going to happen and seeing it unfold over time. Also seeing what's happening to me along the way.

I've also had a taste of that in design as well. Although geared towards solving a problem. So coming to futures work and even learning about it, there was something about it that felt sterile in the methodologies and the frameworks. I like to say, “..as if it's only happening or needs to happen from the neck up”

I've facilitated some Futures exercises or workshops at my previous job at Prophet and I've seen people cry while imagining a certain scenario having to do with children. And yet again, there's nothing in the framework outside of saying this is “provocative” that can hold that space, acknowledging and support that emerging story and offer a way to work with that story to weave into the bigger narratives we're exploring. Also to shine a light on what's happening to the person, what's happening in that interaction with each other.We're changing, and there's a ripple effect from there.

Peter Hayward: Can I ask you, Rodney, as a practitioner, that. Obviously, very interested, centrally interested in this notion of the body and what's in the body and is the body present. You've been working this way for a length of time, not just in futures. Is it getting easier or harder to move to basically encourage people to move into their bodies? Are people getting a more open to the idea? is the clock time, can you slow the clock down to let people do it? or is in fact it's getting harder as things speed up?

Rodney Frederickson: I appreciate the question, the people I have come across, whether in person or even virtually, who've heard me talk about this, what have you, It feels like, one, there's an appetite to bring a wholeness into the room. And I feel like it's easier in some ways because the feedback that I get, even from Foresight students, who are working on their degrees and this stuff, is “..this feels so right, this resonates with me, I suspected that there was something that leaned too much on the cerebral side with this work.”

I feel like when I gave that presentation at JFS, that was the first time I ever packaged my thoughts about the role of the body in Futures, my story, and shared it. It was always just one on one conversations. And honestly, I didn't have enough confidence in my point of view because I was new to all of this. But I saw something, and the more I shared it with people the feedback was always the same, “you're onto something here, keep going” “I can't wait to see where this ends up”, “You're just at the beginning, man, keep going.” To answer your question, I feel like there is a receptivity to what I’m sharing about with people playing in these spaces.

Peter Hayward: Can I just follow on, Rodney, cause there's another. Question, and this is not the but type question. Sure. You've also said that trauma is in the body.

Rodney Frederickson: Yes.

Peter Hayward: And not events. So trauma might be event based, but is felt, is with us, it travels with us. Yes. When you invite people to, get in touch with their body, then you're also not encouraging them, but you're also letting them possibly re encounter their traumas that they're carrying. So how, as a caring professional, do you both encourage people to use their body, but also provide structure and support in case trauma turns up?

Rodney Frederickson: I love that question and I'll use an example. I was invited by Rutgers, after a couple of my Design Futures workshops with the students at their IDEA academy, to be a guest speaker last summer at their Community of practice for collaboration or something - basically how the university partners with nonprofits. The director asked me to be a guest speaker and speak about some of the workshops I was doing with the students.

So I came to this breakfast meeting and one, he never told me there were going to be 51 people there (lol) - all these non profit leaders, and I was the only guest speaker. I asked the question, “how many people are familiar with Futures of Foresight?”and two people raised their hand. I was like, okay, let me level set at the beginning. So I walked through trying to explain it all and I shared my perspective on the body and so forth. And this woman who was executive director of a non profit, she said, How do you do this work with the youth whose values are skewed?

And I thought to myself, what? (lol) So I gently said to her, what do you mean by skewed? And I could see she was careful with her words. And she said marginalized communities, not enough resources and so forth. And I said, okay, I get it. And I said, one, how can we create a safe space to make those values explicit and explore it safely? What's happening in the bodies of these kids? Some of them might have trauma history, so how can we hold space to gently allow them to explore. I held up my hand and I said, “think of this folks on the right hand side. Here's the stories we tell about ourselves, about what's happening in the world and so forth. As we slide out to the left, here are our behaviors related to these stories. Here are our thoughts. Here's our feelings and so forth. Polyvagal theory says, keep going. There's more. This sense of neuroception. That our autonomous nervous system is looking for cues of safety and danger all the time, but it's typically beneath our awareness.”

So I said, “how many times have you met somebody for the first time? And you realize you're about to tell them your whole life story. You just feel so comfortable for some reason, or the opposite. Sometimes you met somebody for the first time and something in you tells you, you just got to get away. Something doesn't feel right with this person.”

So I share that Peter, because a couple days after that speaking engagement, a woman who was there wrote me an email, said, Hey, I wanted to thank you. That was great. And I said, Oh, okay. What resonated with you? She said, “I hope you're really asking. Here's my thesis or whatever.” And she wrote me this huge long email, super personal. And in it, she said, “When you were talking about the body, she said, even remembering you talking about it, tears come to my eyes because I realized. Of all the shit I've been suppressing that I really need to get in contact with. So I'm so grateful for the nudge. And I went and shared this with my son who was going through a hard time in Indiana” Just reading it, I had tears in my eyes, like I was so moved.

So I feel like one thing that I learned from somatic experiencing, which I hadn't thought of before - it was a paradigm shift for me, was the perspective that you don't have to re experience the trauma to heal from it. You could just dip your toe in it. You don't have to “get it out.” That was new for me. You could just do a little bit and work with that and take care of your nervous system along the way.

So lastly I'll say, At the end of the speaking engagement, a woman, older woman, she was older than me and I'm 53, she came up to me and she told me when you were talking about trauma, I remember when I was a little girl growing up in Puerto Rico and the big cars with the big bucket seats, I was in there with my family and some man lunged into the window and took my mom's purse, and it was so horrifying. Still to this day, I get in the car and I roll up the windows, and I lock the door, and she's like, “the trauma it never leaves you.”

So in that moment, something in me said, “nudge gently” because trauma can be reconciled. You can heal from it. So I asked her, have you ever done butterfly taps? And she said, no, what is that? I said, put your hands together back to back as if you're going to make a bird flying with your thumbs connecting. Now put both those hands on top of your chest and just gently tap one hand and the other next to your clavicle bone.

As she started doing that, she goes, “Oh my God, that feels so good.” And I said, “next time you're in a hard place. You can support yourself in this way.” So in that respect, I feel like there's opportunities where we can introduce small practices. Whether it's breath-work or movements or just listening in some ways. Where we don't have to try and fix somebody or heal somebody, but we can perhaps allow a cursory movement through what's emerging for somebody if they're touching, or coming close to some of those wounds in some way.

Peter Hayward: I hope you're enjoying the podcast. Future pod is a not-for-profit venture. We're able to do podcasts like this one because of our patrons. Like Dave Gooden, whose has been a long term patron. Thanks for the support, Dave. If you'd like to join Dave as a patron of the Pod. And please follow the Patreon link on our website. Now, back to the podcast.

Peter Hayward: Thanks, Rodney. It's lovely. Sure. I just want to pivot a little bit. The third question is about what in the world is Rodney paying attention to and why? I'm going to modify the question for you, just because it seems to make sense. Sure. What's your body paying attention to in the outside world?

Rodney Frederickson: I love that question. Hmm..

I find myself, especially on my walks with my daughter, she’s seven years old, I've always loved nature and trees and everything and through my Herbalism studies, just more attuned to just witnessing what's happening in the relationships in these little ecosystems. Whether it's watching a red tail hawk eat a squirrel and somehow there's something terrifyingly beautiful about it because it's just real and wrong. Or watching the way my cat came up and nudged against my leg like seven, eight times and me sensing something was wrong. And then a few minutes later, The earthquake in New Jersey and all throughout the East Coast that happened several weeks ago.

It’s about paying attention to these whispers, these sensations, the sense of emerging change happening right in front of me in my body and other people's bodies. The one thing that having gone through the somatic experiencing. I felt, I always felt I was empathic in some ways, but that just skyrocketed. Like I'm so much more aware of people's little subtle body languages, they're talking and smiling, but I'm also watching what are their hands doing the way they turn their head or their neck and same with animals. So I feel like I'm paying more attention to just trying to be open and clear. In Zen we say beginner's mind - just staying empty and open to what's happening.

I was at a stoplight and at my periphery, there was another car next to me, and I saw somebody kind of nodding their head, and I thought they were just moving to music, and I looked, and a guy had drumsticks. He was playing the steering wheel as if it was a drum. I was so shocked, because I'd never seen this before, I'd never even thought of anything like this, and my first thing was like, “oh my god, this is a signal, or maybe I'm just, maybe this is the thing now, and I'm just not aware of it.” And the light changed and he took the drumsticks and he put them in the visor and he drove off.

So not only was it great to witness that, but also that feeling in my body, like this excitement, like that discovery of something I'd never seen before. And I find myself more hungry for that more, looking - especially from an art perspective, looking for more materials, designs, compositions, going out in the world. So that's what my body's looking for.

Peter Hayward: Yeah.

Rodney Frederickson: Yeah.

Peter Hayward: I'm hearing there, Rodney this idea that, can we find small opportunities to become present in unusual ways that person with the, using the drumsticks on the wheel was hopefully driving safely, but was taking a moment where the environment paused him for him to then try and do something else to become more present just for a moment.

Rodney Frederickson: Sure. One of my wise friends, his name is Janaka, I remember a long time ago I had talked about the challenge of trying to be present especially in groups where if I felt like folks were not present, so forth. And then he challenged me and he said, “Presence never left you. What is this idea of trying to become present? It never left you.”

And these little shocks to the conception. Oh yeah. What am I identifying with when I say I'm not present? Is that a feeling? Or is it a lack of feeling? Is there a range from which I'm oscillating between that the idea of presence and not presence shows up in my vernacular, per se? And where'd I learn that from? Somebody teach me that? Did I just pick that up overhearing or “over-reading” something somewhere

Peter Hayward: care. I'm dying to hear how you answer the communication question. So how does Rodney explain to people what Rodney does, when they don't understand? What Rodney does

Rodney Frederickson: good question.

I really struggled with this initially, especially as I was creating the Design Futures team at my previous job and having to explain people what that meant and using the typical answer of “..it’s about anticipating and visioning and creating plausible, probable, possible futures” and not there's anything wrong with that. That's, very accurate.

At the Rutgers speaking engagement I did last summer, I had a name tag because the director asked me what's your title? And something in me said, “Ooh, there's an opening there. What is my title?” And immediately what came up for me was Design Futurist. So I was like, all right, let's experiment with that.

So I had the name tag, Rodney Frederickson, Design Futurist & Consultant. So people would look at it and say, “Design Futurist - what is that?” And I would practice saying different things. I'd be like, “my job is to help you fall in love with uncertainty. It's to help you expand your horizons of what might be. But also helping you learn to trust yourself in a deeper way.”

And something about that kind of felt like I was close, but it wasn't exactly it. And as time went on and after I did the last of my Design Futures workshops at Rutgers University for 2023 and coming into this new year, I would have these little epiphanies. I felt like I was on some Island somewhere away from some of “Futures” is currently practiced and understood. There’s Future Studies - research, academic, blah, blah, blah. There's Strategic foresight - applied application of that. There's Speculative Design - let's create something to make you think about what's happening or problematizing some issue,  Design Futures, Design Fiction, etc.

One of the things that I felt like they all have in common - it’s doing this futures work for somebody else, an organization. And there's a scope, there's parameters, there's an agenda, there's constraints. But I'm like, I feel like what I'm doing is somewhere out in the woods, parallel, but out in the woods, like I'm interested in challenging and inspiring creative growth through Art, Design and Futures. I feel like there's not only an alchemy within these three, there's also a hidden alchemy across these three. I feel like there's some hidden pool where the interplay between these three is rich for possibility. So me doing workshops at Rutgers University, doing some speaking engagements, doing these presentations and these writings, I’m in the area of exploration and experimenting.

I'm interested in non-linear ways of storytelling, like a good poem, like a good Basho zen poem is only a few words, but it's so evocative. It so allows somebody else to bring their lived experience to the story. How can we explore doing futures in that way without the constraint of or scope of doing it for an organization or government for them to make better decisions so they could perpetuate their own interests.

Is there an opportunity for creative growth and transformation doing this work? - I feel like there is. So long winded answer. I feel I've settled on, “I challenge and inspire creative growth through Art, Design and Futures.”

Peter Hayward: Lovely. Thanks, Rodney. So we're at the we're at the last question. How do you want to end this podcast?

Rodney Frederickson: Yeah. Thank you. Um, one, I'd like to begin the ending with just gratitude for you and the work that you've been doing with this podcast and availing me the opportunity to share this time with you. So I want to start off with that. It's been the last several years have been beautifully challenging at times. I thought I was going out of my mind. All these ideas and some people not really understanding what I'm talking about because I'm pulling from so many different disciplines organically. That's just how I think. Yeah, but I'd like to lean in a little bit is what I see…when it comes to the frameworks, when it comes to some of the methodologies and tools, when I look on LinkedIn and see people sharing about, oh, we did this technique or that technique and so forth, I get it, but it's odd to me where it's highlighting the process in that way where familiar techniques are being used and so forth.

My experience as a designer, as an artist, best practices and techniques break down in certain contexts. There's an opportunity of what's on the edges of these things. So one of the topics I will write more about is, I touched upon in my presentation at JFS folks, futures wheel, I love the futures wheel.

But at the same time, STEEP, PESTEL, some of these other frameworks, they work well when doing this type of futures work for organization and trying to have a comprehensive overview of where the implications may land at a macro level, but it's just a lens.

I'm working with students. They don't know this framework. They don't work for organization and so forth. What about disability studies as a lens? What about post colonial theory as a lens? What are some lenses we can use to usher in, or at least nudge toward, an ethical commitment to a plurality of futures, because it's not a given just because you read the sentence. And that entrenchment into certain ways of seeing the world, that's in the body as well.

There's a correlation with that with me. So how can we create a safe space to relax in, become more aware of what's happening in the body, how that's relating to how I think and feel about these images. Also I had discovered papers from the eighties of, Sohail and Richard slaughter. Is that his name? Critical future studies. I'd never really heard of this before, but I realized in reading some of these papers from the eighties. And looking at my journal notes, we were both coming to the same conclusion, but I was not privy to any of that. So I felt like there were two parallel roads here, they were on a highway, and I was out in the woods, and we were both moving in the same direction.

Because I was like every training I've had in the future stuff, the consistent message is, we're not doing SciFi here. This is not SciFi, and I get it, but SciFi is such a rich area for critique, especially of ideologies that are being perpetuated by status quo and so forth. Can we use that same lens and critique the very imaginings or futures we're even coming up with? What are we perpetuating here? What's the “viral load”?

So I share that in this ending that the way some of these fields are set up as if there's these stark divisions - i.e. future studies and foresight, speculative design and like critical future studies and all these things, it's easy to get caught up in the trappings of the conceptual silos of this stuff. And I feel like what I'm trying to do and lean into by anchoring into the body - it’s underneath what's happening at the level of the waves, so to speak. It's in that quiet, in the deeper part of the ocean. And I think by doing so, it allows an opportunity to question what is no longer fit for purpose anymore. To really bring back what were the context and the circumstances around the birth of some of these frameworks and practices?

I think some of that awareness has happened over the years. Yeah, it's not all done for military. It's not all done for government, organizations and all these things. But the critical eye! I feel when it comes to what's happening in the body, there's still something overlooked.

If I'm reading a Futures Studies paper that talks about “foreign actors” in the Congo - it's so abstract. How about talking about the real life experience of “women and children digging cobalt by hand” in the Congo? Can we say that? is that too granular here? How can we stay anchored in empathy for real people's stories as we ascend to the balcony to get a larger view of the patterns that are emerging. To me, it's not an either or. We could be on the balcony and the dance floor at the same time.

So I welcome folks if you'd like to hear more of my musings, my explorations, my experiments, I would love to hear yours if what I'm sharing and have shared today resonates with you. I recently started a Substack called Somatic Futures. I'm working on the website. I'm tinkering with a Somatic Futures toolkit.

I have some thoughts and ideas around that to help practitioners bring this perspective in as well as I feel like as this perspective evolves, there could be projects or opportunities that are ripe for it. Like one thing I'll share that I feel strongly about is sometimes on social media, it's “the future of this, the future of that, or these type of futures” and I'm like, can we imagine a future without child molestation and domestic abuse? What does that future look like? Or rape and pillage and, genocide? What does that future look like? Can we start with what's happening in the bodies of people? What's happening in our own bodies? Just bearing witness to some of the things that are happening in the world? Can we tie those threads at that level and realize it's part and parcel to our imaginings and shaping how we show up and shape our stories in the world, our shared stories in the world, I should say.

So I have, lastly, I'll say is that everything that I've shared today, I feel strongly about, but I hold very gently, I'm subject to change at a drop of a hat.

Peter Hayward: Rodney it's been a joy to spend some time with you, hearing you talk about your thoughts and feelings and what's in your body. Thanks for sharing and thanks for spending some time with the FuturePod community.

Rodney Frederickson: Thank you, Brother Peter, appreciate you man, and look forward to hopefully having a cup of tea with you in person, my friend.

Peter Hayward: Thanks, mate.

Peter Hayward: I hope you enjoyed meeting Rodney and hearing about his gentle and fierce desire for us to include the intelligence in our bodies in whatever we're doing. And also to listen for the whisperer in your life journey too. FuturePod is a not-for-profit venture. We exist through the generosity of our supporters. If you would like to support the Pod, please follow the Patreon link on our website. This is Peter Hayward. Thanks for joining me and see you next time.