Diverse Bodies, Diverse Practices: Toward an Inclusive Somatics

A secondary motivation in Gandhi’s somatic thinking was to discipline the hard edges of emotional reactions that fragment the revolutionary community and keep it from harmonious and effective action, activities which he thought of as purging the body of the effects of colonization.

The unique characteristics of each method evolved from particular locations in history and geography.

As people drawn to healing work, we want to support others and we are (hopefully) trying to do the opposite of causing harm. Because of that desire, it is perhaps even more painful when we hurt others without meaning to, because our intentions feel so clear to us. But it is inevitable that through our differences in experience and understanding tha

The way I inherited how to feel about my fat body is connected to values that were based in my people’s white supremacy, Christian hegemony, colonial violence, and enslaving and genocide of Black, Brown, and Indigenous people. There is no escaping that the way I was taught by my family to feel about my fat body is inextricably linked to this excruc

“Where shame makes us freeze and try to get really small and invisible, pleasure invites us to move, to open, to grow.”11 Since

Despite over 130 tribal nations already having language to describe gender and sexual orientation that falls outside Eurocentric heteronormative perspectives, berdache continues to be used

have feared slowing down because I have always been on the move. My body feared stillness because of the vulnerability I would encounter. I slowly began to trust the feeling of letting go in my physical body, as well as my mental and spiritual bodies as well. Thich Nhat Hanh says that when we let go we are letting go of something. What was it that

Nearly fifty years ago, a handful of us joined in using the Greek-rooted term somatics as an umbrella designed to coax together a fragmented community of innovative and revolutionary teachers who had managed to craft methods of sensory awareness, touch, breathing, sounding, and moving to address the healing of old and widespread traumas, and to enh

“mind” from “body,” a virus that was harmful not only to infected individuals but to larger communities when it became a weapon used to justify colonialism, slavery, displacement of tribal peoples, and ravaging the earth. We always knew that different viruses were alive in other parts of the world, and that wise people were crafting other ways to d