Diverse Bodies, Diverse Practices: Toward an Inclusive Somatics

This is a way in which power dynamics perpetuate, by continuously focusing on how the marginalized or oppressed can better communicate to get those with more power or privilege to listen. We know that is not real. We know that if people are not willing

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

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

The original innovators of somatics emerged in the climate of two World Wars, the Holocaust, and the residues of slavery in the United States and the devastations of our indigenous populations. Most of them were fully aware that personal and small-group healing, though necessary, was not enough to assure a truly human life within institutions that

When someone tells me I have caused harm, I can feel defensive and make myself small and rigid in an attempt to protect myself from the pain of shame. It is difficult to let my body feel into the truth that I have the ability to hurt others and that I do hurt others. That just by being myself, I can hurt people. But that is the truth of being a per

each orisha can be described as a living force, an energy, or a spirit that has its place in nature and in our surroundings.

monographs are confined mainly to what Le Guin (1986) refers to as “the father tongue,” a high-minded mode of expression that embraces objectivity. Spoken from above, the father tongue runs the risk of distancing the writer from the reader, creating a gap between self and other. What is

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

The first law of thermodynamics, also known as the law of conservation of energy, states that energy can neither be created nor destroyed; energy can only be transferred or changed from one form to another. Something shifts on an energetic level; how is this new energy form experienced? Is it like when you’re feeling positive and encounter someone