This piece is an early release of what I’ve written to be published within the second edition of An Encyclopedia of Radical Helping by Thick Press. “felt futures” is an embodied, experimental concept that I have named, published about in my book collection “may we dream and design felt futures” (Thick Press, May 2025), and continue to practice alongside fellow dreamers and designers.
You can listen to me read the reflections with the audio below and also watch the video of me feeling and writing through these recorded words. The dreamy sentimental piano playing in the background is the instrumental version of “love away” by King Sis.
if felt futures must be met with language, call them a breathing entity. a creative compass. a liberatory lifeforce within us that trusts the sensorial and the sensuous as we dare to make the futures we desire a reality.
to feel a future—a multitude of futures—is to listen for the worlds that long to grow from our ungovernable flesh. we can hear them as interior aches and whispers emerging through our bodyminds, asking us to refuse systems that try to keep us disconnected and disembodied.
felt futures echo for lifetimes when Black feminist, Audre Lorde, reminds us how necessary it is to feel deeply and to key into those feelings because “that is how new visions begin.”1 in these new, deeply felt visions, we are there remembering ourselves as creative, intuitive beings. we are there recognizing that each of us is meant to experience an intimate relationship with our (dis)abled bodies, our more-than-human worlds, and our dreams for care and liberation. we are there learning how to stay connected to aliveness, trusting our body knowledges to inform what we choose to create.
felt futures are not separate from us but fiercely interwoven—in breaths, in bones—pulsing through the sensations of our center, our commitment. and when we take the risk of continuing to feel during the horrors and heartbreaks of the COVID-19 pandemic, collective griefs, ongoing genocides and ecocides, and the devastating rise of empires—felt futures are the enduring undercurrent, carrying us closer to what we long for and love; preparing the practice ground for us to design another world into existence, into the everyday.
with an inhalation on the individual scale, we’ll notice the presence of felt futures when we (re)connect with our creative lineages, abundant creativity, rituals, and devotions. They dwell in the depths of our audacious desires, in the memories tingling up and down our spines, and in the ways we let our kinfolk know—that we know—what we’re made of and what matters most to us.
exhaling and expanding out into the collective, the presence of felt futures is currently manifesting through the care-full2 gestures of groups who gather across borderlines, starting small with the emergent work of imagining otherwise as they organize for irresistible change3. spells are shaping strategies and solidarities. ruptures are becoming ceremonies that can hold the possibility of repair.
while we could create a sanctuary for us to stay in the poetics of it all, felt futures defies language. alongside the abundance of living definitions woven here (and beyond here) the deepest understanding of felt futures exists inside ongoing rehearsals and experiments embraced by the sentient; by those of us who are daring to grow an openness to dreaming, designing, and embodying futures that must—in spirit and in flesh—always begin by feeling.4
feeling our futures,
Denise Shanté
inviting you into the second cohort of experiments in felt futures
As we breathe into this new year, the practice ground is fertile for our bodies to be the compass and for our longings to be trusted.
I’m continuing to transform pages from may we dream and design felt futures into ceremonies of praxis and play and inviting 12 creative, intuitive beings who want to grow more care-full futures that begin by feeling.
Join this four-month literary immersion to remember and explore felt futures as a liberatory lifeforce within ourselves. Together in intimate community, we will feel, dream, and design the futures that our creative being and practice can live inside.
Registration has officially opened today ✨ Attend the free discovery session on Tuesday, January 20th to learn more, ask questions, and drop into a felt futures sensorium soundscape followed by storytelling. Attendees receive a special enrollment price.
Audre Lorde and Claude Tate, “Audre Lorde,” in Conversations with Audre Lorde, ed. Joan Wylie Hall (Univ. Press of Mississippi, 2004), 91.
In the book, Take Care of Your Self: The Art and Cultures of Care and Liberation, Sundus Abdul Hadi shares that “care-full” means “to embody being full of care.” (p.105)
I speak about “irresistible change” in the spirit of Toni Cade Bambara who said, “As a culture worker who belongs to an oppressed people my job is to make revolution irresistible” in the book Conversations with Toni Cade Bambara by Thabiti Lewis.
“begin by feeling” is a direct adaptation of the network principle “we begin by listening” by Allied Media Projects. See alliedmedia.org/network-principles.
Looks amazing, Denise Shanté!