"We neglect ourselves or our growth in our rush to change what is external. When we do, we fracture, and succumb to what we are unwilling to face."
"It seemed as if everyone had come to the edge of the precipice, held hands, but failed to jump. The change that was needed required more than many were willing to give."
"I don't think healing begins where we think it does, in our doing something. I believe it begins in another realm altogether, the realm of dreams and imagination. A realm that I might also call spirit. A place of potential, where possibilities reside, where we retrieve, through prayer or in dreams, visions for ourselves and for the world that make us more whole."
"Some say that in our time of overwhelm and chaos we are at the end of futures, out of resources and hope, that were is nothing left to dream in this reality, that we are trapped on a timeline where we keep remaking disaster movies until we meet our final catastrophe."
"Visioning is an uncovering of potential. It's revealing what is already there and trying to become, if only we believe in it."
"I think of the risk it is to stretch beyond the containers that have been created for us. I think about longing. It's a visceral word for me. It's vulnerable and hard to let ourselves desire beyond what we can trust will be fulfilled. Longing is not evidence-based in that way; it's a yearning that comes from our bodies."
"When we can't perceive too far ahead, it's impossible to imagine that we can shape what comes and create a future we've never seen."
"There is a difference between the visions that come out of our most individualistic tendencies and those that arise when we are able to admit that we need other people. I've often found that the visions people articulate for themselves, those that they are most afraid to admit, are their yearnings for connection and their longing to lead and coordinate something that will have a big impact on the world."
"Our ability to dream of something different, to name longing, to articulate a vision and commit to it, directly correlates to the likelihood that we will experience it, that it will be realized... In prayer or meditation, in what we ritualize, our visions become more real the more space we give to them."
"Healing and social change are not, in fact, unrelated. To pry them apart is to exacerbate the issue. They are inextricably linked, braided together, interdependent processes of transformation... How could our personal development ever truly be at odds with social transformation? How could it happen without it?"
"As we attempt to reconfigure the world where it has been unjust and where our systems and beliefs have hurt us, so must we transform ourselves, our values, our cultures, our actions, and our spirits."
"Pain is transmitted across a power grid. It's sent to the places where we don't fear the consequences of it spilling over onto the people less powerful than us, onto seemingly less deserving bodies. It shows up as abuse toward a partner who has fewer means to leave or in the scapegoating of whole communities for our suffering."
"I've been working for years now with this: Healing is the process, often lifelong, of restoring and reawakening the capacities for safety, belonging, and dignity on the other side of trauma."
"Healing, I often say, helps us fight in the places we need to, but love in the places we long to."
"It's in everything that right rightsizes you, brings you into reverence and presence, where you leave your control or hiding place, and suddenly you can create within the world, and be taken aback in awe of it, too."
"We commit to our own healing in part because the realization of what we are dreaming of rests on it. It is our responsibility to one another to do our internal work, not so that we feel good alone but to stay in active part of the whole and to refuse to pass down to the next generation what pain we've accrued."
"For healing to take place, for it to be felt, for it to root, remake, and rearrange us, it has to happen not only in the realm of our thinking, but in the soil of our bodies. Healing has to be embodied."
"(1) What we practice, what we do over time, can eventually become automatic; that is, it no longer requires our thinking to execute. We just do it. Something is truly learned when it is embodied (whether it's riding a bicycle or having the capacity to trust someone). What we embody may be aligned or misaligned with our values or may be helpful or harmful to us as we learn and embody practices both consciously and unconsciously over time. (2) We can build our awareness of what it is we do automatically, how we do it, and how it came to be - which gives us the possibility to change. (3) We can increase our ability to feel our emotions rather than deny them and allow ourselves to feel what we deeply long for in ourselves and the world. (4) To transform and become who we intend to be more often, we have to practice being who we are becoming."
"Such a view of our own bodies and the natural world converts us all easily into objects when we relate to one another. If we treat our bodies like machines, as if they are only containers for our thinking, then our emotions, in their unpredictability, become the wild in need of conquering, too. And it would follow that if we do not feel or if our society views feeling as a failure, our culture might lose its grasp on what is truly humane."
when did you first know you have a body?
"Our best thinking happens as a full-bodied experience, because no matter how much we try to separate the brain from the body, it is irritatingly located there, inside of it, a part of the ecosystem that is us. There is a reality that our bodies connects us to."
"And our bodies are somehow a collection of living stories, too, of where we've been and where we come from, a profound record of our ancestors' survival."
"The more we are jolted into reactivity, the more we lose our grounding in the present moment as we respond to the vestiges of the past. This loss of presence is a loss of agency. If we are always caught up in responding to the conditions of another time, we are not able to respond as thoughtfully to the conditions of this one."
"Numbing is one way that we protect ourselves from feeling something we are afraid to or are under-resourced to feel."
"Somatics, in a way, is born from the original fracture that separates us all into feeling and non-feeling, wild and civilized. It's a solution to a problem created when the mind was given supremacy."
"Somewhere along the way we were taught to stop feeling instead of being taught to stop what harms us, as though the feeling were our enemy, as though the feeling were hurting us. To move forward and address the harm, we have to feel. As Audre Lorde said in her essay, 'Poetry Is Not a Luxury,' 'The white fathers told us: I think, there I am. The Black mother within each of us - the poet- whispers in our dreams: I feel, there I can be free.'"
"Empathy, mutuality, and connection are dangerous to injustice. They can unravel what is otherwise a fragile, imposed order. For safety reasons, then, we are all taught to push our emotions down and away rather than feel them. If we felt, imagine what we might change."
"Across this earth are our kin. What we do shapes the lives of others. We exist in an impossibly complex web of relationship."
"Inauthenticity is sometimes rewarded. It's a set of defenses learned over time. They can develop out of striving to achieve the visions that were imposed on us. Or we can become someone we're not to protect ourselves from being vulnerable and impacted by other people, a self that is assembled through trauma."
"When we allow ourselves to be authentic, it's from there that we can be known. Authenticity is the root of vulnerability, of intimacy, of relationship. When we can take off our mask, we invite others to do the same."
"I choose what to share, I choose what I respond to, I choose when to leave. I see people all the time who bring others back into their lives after distance and assume that the relationship and their proximity to each other should revert to what it once was. Instead, ruptures should inform the shape of relationships going forward. We should relate differently based on what's happened, now that we've learned something about who the other actually is and who we are. If not, we risk falling into the same patterns that didn't work before."
"These are boundaries. When we decide the shape and nature of our relationships. When we are not forced into closeness because of expectations or history, but we choose according to our comfort. We get to move forward with the knowledge of our history, following a path of our own making."
"trust as the choosing to make something you value vulnerable to another person's actions. Trust is a risk we take with one another to do something bigger than we could have done alone."
"Of course, unplugging gives us the space we sometimes desperately need to reassess and listen, to hear ourselves, our own heartbeats in the silence. But if we believe that our wholeness requires long-term disconnection from the world, we run the risk of mistaking what is comfortable for what is healing, a sense of control with safety, and reinforcing separation and isolation."
"We can't change the world if we can't heal what has become embodied in us, and we cannot truly heal if the conditions that break and isolate us don't change, too."
"While these systems are sometimes the sites of both individual and collective trauma, each of these sites, these systems, is also a potential place of action and transformation. Just as they shape us, they are places that can be shaped and reshaped, rebuilt and reworked, abolished and replaced."
"To initiate change, we can only begin where we are and as whoever we are right now."
"We decide together what is sacred and we hold it as such."
"Engaging the world is about making our contribution, about exiting the safety of the sidelines and feeling the texture of deep practice and collective action."
"When we choose to deny that interconnection by othering, by seeing some of us as less worthy, we refuse to submit to a clear and urgent lesson from our universe: When we don't care for all of us, what is allowed to happen to me will eventually be done to you."
"No one teaches us how to build a family, how to decide that people with whom we share no blood are relatives."
"... we must first be able to feel grief, our own, before we can truly become an ally to anyone else. We have to know what it is to have lost. For all of us striving to achieve, climbing the ladders of success or acceptance in our society, that might well mean we have to stop and admit that there's something that we've given up to play the game."
"There's no saviors in a circle, no heroes, just people taking risks for a vision of another way."
"There's is almost nothing more profound or more terrifying than the simple act of reaching for each other. There is no real intimacy that does not begin with listening. And there is no chance that we can show up for each other if one or both of us is still somehow an object."
conflict is the nature of a relationship asking to deepen
"Sometimes we wrap our tender fears in judgment and in blame, punishing someone for making us bare our chests, holding tight the apologies that are ours to say until the other person shows they are worthy by apologizing first."
"Conflict can makes us very unsure, and a body threatened craves certainty. This can affect the way we respond... when we are able to hold and explore nuance in a situation, it leads to more precise actions. We see that contradictions can exist alongside one another, and we can hear and take in other perspectives. We can hold multiple motivations and truths in our core and live with that stewing of complexity until the next right action shows itself to us."
"What if we could do something different from having innocence and guilt at the core of our conflicts? To give up on this binary is not to erase the fact that we often hurt one another in conflict - very must the opposite in fact... What if, in resolving conflicts, we could move out of binaries and into a culture of accountability? Where we are proactively responsible for our actions and relationships."
"I'm left with a question I haven't yet been able to answer: What will it really take to believe in our and others' ability to change? Maybe the most direct question is: How do we begin to create this culture when there have already been so many betrayals?"
"It is hard to describe to someone who has not experienced it, what it is for a body to open, but it is just as holy as falling before the pulpit and as righteous as a riot. It is the breaking of what binds. It is undoing so that we can become."
"We are always practicing something, somatics teaches us... We have practiced, whether we realize it or not, who we are right now."
"Practice isn't only helpful because repetition brings us closer to some kind of perfection, but because in each repetition we are met by our internal barriers, sometimes small and lurking, sometimes quite profound, that threaten the skill we are trying to learn. Practice is the recurring encounter with ourselves and the space to learn from it. The mundane is miraculous with the right attention."
