This Fall/Winter, I’m participating in the Politics of Trauma Online Course. Building off of Staci K. Haine’s book, it’s a guided journey, collective practice and community working towards personal and social transformation anchored in embodied transformation, social action and love.
The reflection prompt as part of the pre-work for the course brought some writing out, and I wanted to share it here.
- For you, why live more deeply in your body-sensations, aliveness, access to emotions, intuition, and more? Why not?
For myself and my daughter. One day, my daughter was talking to her Uncle, and she said, “My head is telling me I want to tell you a secret, but my belly tells me I shouldn’t, and I know I should listen to my belly.” She naturally articulated something I felt took me decades to return to. To know and value the sensations in my body. I want to keep that awareness for her and get back to it for myself.
At some point, we stop listening to our body. It’s a slow erosion. Learning to regulate our bodies and emotions in ways that conform to societal expectations and the ladder of hierarchy, as Sonya Renee Taylor so eloquently shared in the first episode of Finding Our Way with Prentis Hemphill. Over time, there’s less play, less laughter, less tears. We hold more of ourselves in. At least, that’s been my journey.
My late 30s have been all about learning to be rooted in and trust my inner wisdom. The congruence I feel when I have access to all of that makes me feel so steady. Life seems to slow down a little, and I’m doing my best water lily of being rooted while floating gently and allowing myself to be held by the beauty and magic of the water.
Being this way also allows me to relate to others in a different way. To allow my soul nerve to resonate and find harmony with more people. I laugh and cry more easily and find myself being more satisfied (thank you adrienne maree brown) with my beautiful life.
Why not do this? Because after so many years of disconnection, it’s overwhelming and uncomfortable. Valuing what my brain knows as true, rather than the wisdom my body has to share, has become a default. When that overwhelm happens, it feels frenetic and stressful, and it can even lead to some insomnia or doom scrolling. Why not do this? Because there’s no going back to the disconnection after feeling that congruence, and that also means more discomfort as I try to build the practice of sitting with all of this and feeling through the wisdom present in the jumble of sensations.
“And so my job is not to change, but to radiate. To shine. To be as I am.”
Sonya Renee Taylor
Being a Force for Good 