Generational trauma and knowing who your real enemy is, it's all about the blood

I wrote this only days before the horrific attack in Christchurch, New Zealand, in which 49 people, children, adults, elders, were murdered in a terrorist attack, after the ongoing attack of Ilhan Omar because of words she named about the state of Israel. What I am writing about here is real. It is real in the way of leading to violence in its most physical form. I hold my prayers for those killed in Christchurch and for those murdered, generation after generation, because of what is written here. This is not just a history lesson. ----- There is a line that keeps running through my head. It’s from the Hunger Games, when Finnick tells Katniss, who feels the chaos of not knowing who to trust, of not knowing who started what kind of violence and how she can feel safe, “Katniss”, Finnick says, “remember who the real enemy is.”
I was angry - and confused - for a lot of years about who my real enemy was. What happens when the people who love you, who are there to take care of you and protect you from when you are very small, don’t do that? What do you do with the chaos when the kin who are supposed to be in it with you actually cause even more harm? I picked leaving home, moving far away from my people, calling them out from a distance while creating new stories about why things turned out the way they did. I chose a whole bunch of space and time to figure out how to make sense of the chaos so that I could come home again. And after a time, the real enemy started to become clear. There is a lot of chaos and call-out happening over Representative Ilhan Omar’s critique of the state of Israel. The responses to Representative Omar, and the responses to the responses, carry deep pain and anger. Reactions and then the reactions to the reactions are emotional, some are overly rational and many are dangerous, using the weapons of Islamophobia, anti-Black racism, indigenous disappearance and anti-Semitism with some misogyny and sexism thrown in to build a case. This level of reactivity, of intense response, means that this moment is not about the present moment. It is not about an act of physical violence, of flesh harming flesh. These reactions are to words. The intensity of these reactions are a demonstration of the impact of generational trauma.

Somewhere, there is an original wound. When violence and other forms of held trauma do not have the space to heal and integrate, then they are passed forward. Somewhere is the shape of violent disregard so intense that, generation after generation, it has moved forward as culture, as protection, as surveillance, as pain. Within the cycle of violence, all players evolve protections in order to survive. We develop protections around how we have been harmed and how we have caused harm. And then over time those protections become culture or community practice and their origins become invisible.
Chaos theory says that if we stand back far enough, there is always a pattern to emerge. Chaos is rarely chaos; we’re just in the middle of too much information without a sense of how it’s all connected to each other. Chaos is how systems of supremacy unsettle resistance. When you combine chaos with the triggering of deep fears about your ability to be ok, to survive, to be safe, then it becomes almost impossible to step away from the pattern and see clearly. Healing from deeply held trauma needs space and enough safety for the body to move through something vulnerable. State violence and surveillance and internalized violence and surveillance prevent this space and safety from emerging.
Anti-Semitism, Islamophobia, indigenous disappearance and anti-Black racism would not exist if it weren’t for the violence that, over generations, emerged as the twinning of Christian supremacy and capitalism. White supremacy wouldn’t exist if it weren’t for the twinning of Christian supremacy and capitalism, two belief systems that evolved at the same time.

In the 4th century, Emperor Constantine* converted to Christianity, turning the machinations of the Roman empire into a tool for two things: grabbing land and other wealth AND converting everyone in its path to Christianity. As part of this, in 318 Constantine brought a whole bunch of Christian bishops to a meeting to create the rules of Christianity (called the Nicene Creed). Before this, Christianity was a mixed bag of belief systems including both highly patriarchal structures and highly matriarchal structures, including communities that resembled Buddhist monasteries, communities that believed in sexual pleasure as an expression of God’s divine love, communities that were still predominantly Jewish with a few changes in tradition, and more. The Nicene Creed named Christianity as the single true belief system. Over a period of generations, the pre-Christian beliefs of Rome were wiped out, sometimes violently and sometimes by conversion.  

Anti-Semitism grew in shape and practice along with the growth of the Christian church, its violence waxing and waning, shifting shape and practice, but never disappearing for all of Christianity’s 2000 plus years**.  

Originating in European Christianity, antisemitism is the form of ideological oppression that targets Jews. In Europe and the United States, it has functioned to protect the prevailing economic system and the almost exclusively Christian ruling class by diverting blame for hardship onto Jews. Like all oppressions, it has deep historical roots and uses exploitation, marginalization, discrimination and violence as its tools. Like all oppressions, the ideology contains elements of dehumanization and degradation via lies and stereotypes about Jews, as well as a mythology. The myth changes and adapts to different times and places, but fundamentally it says that Jews are to blame for society’s problems. From Understanding Anti-Semitism.  

The political growth of the Catholic church has depended on the tools of anti-Semitism to grow its own wealth.  The history of anti-Semitism is the history of Christianity evolving an idea of “pure blood” and dangerous blood, of good and bad as essential qualities of a person rather than a type of behavior. These ideologies of dangerous and pure blood could then justify actions that otherwise go deeply against Christian values of life and forgiveness, of community and radical love; go against those values while seeming to stay in alignment with the same values. This ideology evolved along with the Christian idea that being closer to God means transcending or leaving the body. The body becomes a site of control and good bodies go to heaven while bad bodies are dangerous and must be controlled. Histories of blood sacrifice and transcendence as a part of spiritual life are almost universal, with traditions found on every continent. The development of the political Christian church used these practices as a tool for justifying the accumulation of resources through the destruction of other people, cultures and communities. This is not the only time that this has happened. This is what happened that led to our present moment.

In the middle ages, the Roman Catholic Church employed soldiers through the Crusades or what was called the Holy wars.  The Crusades especially targeted those lands of the Eastern Mediterranean, where Islam was a growing spiritual and political force. For reasons of religious conversion, in order to bring alliance among different Christian factions, and for wealth accumulation, the Crusades strengthened the idea of the Pope as the head of the Catholic church and normalized militarism as a part of religious practice. Jewish communities, “heretical” Christian communities, pagan communities and Islamic communities were attacked or often destroyed. The boundaries of the political-religious western Christian world were defined as a result of the Crusades and the political wealth of the Christian church was strengthened. Orientalism, as named by Edward Said, was the justification narrative that allowed this stage of western colonization to expand while, again, maintaining Christian Europe’s sense of living in alignment with its own values.  

The sense of Islam as a threatening Other - with Muslims depicted as fanatical, violent, lustful, irrational - develops during the colonial period in what I called Orientalism. The study of the Other has a lot to do with the control and dominance of Europe and the West generally in the Islamic world. And it has persisted because it's based very, very deeply in religious roots, where Islam is seen as a kind of competitor of Christianity. Edward Said in Orientalism. 

Christian supremacy continued to grow, changing shape and practice depending on the country and historical moment. When the British government began to colonize the lands of the Americas, joining other European countries in the use of the institution of slavery and indigenous destruction as the primary policies of wealth accumulation, it grafted the idea of pure and dangerous blood on to the bodies of those it was targeting. This same strategy of justifying some bodies as bad and some bodies as good enabled the British and then later US governments to continue to build wealth off the bodies and lands of indigenous and Black people while still believing it lived its Christian values.  The invention of the one drop rule meant that one drop of "Black blood" made you Black and therefore controllable by white supremacy whereas Blood quantum meant that you had to have a specific amount of "indigenous blood" in order to count as Native and therefore be recognized by signed treaties. Blood rules helped define strategies of surveillance used in times of war to contain the bodies of those who resisted: reservations, prisons, and then, over time, the cultural practices of educational systems, healthcare systems, and all other methods for disseminating culture.  At the same time, religious practice became increasingly focused on transcendent practices, a sense of leaving the body to find relationship with God, of becoming pure Spirit, a sanctified dissociation that also supported those causing harm to not feel, in that most physical of senses, the impact of their actions.  

In the early 20th century, independence movements in lands colonized by western Europe began to surge forward and an increasing western need for oil merged together. The same essentializing idea of pure and dangerous were now directed towards Islam, justifying Western war mentality by calling the Islamic world and Arab countries barbarous, cultures in need of ‘civilizing.’ The Western cultural practice of orientalism created fertile ground for the violence of Islamophobia. This became heightened as a result of 9-11 and once again, trauma repeated itself. Christian fear swelled and the need to offset that terror on a clear enemy turned into the rapidly evolving practices of Islamophobia and anti-Arab racism.  

Anti-Semitism, anti-Black racism, indigenous disappearance, and Islamophobia are all manifestations of the same early trauma and override: the desire for wealth accumulation, the violent taking of lands and resources and bodies to accumulate that wealth, and a need to feel in alignment with deeply held Christian values. They all depend on this idea that some blood/people are dangerous and not quite human while others are pure and that it is possible to do great violence and still be a good Christian. Andrea Smith powerfully names this history in her piece, Heteropatriarchy and the Three Pillars of White Supremacy.  

Christianity also evolved in European owning class communities to support a dissociation from the physical body and an essentializing of bodies that are “different” as needing to be controlled or dismissed. When Constantine paid for the construction of a singular unforgiving Christian doctrine that was then used to justify the expansion of Empire, he took a grassroots belief system that centered the ending of poverty and radical love and turned it into a tool of violence. Western Europe used that legacy for the development and then expansion of market capitalism. You could not have capitalism without Christianity and you could not have the spread of Christianity without capitalism.  

Systems of belief have protective survival responses. They are held in the nervous systems of all of those who have  been raised within those systems of belief, both the perpetrators and those who are harmed. In moments like this, I see multigenerational systems as having a kind of energetic form, their hands holding the marionette strings and making us dance. We lost a lot in the scientific world when we stopped talking about evil spirits. Sometimes I think it’s the only way to make visual the way these multigenerational patterns live through us, forcing so many of us to be agents of their harm even as we seek to destroy them.   

What is happening right now is painful. And it carries with it a whole range of individual and collective experiences that have taken place since the expansion of the Roman empire and probably before. Without transformation, the cycle of violence always moves forward and those who have been harmed, too often, become those who carry the harm forward. Shifting the complex paths of pain that are twisting so tightly in the conversations and reactions swirling around Representative Omar’s comments is about more than remembering history. But remembering history is deeply important. This mess started somewhere.  

All of my family lines are Catholic with the majority of them being Catholic as far back as can be remembered and with some of us Catholic through forced conversion within recent generations. Some of my ancestral lines represent the people who were also first colonized by the Roman Empire and who then became the ones to benefit from and move forward that wheel of violence. I assume and sometimes know that somewhere in my histories are people who supported or benefitted from anti-Semitism, the Crusades, the stealing of land, and the enslavement of free bodies. As is true with all empires, most of my people were living their lives, using their Church as the place to support their grief and family transitions. They were not thinking about strategies for wealth accumulation and that wealth rarely trickled down to their families and kin. And as is true with all empires, each and every one of us is still, in some responsible for the repair. It’s about time that energy and pain that is wound around and between those hurt by and raging against Representative Omar turn around and direct that energy towards us. Sometimes you have to look far enough back across the space of history to begin to see a pattern in the tangled mess of the present moment. Sometimes you have to look far enough back to understand why those who seem to be causing you harm are, themselves, stuck with you in a pattern of pain. In my own family, this meant looking for enough back to find the common thread that causes some of us to turn to our own kin and hoist our hurt on each other’s bodies rather than come together to fight against the violence that has become woven through our lineage.  

In the midst of chaos and generations of pain, it’s important to know who your real enemy is, your original enemy, the one who continues to benefit, especially when those who were first hurt are overwhelmed with chaos and striking against each other rather than turning to the ones who first set the violence in motion.

* Violence begets violence. So why start with Constantine when there must have been a before? Did Constantine’s class/mixed upbringing, his witness of the Great Persecution in which state policy was to destroy all Christians, a literal genocide, before Constantine came to power and shifted state policy to use Christianity as a means to an end? And then what was the before for that? ** The political Church is not always the same as what regular folks do on the day to day. While there have always been people who have used the political Church to further their own ends and to cause harm to others, many people truly seek to be faithful and to follow the values they believe in.

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.

healing justice, grief and children

I spent last evening with a group of people who were in ceremony, in practice, honoring the dead from a range of traditions, being intimate with the concrete truth of death and with the bodies that death has already claimed. This is new to me. I experienced a lot of death as a child. We went to funerals (sometimes) and told stories about the person who died in those immediate months after their passing (sometimes) but we did not practice intimacy with death.

My daughter was there at the ceremony last night. She's 15 and has her own life and privacy so I won't give too many details except this: for the first time in her life she had the experience of grieving a recent (violent) death within a circle of intimate strangers and feeling that transformation that happens when heaviness around death turns to something different, more connected, less isolating. I watched this happen and wondered what it is like to experience this for the first time at 15 as opposed to 54 or 3. I watched this happen and placed it in the context of the next story.

As we were telling stories about those who had passed, one woman, a friend, began to talk about a grandmother, a woman who does not know how to show the love she might feel in her heart. This friend talked about her grandmother's emotional distance and about the impact of this on my friend's feelings about her grandmother's eventual death. Then my friend said something that touched everyone in the room: she reflected on the chain of broken relationships, about what happens when a parent is not able to show their love to their child, that raw steady unconditional love. She noticed what this child does - and doesn't learn - and then what happens when this child becomes the parent and again, does not know how be that deep steady resource for their child's living. And on and on again, this line of grief and disconnection that becomes culture, family and the marker for what a person can most expect from the world around them.

That reflection visited my in my dreams last night: a parade of families, of adults stepping up and showing themselves, showing the reasons for why that deep steadiness of love might have disappeared. This really is one of the ways that supremacy and oppression hijacks the body's survival responses. We live to love. Period. We are here to feel and deepen connection with ourselves, each other, the land and spirit around us. Last night I remembered every attack that supremacy has used to isolate and destroy children within their families, from the original wounds of attempted genocide and the institution of slavery, to every act of deportation, incarceration and forced migration, every moment of unsupported poverty and normalized sexual and physical violence.  I will say this over and over again until I hear us saying it everywhere: every time someone's deep-rooted relationships, long evolved languages and cultural traditions are force-taken away, it becomes harder for the kin network to make sure the children are safe. It becomes harder and sometimes impossible for elders to pass along the steady grounded stories that tell the children who they are and why they are here on this planet.  This kind of certain safety and story telling is part of the chemistry of unconditional love. No single one of us should have to figure out for ourselves the meaning and experience of our life upon this planet or to be watching, alone and moment by moment, to make sure our bodies are safe.

The ACE study uses research to prove what all of us know by instinct: if you do not protect the children and keep them safe, then they will be hurt and that hurt will translate to many kinds of pain in their later lives. All of the ways that adults are not able to care for and sometimes are violent towards the children in their care, this generational chain of harm, is at the root of each child who grows up to be an adult who causes harm to their own body and the bodies of others.

One of my teachers talks about the difference between targeted trauma and matrix trauma. Targeted trauma is when a specific act happens to your individual body: you are in a car accident, you experience a racist attack, you are physically violated. These are targeted acts against your body that have a beginning and an end (in the concrete sense, not in the experience of their impact). Matrix trauma is what never ends; it's the ongoing everyday seems-almost-like-the-air-you-breathe systemic attack. The constancy of this is like a slow burn erosion of a person's - and community's - internal clarity about the importance of their own life and connection to others. All systems of oppression are a form of matrix trauma: ableism, white supremacy, patriarchy, homo- and transphobia. They are always there, working to constrict the expansiveness of individual and collective life. Tightening it. Policing it. Controlling it. Matrix trauma can sometimes be invisible, can feel like culture. We say it's just how we do things forgetting that how we do things evolved so that we could survive. This is what happens when the intensity of trauma gets embedded in our kin networks and then passed forward from one generation to the next.

There are multiple forms of cultural trauma that have impacted how children are raised. My friend, who is multiracial raised white, was talking about hers: this emotional disconnection between adults and children that freezes the loving heart, which will protect children when it's in response to protecting the stories the family tells about themselves, but will not protect or even see when the harm is coming from those who are supposed to be there to protect and care for them. This is the trauma which, within the cycle of violence, turns to perpetration and such are systems of supremacy maintained.

What does it mean that, outside of culturally-grounded and connected space, our movements are largely absent of children? I see portable babies in movement spaces, lives that are still in the enmeshment stage with their adult and so are held tight against the body, nursing or bottle feeding or sleeping on one lap after another. This is beautiful and right. I see far fewer children who are at the question asking stage, the interrupting, slow things down, let's play stage. Around age 2 or 3, they start to disappear from many and possibly most places of (non-culturally rooted) movement work. My question isn't just a form of inclusion politics, it's a question about how we imagine and experience community. And my asking is a form of linking arms with everyone reading this and looking at the question together. Even as a parent who has that special eye contact moment with other parents when organizing spaces are so obviously not centering the fact of children, I don't always know how to do this differently.

This is what happens when we don't do this work differently; the children disappear. And things happen when the children disappear - from mild disregard to deep and dangerous violence. That wound of separating families, of professionalizing or formalizing spaces, of putting the care of the children into a different category from the care of the communities: it continues forward, a kind of culture that was at one point the best way someone knew how to survive.

I had an experience at Standing Rock that has impacted me forever on all of this. Irna Landrum does an incredible job of describing what happened, but the bare details are this: all of us at the camp were awakened in the middle of the night to be part of a potential search party for a little girl who was missing (quick assurance: the little girl was found safe and ok). All of us, a moment in the camp when that meant hundreds and hundreds, maybe even thousands of us. We all got up, not knowing exactly what was happening, wondering if we were being raided, and went to wait on the road. While we were waiting, a white woman standing next to us complained about being awoken when people weren't sure if the child was actually missing. "Why couldn't they wait and wake us up when they knew for sure?" she asked. Many of us turned to her and said versions of, "I would rather be woken up for a false alarm than not being woken up and have that child turn up hurt." We were sleepy and not sure what was happening but many of us, including myself, were shocked into being awake by that white woman's question.

I want to live where I can assume that you are going to come and bang on my door when your or someone else's child is missing - or your grandmother or the person you never met who lives alone at the corner but there are now three days of mail sticking out of his mailbox. This is the normal that I want.  It matters so much that my daughter, even just now at age 15, got to experience grief as a collective held and normalized thing, to not let the fact of a violent death go unwitnessed and uncared about. It shifted what happens after, and not just for her but for the small ones that she might someday be in relationship with. Healing justice is many things but to me, it's also about creating the conditions that support the deep shifting of unfinished survival histories that are held within the tissues of our physical selves and the tissues of our shared cultures. It's about remembering the descendants, not as someday concepts but as real live breathing small people who are tugging on our pant's legs and asking us to remember them, play with them, keep them safe from harm.

Written in deep care of so many of the adults I know who are living with and caring for small children every single day, theirs and others, while also working to pay the bills and working to change the world. All at the same time.

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.