Stella Wren Ramos Says There's A Better Way To Be Productive

Let me start this by saying, it was a hot and sexy summer 2023. I have been dancing, I have been swimming, I’ve been playing basketball and so much more! As the heat wanes, work has started to pick up again which means that cortisol levels are getting a little high, I'm not gonna lie. I’m looking forward to the cool down but it also makes me nervous as I tend to spend less time outdoors movin’ and groovin’.

Just as I started to get worried, here came an email from the Feminist Center for Creative Work announcing a Soft Skills Summer School workshop with dear friend Stella Wren Ramos. The title “Somatic Approaches to Organizational Systems” intrigued me immediately and I signed up for the Zoom meeting almost immediately.

A week later, I signed on to a video chat room with people from all over the country, and dare I say the world with whom I shared the same curiosity. As soon Stella began to speak I could see the eyes of fellow students, in their respective digital boxes, light up at what she shared. We spoke about the importance of listening to the body’s response to work and the environment in which said work is practiced. So many resources were shared and a whole new world opened in front of me. I thought to myself “Of course there is a more sustainable way for me to do things!”. To say the least, I found this course life-changing. Today, I find myself using what I learned and I think so many of us need those skills to live better and healthier lives around and outside of work.

After the workshop, I received the prompt from byline for this month's edition and it was so clear I had to feature this significant experience so I hit up Stella to talk some more.

Here is a transcript from our recent exchanges!

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Sacha Medjo: Thanks for agreeing to interview with me today. I learned so much at your “Somatic Approaches to Organizational Systems” workshop and truly admire you for your beautiful way of teaching. I’m super excited for you to share your journey to creating this workshop and a bit about yourself. Let’s start with a little intro.

Stella Wren Ramos: My name is Stella Ramos, and my pronouns are she/her/hers. I’m originally from Seattle, Washington, and moved to Los Angeles in 2017 to attend Occidental College — where I graduated in 2020, studying Religious Studies + Environmental Ethics with a focus on Indigenous Futurity and Subverting Settler-Colonialism.

Sacha: These are such cool areas of study. My current work intertwines those last 3 subjects, I’d love to talk about this more post-interview! More importantly, it seems like you juggled a lot at school. I’m curious to see how this mindset transferred into your present life. Could you tell us a bit about your current work setup?

Stella: I joined the Feminist Center for Creative Work (FCCW) team in 2020 as the Programming + Press Intern, and have stayed on since in my positions as Programming Manager and Administrative Assistant. Both roles require a lot of creating, managing, and producing — which relies heavily on flexible and abundant organizational and administrative systems. Luckily, I love organization, and I joke often now that I’m a Professional Virgo, as I’ve been working additionally for 2+ years as a Studio Manager and Creative Assistant with individual artists and creatives, which was a natural progression from my work with organizations such as FCCW. My goal through this work is to support the logistical frameworks, creative visions, and long-term dreams of artists and creatives with an efficient, generous, and grounding approach!

Sacha: I love the term Professional Virgo for you. It’s interesting how nowadays, more and more people have their hands in many bags. I too have a day job accompanied by other ongoing gigs, like writing for byline wink wink. For me, this means that I’ve spent a lot of time focusing my mind on certain tasks without including my body in the processes and recently it’s started to come back and bite me. That’s what led me to your course. I had heard about somatic relationships in the body but had never truly explored them. What is your personal history with somatic practices?

Stella: My creative work is as a writer and dancer. Growing up dancing lent me towards having a strong connection with the embodiment of feelings and how my mind and body connect, and I became passionate about learning more about the intrinsic relationship between emotional states and physical experiences from this. I'd say my personal, creative, and professional pursuits are all now pretty entangled with somatics in how I problem-solve, conceptualize feelings and information, and approach the world around me.