#MeToo and I will fight for you

It was when I was talking with someone today, a friend who had come for bodywork. This friend has been hurt. A lot. She's been hurt by family members, by men, by queers. She is well known and well loved and most people have no idea she has been hurt. Most people have no idea of the space between her outside self and the inside self that she keeps protected far inside.

There are so many people I know and love like that; people experiencing not just a subtle but an extreme gap between the person they show and the person they protect.

We were talking about a couple of different situations she is in; situations that wander the line from fucked up to abusive. As we were talking, I suddenly felt very fierce. I leaned in towards her and said, "You have to know this, right now. What has happened to you in the past is never going to happen to you again. Not on my watch." She got soft and quiet, looking at me from the other side of the wall that she keeps well built. Careful. Cautious. "If you get into a situation that feels unsafe or you are not sure that it's safe, call or text me. If that isn't enough, then I will pick up my keys and come get you. I will stay connected to you until we are both sure that you are safe enough to be alone." I was feeling this really fiercely. Nothing I was saying to her isn't something I haven't said or felt before and still, it was there, and it felt wild and rageful, protective and fierce.

She and I had just been talking about the most recent round of white cismen being called out and called up for their past and present sexual violence. We were talking, as we have in the past, about the power in watching individual white men no longer able to hide, losing their jobs, losing some of the celebrity respect they have gathered.  At the same time, we reflected that what is happening, this allowance and normalization of constant gender-based terror, is much bigger than any individual white man's accountability - or obvious lack of accountability - can touch. We reflected on how grateful we were that some of the articles coming out name the widespread and sometimes nuanced truth of sexual violence, how it is more than what any individual white cisman does. That articles are coming out that are also naming women as complicit, calling out all of the times when women turn on other women.  This sexual violence is about the air that we breathe, something so constant and ever-present that many of us no longer recognize it as violence.  We shared our frustration that in all of the conversation about this moment, rarely are white ciswomen, no matter how hurt they have been, holding the complexity of race and white supremacy in this moment.  We know that sexual violence combined with racial violence is another deeper story entirely and that white women have sometimes condoned it as a way of getting the attention off their own backs. 

Sexual violence did not exist on this land before colonization. Sexual violence has culture and history. In the US it is lifted up, supported and pruned by histories of Christianity and European class histories which then, depending on the cultures and histories of your family and kin, mixes with what your people knew as "normal" before settling here. Sexual violence did not exist on this land before colonization, before immigration, before Christian missionaries carried with them the idea of women (and land and sex and children) as being subservient and in need of control. 

This is what we were talking about before I asked my friend how she sits within this moment when her own tissues carry memories that have largely never been voiced. This is when she shut down. This is what propelled me to fight for her. In that moment and into the future.

I have seen women fight for other women. Ciswomen. Transwomen. Poor women, Native, Black and Brown women. I have witnessed it and experienced it. It's usually something that happens on the streets or in someone's home or together, in a private room, as women in movement work are figuring out how to have each other's backs against the sexual violence from those they are supposed to be standing with as they fight against white supremacy, ableism, deportations.  I have seen women fight for and on behalf of other women, fighting as an intimate thing, a personal thing, not the work of policies and nonprofits. I have seen it. But not enough.

As my friend and I talked, we noticed that this is the connective tissue. This is the piece that wants to be added to this work of calling out and naming the perpetrators and then calling out and naming how we have passed our ways of survival on to our daughters, how we have separated ourselves from others experiencing sexual violence because of how they dressed, because of their class, because of their race, because they were not straight or cisgender or the billion other ways that you who are reading this, like me, sometimes opt out of stopping sexual violence. We noticed how often sexual violence can bring out the predator in everyone, even those who have long been victimized themselves. And we noticed the many times when it doesn't.

As healers and healing justice practitioners, we know that in order to get past survival, we have to be able to fight for our own lives. And that in order to fight for our own lives, we have to believe, in the deepest part of our beings, that our life is worth fighting for. This is the core belly truth that oppression works to unsettle. 

What happens if every single one of us who experiences or has experienced sexual violence on the basis of our gender turns to two or three or five or ten others in our lives and tells them: Never again on my watch. I will fight for you. And then explains, concretely and with detail, exactly what that means. Here is my number. Here is how I have seen you get hurt. Here is the threat I know you live under every day. No longer on my watch. Call me and tell me what it was like and I will believe you, even if you think it was small. And more than that, I will come and find you. I will put my body between yours and his (or sometimes hers or theirs) and I will not let this happen to you again. 

Sexual violence mixes with every other form of violence and it is messy and hard. Not all of us are impacted by it in the same way. Not all of us experience the same level of threat. And at the same time, no women, no fem-presenting person, should ever, no matter what their life is like and what they are aware and not aware of,  be the victim of sexual violence. Not on our watch. What happens if we tell each other: I will take a self defense class with you. I will sleep over if you feel unsafe. I will remember that no matter what he (or she or they) say or do, that I am fierce about your safety as you are about mine. I will do this as an everyday thing and I will remind you, as you will remind me, that never again on our watch, never again, will you be the victim to someone else's predator.

We all have the right to a fight response. To our fight response. To our right to fight.

Someone recently told me the story (and she might have heard it from Adrienne Maree Brown but I now can't remember) of how swallow murmurations happen. Each bird flies as closely as possible to the one next to it, keeping track of that bird, keeping eyes on that single bird, who is doing the same to the next to it and the one next to it and so on.  By doing this, the birds fly together and move forward, making stunning visual effects as they weave and shift together. They move forward. They move forward together. They each keep watch on the other.

Go ahead. If you are reading this, make a list of 2 or 3 or 5 or 10 women, fem-presenting people, and tell them, concretely and with as much detail as you can, not on my watch, never again. And then watch us fly.

#MMIW 

Unlearning what we learned in school

I woke up yesterday morning to find my daughter sitting at the kitchen, reading her biology textbook. She had a test and was trying to cram all sorts of information into her head. While I made coffee, she sat there sighing.

Luca has talked a lot about how sucky her biology class is; how uninteresting and confusing. This morning, as she was hating on it, I asked her if I could look over what she's learning and tell it to her like a story instead of like facts. A measure of how frustrated she was: she said yes.

When I looked at the chapters she was learning, I wanted to weep. Forty pages on the cell, turning something magical into something that is dry as dirt. I looked throughout her textbook and remembered for the five millionth time: western science at the high school level turns the glory of life into something burdensome. It's part of the training ground that serves isolated individualism, as though any cell can experience itself outside the context of connection to the other.

After we had a fifteen minute conversation about the cell (which did NOT call the cell a factory like the textbook does), she asked if she could bring some of her classmates home every other week to just relearn what they are learning so that it's interesting. My mama-heart and Leo-heart and I LOVE BIOLOGY heart purred.

All life is connected. All life. Whether you believe in evolution or creation, whether you were raised with a traditional origin story or not, all life is connected. Trauma, from individual acts to collective systems passed down through history, is disconnection. The fact that disconnection exists does not contradict the fact that connection is here, too.

As I was leafing through Luca's textbook, I noticed that the chapters were arranged with an introductory chapter about life and protein followed by a small section on animals and then breaking the rest of the chapters into cellular life, cellular growth, cellular energy, reproduction, ecosystems, interdependence and then health and disease. How totally apocalyptic: the entirety of human life concluding with how we get sick. This is the conditioning that makes diagnosis and the drug industry possible.

If it really happens that Luca pulls together a group of school mates for mini-biology conversations in our house, this is how I am going to start: all life is connected. When you are reading chapters in your book about the differences between animals and plants and humans, you are reading more about the interests of the different mostly men and some women who are defined as "discovering" the principals of life. When your textbook says that cells were not discovered until after the microscope was invented in the 1500s and not really named as true until the 1800s, you are not learning the full story. You are not learning that traditions across the globe did not need to see through a microscope to have a felt sense or a sacred awareness of the billions of personalities that organize themselves into organs and systems and energy tides and balances. Life is not invented or discovered. It is lived.

I am going to say to them, let's not learn this as cold hard facts with little walls around them. Instead, let's learn about this as poetry, something you feel, something that emerges insight and connection without having to trudge through it. And then let's listen to the life inside us while we are learning about the same life. Did you know that you have the capacity to feel/sense every single cell in your body? And that, like any other relationship, you can have conversations with them? Become aware of the communication that is happening all of the time and even ask questions to deepen your understanding of your own life? Right now, close your eyes or keep them open but bring yourself to whatever stillness feels possible right now. Imagine your ears are turning direction and rather than listening to your outside body, you are listening to your inside body. And then just ask, whisper to yourself, hey liver, show me yourself. Hey left femur, make yourself known. Hey energy of my blood, rise up and warm me. And then notice what happens. You might have feelings/thoughts about getting this right, a kind of conditioned anxiety that keeps you separate from yourself. If you do, try and ignore them. You can't get this wrong. Just say, hey stomach, I'm listening. Communication can happen in so many ways. You might feel a presence, a sense of something-ness around the area where your liver or femur or stomach are. You might feel a presence somewhere totally different. You might feel a temperature change, get an image, feel the urge to move, so many different ways of life expression. Don't worry about understanding, not right now. This is just a gentle touch in, like meeting that person you've heard about for years over social media but haven't actually met yet. Hello, I feel like I know you but I don't yet. Eye contact. Smile. And then comes the time for relationship to emerge.

The words don't matter, it's the intent behind them. Every aspect of your body that you whisper to is an aspect of yourself. This is the basic destruction of western science: life is taught of as something separate, an object, a mechanism. Your cell is not a factory, it is a living breathing intelligence. It is you, 52 trillion times over for 52 trillion cells. This is you. Each cell carries the same kind of complexity as each organ, as your body as a whole, as the planet that we live upon, as the galaxy we are part of. Adrienne Maree Brown and others are talking about fractals as a way to experience organizing and change. This is what our life is: one element of an infinite fractal.

Your body, every single cell, has stories to tell you. Just like the person who lives next door and tells their family stories about your parking habits, habits that you've never noticed yourself.  Or the person who used to serve your school lunch when you were in third grade, who remembers you vividly even though you will never know their name. And then hundreds of stories that are not directly about you but they cross your life, the woman who works as a parking attendant in the garage that you pass when you are walking to work. The two people who work for the park near you, keeping the grass cut and the sidewalk shoveled in winter, you don't know them and yet their life is directly connected to yours, every time you cross the street and step on that grass. It's a wide mass of complexity and connection that is more than you can track, whether you're talking about the people who are all of the aspects of your outside life, visibly and invisibly, or the cells that are all the aspects of your inside life, visibly and invisibly. Everything is connected.

What I will tell my daughter and her friends is that, in order to understand this complexity, western science has broken it down to a never ending table of parts. That is how we come up with the word for cell and for the aspects of the cell: the organelles, mitochondria and Golgi apparatus. Sexy words, huh? Listening to the different notes of music within a complex composition is not a bad thing. It's one way of experiencing and appreciating what happens when it all comes together. The problem is when all of the parts aren't ever, on their own terms, experienced all together. That is not how most science began. Science that is indigenous to this planet, that is native to the land upon which you now live, is the science of connection and relationship, not the science of parts. It's the science that quantum physicists and evolutionary biologists and ecologists are in the process of "rediscovering." It doesn't need to be rediscovered. It just needs to be lived.

Healers or people doing their work with a healing justice lens are creating the conditions for new stories to emerge. Or for old stories to be remembered: the whisper of a muscle fiber that carries the strain of bracing against the endless stream of police cars that slow down as they pass. The open and closedness of a cellular membrane that has figured out how to operate within the toxic soup of the nearby chemical plant. The hold on the bottom of the heart from a loss that hasn't yet been heard. This is what I will tell Luca and her friends when they come to talk about biology: it's all connected. All life is always connected. This is why it is not possible to heal alone as an isolated individual, we heal together. That's basic biology, even if it isn't how it's taught in high school.


The image above is the representation of a cell, a eukaryotic cell which means a cell that has a nucleus around its DNA. Every cell, like every individual body, has a way to digest food, to poop out waste, to turn food into energy, to pump blood, and to learn in response to new information. This representation shows some of the parts of the cell. You can think of it in the same way you would see an image of human anatomy or of the anatomy of our planet.

What people ask us for when they are asking about healing

I am grateful to be a member of the People's Movement Center. Like incredibly grateful. It means that I get to be in relationship with other practitioners, with healers who are also deeply grounded in liberation and justice. We have conversations about healing justice. We also have conversations about how trauma shows up in the nervous system, about the difference between different healing traditions and how Chinese medicine has five seasons. We also have more mundane conversations like about how much money we have in the bank and how we can earn more income so that we can actually pay for a staff member.

We've been around for slightly over three years and the majority of our work has expanded through relationship. This has meant that we are getting asked more and more often to do work with groups and organizations.  In conversation, we are noticing that when people call us, they often can't exactly explain what they want. They just know they want us to do something about healing. People are calling because they have a felt sense of something. It's like they know that what they want is different from what they have - they can FEEL it - but they don't always have language to name it. It's one of the reasons why so many people are hungering to be involved with healing work.

Healers are all about patterns, right? We look for the connections between things, the places of expansion and contraction, in order to support those we work with to have more connection to their lives. So when people call us and we notice the pause that comes after, 'tell us what you mean by healing work," we start watching for patterns. 

First, a lot of people are calling and asking us about trauma. They want a mix of information and practices related to dealing with the impact of trauma on the nervous system, the role of trauma in development, and techniques for shifting the impact of present time and held trauma. At the PMC we are a collective of mostly people of color and indigenous people, of queer and trans identified people. The people who call us are also often POCI and queer and trans. And many want conversations about the connections between individual and collective trauma, between present and historical harm. People who call want to know about how to make these things visible within an organizational culture. They want tips for dealing with stress and anxiety and for frames that they can use to help navigate overwhelm. 

The second biggest ask we get is for some kind of body-based, somatic, embodiment, spiritual and experiential practices. These are all concepts that seem to be pointing to something a similar ask or experience: ways to be together that aren't just about talking and thinking. They want somatic practices or somatic facilitation, someone who can help them shift their culture from doing work to being within work. They want help in coming up with their new strategic plan but doing it through movement and listening rather than just putting ideas on paper. People call wanting Theater of the Oppressed work, movement work, breathing before talking support. They want support for ceremony or ritual or a way to make what they are doing feel more sacred. These requests are what have made us get clear that sometimes the best healers are our magical facilitators who help people re-member themselves alone and together in groups. We see you facilitators!

The third ask is directly for healing spaces. This is when people are having a retreat or want to gift their members or they have been through something intense and harsh and they want us to pull together a group of healers to hold a healing space. Sometimes these include skills sharing like leading everyone through breath work or a bodyscan and sometimes they are just about receiving.

What I was taught when I came in to this work and what I still believe is that healing justice is a lens, something that helps us to weave together histories and present time, to lift up cultural traditions and healing practices, to find ways to bring healing practitioners into movement spaces, and to work to ensure that everyone has access to culturally grounded integrative care and not only those who can afford it. When I look at what we are asked for at the PMC, I see these as sign posts for what we need to lift at this moment in time. They don't define healing justice work, but they are practices and conversations within it. And the focus or requests will change. They always do. As healers, our job is to keep listening for and tracking the patterns.

The image the top of this blog post is a slide of heart cells. There is new research about the heart that says it is wrong to think of the heart as an organ that pumps blood. This research suggests that the heart actually slows blood down, helping it to pace itself so that the body can savor it. Everything we think we know and understand evolves. Always.

Gravity

From the minute sperm and egg meet, we are becoming. Each cellular shift is a kind of unfolding, an emerging within the fluid of the womb. For these first nine months, this is all we know. Fluid, in the beginning without clear boundary and, as we get closer to birth, fluid that is contained on all sides by a wall we can't yet cross.

Our first and earliest becoming is in the space of infinite possibility. That's what it means to grow within water. Every single direction is possible, all at the same time. We can lengthen and widen without coming against a boundary. And yet, because it is fluid, we also get the constant reassurance, light pressure against our emerging skin, that we are not alone. We are contained. Supported. Infinite space and complete containment, all at the same time.

Because this is all that we know, once we are born, the first reflex that kicks in* is the reflex that helps our body build a relationship with gravity. Try to think of it! No matter how we get out of the body, down through the birth canal or lifted up out of the abdomen, our tissues go from only knowing fluid to suddenly feeling the heavy relentless pull of gravity. Whether you believe in evolution or loving creation, it's the same thing: the first reflex that kicks in is one that helps our heart and lungs, blood vessels and lymph, and eventually intestines, muscles and bones, find their way to move against the demanding heaviness of a gravitational pull.

Reflexes are like those teachers that used to pop up on microsoft word when you first downloaded a new program. Remember the little paper clip with the startled expression that suddenly popped in to the lower right hand of your screen, asking you if you wanted help on formatting a document? Well, reflexes are like that, only less annoying. They pop up in the body at the appropriate time, giving a nudge to nerve endings which nudge muscles which means that suddenly, without being taught, the baby rolls over, lifts their head, starts doing the back and forth swimming movement that leads to crawling, reaches for the table and pulls themselves up, takes that first unsteady step that resolves into walking, and then learns to jump away from the gravity that holds its body down. Reflexes are made up of thousands of tiny concrete details that, over time, most often although not always come together in a body that, in jumping up to grab an apple off the highest branches, finds out how to move against gravity even as gravity continues supporting it.

As we develop and age, our bodies don't forget those reflexes. They are always there, ready to support a reboot, ready to remind the map of cells and awareness how it was that we started. To share with us again that first experience of coming into our own life, as something physically separate from the body that grew us within their womb.

I have never studied yoga. I do not know enough about the rich and complex history of its lineage, its teachings to explain why any particular pose or asana exists. But the first time I was invited to do shivasana, I immediately thought, look! It's the first reflex! Lying on the ground or sitting/leaning against any surface, soft and open, and being with our cells as they fall into and push against gravity.

Alright, in a second I'm going to ask you to put this down. To seriously put this blog down, even if your mind pops in and says, sure, sure, I'll do that after I finish reading this thing.  Seriously, I want you to put your phone, laptop, tablet, whatever you got down on the table or the floor. I want you to bring your body to gravity and listen. If you are able, lie on your back on the floor, arms and legs relaxed and open, head supported and mouth gently open. If the floor is not an option for your body, then stay in our chair or lean your back against a wall, letting gravity support as much of you as you are physically able, and then just listen.

Do this now and then, after 2 minutes, 5 minutes, 10 or 30 depending on what feels right when you are there, come back to this page.

❤   💙   💚   💛   💜   ❤   💙   💚   💛   💜

What did you notice? What did you feel your body, this mix of fluid and membrane, do? Did you sink into the floor, chair or wall? Did your body pull away from the force, staying somewhat suspended, almost hovering just on top of the surface? Did your body sink down so far that you could barely pull yourself up, as though the surface overcame you and you felt like you disappeared? Did you notice emotions, physical sensations, a desire to move get stronger the longer that you stayed there? Was it impossible to notice anything because of how much your mind was chattering?

As you reflect over all of it, are you getting that "oh shit, I didn't do it right!" or some version of how you're not a good enough healer, person, life form because you couldn't still yourself for two minutes? Be wary, systems of supremacy have long ago found the cracks in the self care and mindfulness industries and have already shoved perfectionism and the protestant work ethic right down into its peacefully beating heart. It's managed to make "being present" another item on the to do list, one you can fail and or succeed at, meaning that your struggles are, again, all your fault. If that's coming up in you, then that's information. Notice how that old conditioning that best serves capitalism and not life has got into you.

Healing is about noticing what is here, right now. All of it, whether we like it or not. Sensing in and feeling noticing what is true at this moment. And then building enough space around what is true to be able to shift or change what comes next, if it serves your life or your kin's life better than what you were doing/being before. Bringing your body to gravity, or as close to gravity as you can get, is to intentionally let this first and very early relationship sniff around your life right now and share with you what it's experiencing. It lets this first early relationship with gravity help your cells remember themselves as they are and on their own terms.

Everything is information, including if the felt sense, the physical message that is rising up in you as soon as you bring your weight to gravity, is that it is not safe to rest. There is information here if trying to settle into weight makes every nerve ending in you scream that you have to get up and run. Bringing our body to this first reflex makes even more visible what our lives already know: what happens when we try to rest?

The first part of healing is stopping the violence. Always. That is true whether or not the violence is happening  in the present moment or if the violence is held in the tissues, a moment in the past that hasn't yet settled. Coming to this first reflex lifts up just how much of that present or past violence is impacting our ability to rest. As a healer, I look at violence as a range of things including the US normative conditioning that says your worth is bound up with what you do and not who you are. No single one of us can be healed or free until all are healed and free. It is possible to stop the impact of the violence still held in your tissues by controlling the space you are in and having enough time to let your bodies very slowly and fully feel that space around you, like a scared mammal slowly sniffing its way into someplace new, sniffing to find a corner to curl up in that is hidden and quiet.  It is also possible to stop the impact of that violence in your tissues by being raised with a range of race, class and gender privileges so that your conditioning numbs you and you can't feel the violence even when it is loud and screaming right outside your window. The first is about creating healing spaces. The second is about living your own life at the expense of others. Both of these scenarios are about violence that needs healing.

Coming to our first relationship with gravity, whether we do it by ourselves and for our individual bodies, or we do it as part of a group, it is always about taking a moment to listen, to integrate without thinking, and to notice what is true. Right now. In this moment.

And like all things, this is about practice. (Go ahead, I know you read that and want to lie down again. Go ahead and do it and then come back. This blog piece is almost done.)

We can't build a practice of rest if we don't know how to rest. This is the place of contradiction, the wrapped up tight knot that generations of living within and overriding violence have created. It is very difficult, although not impossible, to bring our body's to gravity's weight if we don't believe we can let go of our weight. That we can rest.

The gift of this is that gravity is not going anywhere. For the rest of your life and beyond, gravity is going to be this living relational thing that is with you, wherever you are. It was there to greet you immediately upon being born and, after you pass, it will help pull your body down and back into your most basic elements. It is always here. Always. And remembering your, our relationship to it is something you can do on your own or, even better, something you can do with others. Nothing I am writing here is new. Instead, this is all ancient and so many healers and teachers across literally thousands of years have practiced what it means to bring a body back into its ability to rest. Rest is how life remembers itself, reflects over what it has learned and slowly remakes itself in response to that learning. All of this is why systems of supremacy hijack the body's survival responses, keeping our nervous systems at the ready for disaster. Unable to rest.

I wish for you the ability to rest. I wish for you, no matter what has happened in your life or is happening now, the space and time, for five seconds or five hours, to remember this first and very loyal relationship.  Right now. As I finish writing this blog, I will practice. My daughter and partner are both still asleep. It is cold enough outside that the windows are shut so this room is quiet and contained. I will practice with and for you, remembering gravity, and wishing its patient steady pull as a kindness that only wants to hold your bones so that you are contained, held still, not falling into space or falling apart.


* This isn't exactly how the study of developmental reflexes names this first reflex. They focus more on what the set of specific reflexes moves towards. I am grateful to my teacher Suzanne River, who has since passed, for how she taught these reflexes as a series of reflexes and movements within the larger reflexes.

A midwestern POCI conversation about healing

Place matters. All action is local, even when it is sent through the internet to be a national or global initiative. It's local because we experience it locally. In our bodies. It matters deeply that I am from the midwest - started on the eastern edge of the midwest in Ohio and have ended up here on the western edge, in Minnesota. The feel of this land, its seasons, what its food and water carries into my body, the fact that it is already in the 30s today, cold and dark early: these are what forms me. Where you are is what forms you.

I am resharing this conversation here, although I've already shared it through Facebook. I am sharing it here and prefacing it with place because the 23 indigenous and POC healers and healing practitioners who are talking on its pages also live here, on the Dakota homelands, in Minneapolis and St. Paul. These are people close to my heart, some of whom are in my everyday life. We all live here, on this land, right now. And that matters.

The focus of this conversation was on how to support leaders of color and indigenous leaders, people who are often working in toxic spaces where their leadership is under attack, where they are under-resourced and where the weight of white supremacist systems and organizations makes the work of liberation feel sometimes close to impossible. The question that Nexus wanted us to sit with was to better understand how healing can happen within these spaces.

I am resharing the report that came out of that conversation here, when we are on the cusp of an election. Many of you are involved in some kind of voter work. Many more of you are impacted by what happens at these elections. And no matter what, shifting power at the electoral level is important but it isn't about healing. It can, however, set the conditions that allow the potential for healing to increase or decrease.

So I share these words with you because, well, we all need words that make us dream bigger. Feel free to share with me what you have read and written. This is a conversation. Trauma is disconnection. So how can healing, re-connection or connection for the very first time, happen right now. Here.

The image above is of a single nerve cell, something that doesn't really exist because a nerve cell only exists in its relationship to the other cells around it. And yet it also does. A single nerve cell can shift how communication is happening within the body. It is powerful. And yet a single nerve cell depends on the communication that happened before and after, its role in change is only about those who came before and those who came after. A single nerve cell.

Dealing with the original wounds

This is not a trigger warning, but it is an invitation that you pay attention to yourself. I am going to talk about the violence that is the foundation of the creation of the United States. It is easy to read history and turn it into information: something that a person “knows” and “understands.” Please don’t do that. Everything written here is about real people; people like you and your kin. What is written here might be about your kin or your people might be the kin who were committing the violence. Either way, notice yourself as you read. Listen deeply, listen to how your ancestors might whisper to you through your DNA, through your spirit. Read this as a prayer, not a school lesson. And then breathe.

I just finished taking a walk along the Mississippi River. The leaves are mostly fallen, the sumac is bright red, and the ancient cottonwoods loom large along the riverside. I usually walk near Coldwater Spring, a sacred Dakota site that has been taken over and domesticated by the park service, and along the river just north of Fort Snelling. I never go there without remembering where I am and what happened at that place. I never go there without remembering that eight generations ago, there was no Fort and this was only Dakota land. I never go there without remembering the 1600 Dakota families who were interred at the Fort after and during the Dakota war, only six generations ago. I go there and remember the expulsion of the Dakota people from their homelands, still six generations ago, all of these actions taken by President Lincoln within months of his signing of the Emancipation Proclamation.

As a bodyworker who studies craniosacral therapy and learns from other modalities, I know that if you can identify the original wound, the first significant hurt, and if you can support that original wound to get what it needs to transform, then many of the things that happened afterwards will transform at the same time. I have seen that kind of unwinding, this moment of deep healing, within the cells and tissues of people who invite me to be with them. Held trauma is a moment of unfinished history. Life wants to come back to the present moment, to feeling connected to other life. This means that held trauma will find a way to resurface again and again until it is finished. This is why a person seems to get involved with the same kind of person, the same boss and situation at work, the same feeling of isolation and sadness. Until we can heal or shift the original conditioning or experiences, we will get tangled up in the same tangles.

The same is true of what happens to the collective body. I believe that for those of us who live on this land, there are two significant original wounds. These wounds overlay a whole range of histories that we have separately brought as people coming from many different places but when we settle here, on these lands, then we settle in relationship to the original wounds.

The first wound is the attempted genocide of those people indigenous to this land. For over 500, 5000, some peoples say 50,000 generations there were people who lived on these lands. They moved and migrated like people do, from one ocean to the other, from the south to the north and the north to the south. Real people who did all of the glorious and absurd things that real people do, who had wars and who got sick and died and who lived contented lives, real people who never lost their relationship to the land. Real people who understood - and understand - that we are the land and the land is us. The first wound happened when Europeans brought their wounds to this land and planted them. Those wounds were the wounds of disconnection from land and the idea of land ownership. Their wounds included the idea of profit, something that is not possible without inequality. They included rigid and specific gender assumptions that subjugated anything seen as feminine and they included a patriarchal and transcendent God who expected harsh discipline and service from his followers. These were the wounds that had evolved in western Europe for thousands of years. In their European homelands, people were (and are still) fighting for a connected life that does not depend on violent inequality at its base. Many of those who first crossed the ocean to come to this land came because they wanted to find a place where they could live more spiritually grounded simple lives. But even those who came seeking heaven on earth came bringing their own original wounds, this deep disconnection from life, and they carried it like a virus as they built their farms and towns and expanded across the land. This is the first original wound: the attempted and unceasing disappearance of the original people of this land through murder, forced assimilation, land theft, and cultural policing and minimization.

The second original wound came soon after first contact with these lands. This was the wound that enabled those who settled to increase their profits and to feel justified in doing so. First the land was turned into an object to be sold and used for personal purpose and second, human beings were turned into objects to be sold and used for personal purpose. The second wound is the institution of slavery, the economic system that depended on the creation of race as a way to organize the complexity of life. The European system of slavery or the owning of people has its roots in European feudalism, anti-Semitism and the colonizing mix of the Catholic inquisition and crusades. The way the institution of slavery developed in the Americas is born of these histories with each colonizing country putting the pieces together slightly differently. This second original wound is entwined with the first; both together creating the foundation of the creation of the United States: indigenous disappearance and the violent policing of anti-Black racism. The institution of slavery had already been started in the islands and lands to the south of us. This means that as Europeans first started coming north to settle and colonize, they brought with them enslaved Africans. The first settler’s legal code, the Massachusetts Body of Liberties, legalized slavery in the colonies. After the Bacon Rebellion, a shared fight by Black slaves and Black and white indentured servants only two generations after the first large scale settlement in the East, race rather than class became the tool for social control.

When you attend to an original wound, are not distracted by all of those things which show up at the same time, you increase the potential for transformation.

There are many other wounds that exist here on these lands: gender oppression and classism and ableism and religious persecution and anti-immigrant hatred and all kinds of phobias. But they are not the original wounds of this land. Most flavors of US-based class and gender oppression have European roots, not indigenous or the many different kinds of Asian or African cultural roots. Forms of gender and class based oppression might well exist in those lands, but upon settling here, in the United States, those other homegrown inequalities merged with the European form of cultural divide.

The one thing all of us share who are living on this land that is now called the United States is the experience of being raced. This is true whether we are new immigrants or our people have been here since first contact. This is also true for those who are indigenous to this land but it doesn’t quite work the same way. Being native to this land exists before race and so identities like Lakota or Ojibwe or Cree are cultural experiences that exist before they were raced. Being raced means having the complexity of your history, your culture, and your understanding of yourself and your kin aligned with a category that you have no power to shift. The only people who get to experience life without the awareness of being raced are white people.

White supremacy, I believe, is a system of coddling European-descended people so that they don’t have to feel the impact of the wounds they brought with them over the ocean and then transplanted directly and indirectly into this land and into people’s bodies. White supremacy is a system set up to maintain these original wounds so that they are raw and bleeding, never able to heal and then transform into something new. White supremacy exists so that European-descended people don’t have to experience the profound contradiction between the life they are leading and the values they claim to hold.

To me, healing justice is about directly addressing these original wounds. Period. This means healing justice seeks to stop the violence of these histories as they show up in the present day, including in how newer immigrants are defined through the lens of anti-Black racism and anti-indigeneity or with the added layers that are defined in relationship to US global economic interests.

As healers and healing practitioners, we work most of the time with individual bodies. Life shows up in healing spaces in very local ways: as an experience of pain, of emotion, of disconnection, of compromised movement or energy. We are there in response to how the truth of someone’s life shows up in any given moment.  This is healing. What makes it healing justice is how we hold the truth of the present moment within the larger context of the original wound. How we do this is part of what I will keep reflecting on in this blog.

I want to be clear about one more thing: paying attention to the original wound does not mean ignoring the real pain of gender and class and all other forms of oppression and violence. But it does mean still and always paying attention to the original wound. There is no gender or class liberation possible on this land without attending to the original wounds. Without attending to and healing the origins, other fights will eventually become aligned one way or another with white supremacy. It matters deeply that profound class divisions, sexual violence and rigid gender binaries did not exist on this land prior to colonization. They are not native to this land. They were brought here and transplanted, just like a Monsanto seed, fighting its way into the reproductive cells of native seeds as they are transformed against their will.

Beneath all of what I wrote here is the foundational hurt: the one that these histories made possible and maintain. Beneath all of this is our separation from the life that sustains us. This land, right here, below our feet. The kin who are within arm's and heart's reach. How we experience the connection of all things, spirit, life.  And the ancientness of our selves, our ancestors joining hands along our DNA. Notice your breath. Right now.

How we talk about bodies matters

Because I am restarting this blog to talk about healing justice, I am starting with some fundamental pieces that feel, for me, like the underbelly foundation in how we hold this work. They are not offered as the capital T "truth" but rather like poetry, like ceremony, like song. I want to be in conversation with you, with the connection of all life. I am most interested in how these words resonate in your life, in your body, in how you experience your breath.

We didn’t ask for it. We didn’t create it, but it’s true. Every time we talk about bodies and healing, we are in relationship to histories and beliefs about what is normal and what is not. These histories and beliefs carry invisible assumptions as heavy as gravity.

Many of our people had some belief or practice that saw their kin with different physical bodies or different ways of expressing or different experiences of their senses as evil or possessed by spirits or a danger to the community as a whole. Not all of our people believed this. Some saw those who were different as gifts, as beings in closer relationship to the sacred. But those European histories that first colonized this land and created the mainstream beliefs that define healthcare and religion and politics come from histories of torturing, killing or separating those who were seen as physically, emotionally or mentally different. It wasn’t and isn’t only European histories that had violent ways of dealing with difference. For the purpose of talking about culture in the US, I am writing here about Eurocentrism but please learn and know your own histories. Very few of us come from people who knew how to love radical difference within our intimate spaces, even before we were colonized.

As scientific ways of thinking began to define European culture in the 1800s, this added a new layer of defining the body. Now the science of anatomy, of medicine, of health and wellness began to define “normal” and “abnormal” and to create public policies for managing society along these lines. Who was and is defined as normal shifted over time but most often it included people with physical impairments including cognitive differences, gender non-conforming people, those seen as delinquent or deviant or criminal, and those who are raced as not white. Eugenics developed along with the theory of evolution as a respected science focused on creating the “perfect” race.

This is not a history that is finished. The collective trauma of murdering our own kin because someone defines them as inferior is unfinished and shows up again and again as policies that define any person as diseased and therefore not worth having control over the meaning of their own life. This includes how conversations about assisted suicide unfold, racialized beliefs about who is more violent and who is smarter and who is more generous, how healthcare policies are defined and how healthcare expenses are treated, how accessibility to public and private spaces is supported or dismissed, the obsession with super fit bodies, making assumptions about gender and experience based on the genitalia or our perception of the body in front of us, the use of the words crazy or insane or foolish to dismiss anyone you disagree with, the invisibility of mental health struggles, the assumption of a certain kind of neurotypical cognitionl, the physical and mental and emotional assumptions made in movement spaces where liberatory political work demands long hours of physical and mental energy, and in every space where people talk about healing.

I have heard many different healers use words like “whole” when referring to where someone’s body needs to be. I have heard many healers talk with community members about the outcomes of doing healing work: feeling better, feeling more connected, being stronger, better, faster, just like Superman. I struggle with this whenever I talk about healing - and usually try to only talk about trauma as disconnection and healing as connection - and to then be clear that what connection feels like is defined by the person who wants to heal and NOT by anyone else.

Eli Clare talks about much of this in his book, Brilliant Imperfection: Grappling with Cure. If you identify as a healer or healing practitioner, read this. Now. Assume that even as you are doing powerful work in support of the person you show up for, you are also re-entrenching a history of ableism that slides its way into every sentence that you speak, every assumption that you make. All trauma is collective and as people who care about healing justice, we don’t get to claim our own work as healers without directly attending to disability justice.

There is work to do. Deep work that is dealing directly with how histories of violence are held in the cells of the body. There is also deep work to do about not holding on to what the idea of transformation or liberation looks like. There is deep work to do as healers about not assuming what is normal or valuable and what is not. And there is deep work to do about separating the many different ways that a life experiences itself and allowing that life to define for itself and within relationship to its chosen communities how it wants to define healing.

I make mistakes every single day. In the morning before I practice and when I pray, I ask for help in showing up in the best way that honors the sovereignty of the individual and collective lives in front of me while also working to stop the histories that negatively impact their sense of possibility. As healers or people committed to healing justice, let’s spend the rest of our lives doing a better job of not getting in their way because of the violent histories about wellness and bodies that inform the very practices that we use in support of their liberation.

The image at the top of this page is of a slime mold, the first multicellular reproductive organisms or our shared first mother. When a slime mold is split into parts, it finds its ways back to reform together. And when a slime mold learns, it learns instantaneously, outside of linear time.