Four Ways of Knowing

Toward a Liberatory Practice Rooted in Science, Story, Body, and Community

Dorian Wallace

Apr 16, 2025

In the work of healing, organizing, and collective liberation, it’s important to pause and ask:

How do we come to know what we know?

What shapes our understanding, our choices, and our commitments?

There’s no single path to truth, no one-size-fits-all method for making meaning.

We each carry different lived experiences shaped by where we come from, how we’ve been treated, and the social positions we’ve been born into across complex strings of ethnicity, class, gender, and beyond.

Over time, I’ve found it helpful to return to a simple framework that honors multiple ways of knowing:

Scientific. Mythic. Somatic. Communal.

These lenses support us in observing and reflecting with greater care and in acting with deeper intention. Knowledge never exists in a vacuum; it’s always shaped by context, and it gains potency when shared collectively and held with respect.

Scientific

Grounded in Material Reality

This way of knowing draws from what can be observed, studied, and tested. It includes the scientific method, historical materialism, political economy, psychology, law, and philosophy—disciplines that help us understand how things function, why they break down, and where power moves.

In practice, this might look like:

Studying how trauma affects the nervous system and behavior
Examining legal codes, economic policy, and systems of policing
Applying research and theory to support strategy, cautiousness, and accountability
Apply a historical materialist lens when examining historical and transgenerational trauma

This method gives us language for patterns we experience and observe. It helps us stay rooted in reality.

Evidence matters. Facts matter.

Mythic

Transferred Through Narrative and Meaning

Mythic knowledge takes shape through narrative, metaphor, archetype, oral tradition, and spiritual imagination. It helps us make substance of what’s too complex, too sacred, or too painful for reason alone. It communicates through the stories we carry, the images we recognize, and the symbols we live by.

This way of knowing moves through religion, psychology, philosophy, film, theater, dance, photography, painting, sculpture, music, and literature. It lives in ancestral stories, liberation theologies, oral traditions, and folk wisdom passed down across generations and geographies.

We see it in the hero’s journey, in songs of mourning, in parables and proverbs, and in rituals that hold space for grief, healing, and transformation.

It appears through archetypes, figures like the healer, the rebel, the shadow, the trickster, and the guide, that give us a vocabulary for our internal and relational experiences.

Mythic narrative often becomes a way of comprehending ethics, time, identity, and collective memory. Across communities, it provides a sense of continuity, belonging, and purpose, helping to bind people together through shared meaning.

In practice, this might look like:

Reframing survival as a mythic journey of exile, struggle, and return
Invoking ancestral stories or collective memory as sources of strength
Using poetry, music, or ritual to hold space for grief and transition
Drawing on liberatory spiritual traditions to oppose despair and reclaim meaning

Myth is not neutral. Like any cultural force, it can be co-opted and distorted. We’ve seen myths reshaped to serve reactionary chauvinism, nationalism, white supremacy, religious fundamentalism, and other forms of high-control behavior and coercive control.

That’s why we need media literacy, historical awareness, and critical imagination.

Myth can be used to bind or to liberate. It can obscure the truth or help us understand more clearly.

Myths rooted in solidarity, justice, and community become powerful tools for healing, vision, and transformation. Stories help us imagine what liberation might look and feel like.

Somatic

Held in the Body

Our bodies hold deep knowledge. Much of this is stored not just in conscious thought but in the implicit memory systems of the brain and the nervous system's patterns of regulation. What we often refer to as the "unconscious" includes how the brainstem, limbic system, and autonomic nervous system respond to perceived safety, danger, or connection, even before we're consciously aware of it.

Somatic knowing lives in breath, sensation, posture, stillness, and movement. It reflects the body's ongoing process of neuroception, how the nervous system automatically detects cues of safety or threat in our environment without conscious thought.

This form of knowing helps us:

Track emotional and relational boundaries
Sense whether a space or person feels safe or activating
Recognize when we're dysregulated or grounded

In trauma-informed practice, these sensations are key to restoring nervous system balance and building capacity for healing.

In practice, somatic awareness can look like:

Listening to signs of burnout—tight jaw, clenched shoulders, shallow breath
Grounding through rhythm and music—drumming, humming, swaying, deep breathing, or using the "voo" sound to regulate the vagus nerve
Noticing and trusting gut instincts or subtle physical cues during moments of uncertainty
Resting as resistance—honoring the body's need to pause instead of pushing through exhaustion

Activism, caregiving, and community work can be overwhelming.

This lens reminds us that the body is not a machine and that the revolution needs rest.

Our nervous systems are not designed for constant urgency. They need rhythm, recovery, and connection.

We have to build a liberatory relationship with our bodies. Our communities have been taught to disconnect from them for survival.

The body is where healing begins.

Communal

Building Relationships

There is no liberation without community. Communal knowing arises through shared experiences, relational trust, solidarity, and co-creation. Healing and justice are not solo pursuits but collective processes grounded in connection.

This way of knowing honors the strength of:

Listening circles, mutual aid, and collective care as practices of shared support
Affinity spaces where people with shared identities can safely heal, rest, and strategize
Rainbow coalition building across lines of race, gender, class, and ability
Intersectional analysis that recognizes how overlapping forms of oppression require adaptive, responsive care
Class consciousness as a foundation for solidarity among working and marginalized communities
Brave, well-held spaces where conflict can be navigated with accountability, clarity, and care
Lived experience as personal expertise, especially centering those most impacted by systems of harm—while also remembering that lived experience is the expertise of oneself, not of others
We cannot heal alone. We cannot organize alone.
Liberation lives in relationships where we are respectful in how we listen, how we show up, and how we build together across contradictions with love and clarity.

In Closing

Engaged activism isn't only about what we fight against. It's also about how we know, how we care, and how we navigate and move.