“Hope is a Discipline”

December 14, 2025 by Amanda K Gross

I have been asked to speak about hope, which, interestingly, is a word I don’t often choose to use. Hope on its own feels flimsy to me. It smells a bit like the semi-smug well wishes of “hopes and prayers,” as a performance of caring, the impact of which too often communicates: I want you to know that I’m aware that you’re suffering, but I will probably—no, most definitely—not do anything to bring an end to your suffering, especially if it means upsetting my status quo. There might be good intentions in its acknowledgement, but “hopes and prayers” has a pretty strong track record of not bringing about justice.

I’m approaching the theme of hope today as a challenge to myself, and by proxy to all of you, to seek the places and spaces of hope that have teeth. As in, how does hope actually contribute to meaningful, lasting, life-upturning change? Where is hope active, faithful, and accountable?

Prison Industrial Complex Abolitionist Mariame Kaba says that “hope is a discipline,” which grounds hope in a daily practice and associates hope with agency. If hope is a discipline, then how can hope sustain us? Or maybe instead the question is more reciprocal: how we can sustain hope? Especially in these moments of increasing despair, how can we be disciplined in our practices of courage, in disrupting complacency, and taking strategic meaningful collective risk to affect real change?

But first, we are going to talk about our bodies.

As an anti-racist organizer and educator a lot of my work is supporting white-bodied folks in being able to increase our windows of tolerance for discomfort. This is really about supporting bodies in discerning the difference between actual life threats, discomfort, and unhealed unacknowledged past traumas that need tending to.

Who here has ever encountered defensiveness or denial in trying to engage in conversations about politics, or racism, or fascism? Informed by PISAB’s work on Internalized Racism, I see these 4Ds as Defensiveness, Denial, Dissociation, and Deference, which connect to the 4Fs as embodied trauma responses (fight, flight, freeze, fawn).

We may get frustrated when these reactions show up in others, or in ourselves, but Dr. Stephen Porges notes that defensiveness is an involuntary response. When our fight or flight response is activated our physiology changes. For example, in hyper-arousal we become less able to discern human voices because our inner ear shifts. When activated in fight mode or while fleeing in flight, we literally cannot hear what another person is saying. This makes it incredibly difficult to listen, receive feedback, and learn. These hyper-activations cause separation and disconnect. And, if our bodies are in that place long enough, exhaustion. The hypo-arousal response of dissociation/freeze appears when we no longer have access to fight/flight, either based on our circumstances or because we have depleted our adrenals.

Based on the body that you are in, your specific contexts, and the way systems, institutions and the people that run them treat you, you probably have a go-to out of these 4Ds. When you are under stress, which is your default? Often folks have one or two primary ones.

The question is then, how do you know when you are being activated? Specifically, where do you feel defensiveness, denial, dissociation, or deference in your body?

Once you’ve identified how it shows up for you in your body, the next question is what is one thing you can do for your body in the moment? How can you tend to it? There are practices we can do preventively and things we can do to restore after. But, in the moment, when you can’t go for a run or take a bubble bath, what is one thing you can offer your body? I’m going to offer us a collective breath now as one way to soothe our nervous systems.

The 4Ds have something to say about how the discipline of hope begins as embodied practice. Conflict mediation forerunner, Paul Wahrhaftig created the tension triangle model to represent how the higher your level of tension, the fewer options you perceive yourself to have. Fewer options can lead to feelings of restriction, frustration, and hopelessness; having only one or hardly any options can instigate despair. Tending to our bodies, increasing our windows of tolerance, being able to regulate ourselves and return to tolerance when we are activated gives us more options. We are not trying to get rid of these trauma responses or feelings; these are often sane and humane reactions to inhumane circumstances, but the discipline of embodied regulation in the face of ongoing trauma offers us more options, more possibilities, and more spaciousness. It presents an embodied practice of hope.

Yet, it would be a mistake to focus on the discipline of hope as solely an individualized embodiment practice. We know that our traumas are not just individual experiences, although they might feel isolated and isolating. Traumas, and thus trauma responses and resilience practices, are also connected to greater historical harms, structures, family systems, and culture. There’s a direct connection between the traumas we experience in our bodies and larger forces. As embodiment coach Prentis Hemphill notes, “Oppression is the organization and distribution of trauma especially by those who have concentrated power.” Collective trauma expert Thomas Hübl talks about how we have both an individual and a collective nervous system. How then do we tend to the embodied discipline of hope as both self- and collective care?

The Mennonite church that raised me was originally started as an intentionally multiracial congregation back when integration was illegal. By the time I was a young teenager, the congregation’s Black membership had significantly dwindled and though there was a wide mix of ethnicities in the pews, especially from white Mennonites creating families with folks of the Global Majority, the church structure and leadership largely reflected white North American culture.

One of the remaining Black families in the congregation had a street ministry led by the family matriarch, who presented loudly both in volume and appearance. She wore bright make-up and sequins to church and, after gaining access to a microphone, would perform long solos fluctuating between powerful gospel songs, personal testament, humming and swaying to instrumental accompaniment and drums. Despite the implicit and sometimes explicit invitations for the congregation to express the holy spirit in tandem with her—by interjecting Amens, improvisational calls and response, swaying, and humming along—there was a palpable resistance and begrudgery when she stepped up to the mic. At one point our lead pastor was interested in developing an official ministerial role for her, to which he received a firm no. I heard talk in the background that she wasn’t Mennonite enough, folks preferred singing hymns.

While there’s lots we could unpack in this story, what I’m interested in for us today is how my congregation missed out on an incredible opportunity to learn and practice culturally embodied hope.

Somatic Abolitionist Resmaa Menakem describes how Bodies of Culture—the term he uses to collectivize nonwhite folks— have resourcefully created in-body collective cultural responses to preserve survival and to thrive within the harmful context of white body supremacy. Menakem gives the examples of humming, music, dancing and swaying to rhythms through the use of drums as collective practices coming from Black communities that have sustained both individual and community bodies in the face of racist oppression.

He then goes on to challenge white-bodied folks to create collective anti-racist embodied cultures. Caring for each other’s bodies is a radical act of resistance for those of us who have been socialized to dehumanize, ignore, deny, intellectualize, and/or wash our hands of direct responsibility. A diverse range of life-giving cultural ways of being have been stolen for some, and forfeited for others, in order to assimilate. This is where collective art-making, eating together, singing together, moving together, dancing, play are so so necessary.

Menakem also points to how white bodies are conditioned in that Denial/flight response in order to numb to violence and distract from empathy and interconnection. One specific distraction he names is addiction, including workaholism, which has some specific wisdom to offer those of us overscheduled by our commitment to social justice.

We arrive in this moment within the paradoxes of urgency. This is no doubt a moment of incredible urgency as fascism has the keys to the People’s House. While the potential impact of an authoritarian regime is a new reality for many of us, fascist policies and practices have been the experience of Black and Brown, Indigenous communities and others since this country’s inception. Meaning this present political and ideological crisis is both new and also not new at all.

Within the paradox or urgency there is also a paradox of risk. For members of those communities targeted most directly right now––for members of immigrant communities, trans and queer folks, and People of the Global Majority––the moment is urgent and the risk is incredibly high. In such a moment of crisis, it is critical to act swiftly and directly. And also, the danger of reactionary actions—especially without strategy, without contextual awareness, or accountability to the most targeted among us—can put the lives of those most at risk in further jeopardy. One paradox of the moment is that while we must resist urgently we must also slow down enough to move intentionally, with accountability and coordination.

It is tempting to react out of that fight response because the threat in the moment is real, but if we are going to be effective and if we are going to sustain ourselves for long term solidarity, then this is an opportunity to be disciplined.

This is an image by Vanissor Tarakali that I was recently exposed to about getting below shame in white anti-racist development. The 4Ds reside in the tip top of the iceberg. Beneath them are these feelings of anger, fear, collapse, and sadness, all difficult feelings to tolerate. According to this model, if we can move through and beneath those, there is this layer of shame. The shame trampoline serves as a barrier to protect us from those barely tolerable sensations below: terror, despair, powerlessness, abandonment. Throwing ourselves into action as a way of distracting or avoiding the profoundly difficult feelings can result in bouncing back and forth in the narrow top of the iceberg.

Ironically, the way toward humanity, interconnectedness, and hope may be through the experience of hopelessness and despair. Or to call back to Mariame Kaba’s words: “…hope doesn’t preclude feeling sadness or frustration or anger or any other emotion.” What if the discipline of hope involves experiencing hopelessness too?

Since January, there have been many efforts to prevent, interrupt, and provide after care to families being separated by ICE’s cruel and dehumanizing tactics. Local residents have been resisting in a myriad of ways, including a campaign, which has created two yard signs for people to shift the physical space and literal discourse. You can get them in the back.

As you can see, the first is a brightly colored orange, white, and black with two exuberant monarch butterflies. The signage reads “Las familias merecen estar unidas! Families belong together.” The second, has a playful element but is bolder in its declaration to “De-ICE the Friendly City.”

100 of each were printed and within one week one of the designs had been completely distributed and a second print run was ordered. The other, has had a few dozen takers and there are still many available. Which do you think was the most popular and why?

If you guessed the butterfly signs, you are correct. When I’ve asked around, a few folks have offered generally that they’re just more comfortable with the butterflies, they like the positive message. Some folks who live out in the county have expressed more specific concerns: that in the past signs have been stolen; or even have expressed fears of potential violence due to the politics of armed neighbors.

While I want to acknowledge that there is clearly risk in this moment in voicing political dissent, and while there are also many armed people in close proximity who disagree and do not hold nonviolence as a value, I have been surprised at this aversion to take such a relatively small risk. I am concerned that we are in a moment of inaccurate and potentially dangerous risk assessment. Are folks simply complying in advance? Are we creating a self-fulfilling prophecy? The irony is that in denying the opportunity to risk speaking up, we perhaps are ensuring that we won’t be able to publicly dissent in the future.

Personally, I don’t use the term ally. Similar to my suspicions about the flimsiness of hope, allyship seems tenuous. It is something that can be given and thus can be taken away. In my perspective, allyship exists in this space above the shame trampoline. It may be an important place to start, but without going deeper, allyship can maintain a positionality of separation. It can facilitate bouncing up and down on the shame trampoline, but doesn’t help us to break through it.

When we are really in it, when I know that my liberation is tied up with yours, that my survival is dependent on yours, then those barely tolerable feelings belong to me too—the sensations of terror, despair, hopelessness, powerlessness, abandonment, death—are ours to hold together. What I am trying to say is that hope comes from active solidarity. We get to aliveness, interconnectedness, and joy through going through feelings of terror together, not wasting our precious energy pretending that the terror doesn’t exist.

Earlier this week, Minnesota Public Radio reported on Susan Tincher, a 55-year-old grandmother and white US citizen who walked outside to check on a neighbor after receiving an alert about an ICE raid. After standing on a public sidewalk, watching, and asking a question, she was thrown to the ground, handcuffed, and hauled her away where she had her wedding ring cut off, was threatened with pepper spray, and spent five hours in leg shackles at a federal building without her family knowing her whereabouts.

This is a terrifying story in part because it upsets the narrative of relative safety that many of us have come to expect. The discipline of hope, however, demands courageous risk-taking. It is in these moments of active application that we join the collective, that we dive into deeper solidarity, that we release the illusions of separation and hierarchy.

Trauma expert Dr. Gabor Maté differentiates between trauma and traumatic events in a way I haven’t necessarily so far. Dr. Maté says, “Trauma is not terrible things that happen from the other side—those are traumatic. Trauma is that very separation from the body and emotions. So, the real question is: How did we get separated and how do we reconnect? Because that’s our true nature—our true nature is to be connected.” Hope resides in our connective tissue, in our connected true nature.

Relatedly, Dr. Porges notes that humans have evolved to physiologically regulate together. “Self-regulation,” he says, “is through co-regulation and not the other way around,” meaning we cannot self-care our way into hope. We will have to practice the discipline together. Granted this may be a trickier task for those of us raised on individualism, competition, and meritocracy.

When I showed the image of the shame trampoline in one of the anti-racist book groups I facilitate, a participants noted how wide the bottom of the iceberg was. Looking at it we can see, it is at the bottom where the most extensive resources are available. When we stay at the top of the iceberg, we experience the restriction of scarcity mentality, but the deeper we go, an abundance of resources are available. And if we can take a moment to zoom out, we can see that the abundance has always been there.

Mariame Kaba: I always tell people, for me, hope doesn’t preclude feeling sadness or frustration or anger or any other emotion that makes total sense. Hope isn’t an emotion, you know? Hope is not optimism. I think that, for me, understanding that is really helpful in my practice around organizing. I believe that there’s always a potential for transformation and for change. And that is in any direction, good or bad. The idea of hope being a discipline is something I heard from a nun many years ago who was talking about it in conjunction with making sure we were of the world and in the world. Living in the afterlife already in the present was kind of a form of escape, but it was really, really important for us to live in the world and be of the world. The hope that she was talking about was this grounded hope that was practiced every day, that people actually practiced all the time. I bowed down to that. I heard that many years ago, and then I felt the sense of, “Oh my God. That speaks to me as a philosophy of living, that hope is a discipline and that we have to practice it every single day.” Because in the world we live in, it’s easy to feel a sense of hopelessness, that everything is all bad all the time, that nothing is going to change ever, that people are evil and bad at the bottom. It feels sometimes that it’s being proven in various different ways, so I really get that. I understand why people feel that way. I just choose differently. I choose to think a different way, and I choose to act in a different way. I choose to trust people until they prove themselves untrustworthy.”

Link to Prezi: https://prezi.com/view/luFYo33m44xBqDTlVY0v/?referral_token=yVLeiulnB3FN