So I’m a complex trauma specialist. I’m a licensed independent clinical social worker, and the way that I approach complex trauma work is from a body-based approach and with an emphasis on how we can restore our nervous systems. Like in and amidst our survivorship of complex trauma. I am a person that understands the world through my body. I love to move.

I’ve been a dancer my whole life and I am committed to being in a healing relationship with my own body and the bodies around me, including the body of Mother Earth. For those of us that are invested in healing on an individual and collective level, we’re practicing disconnecting from the rhythms of capitalism and colonialism and how those perpetuate other systems of violence following through with systemic racism, transphobia, queerphobia, misogyny, and all those layers that keep us at a certain rhythm and at a certain level of disconnection.

And so, the ways of healing that are outside of those systems and dependent upon rhythms that are more sustainable and that will carry us through the dismantling and the crumbling of the things that need to die are the rhythms of Mother Earth that have been here well before we popped on and have created these falsified systems that keep us in patterns of stress, disconnection and violence. And so, movement through that, especially while being in places with an increased isolation and not getting to be in human relationship, which I know is also the thing that’s going to sustain us through, is staying as close in relationship with the rhythms of Mother Earth as I can.

So I love staying near the water and watching the tide change and knowing that there are those on this Earth that are well beyond my size, my influence that are holding us together, that we can confide in. I have tried to stay as connected to the sunrises and sunsets as possible and be able to sense those transitions and allow my body to sort of surrender to what it feels like to watch the sun go behind the horizon. 

I’ve meditated at the base of trees, trusting that my body can rest into the strength of their roots and the mycelial connection that keep all of the plants and communication and sustenance with one another. And music, you know, carrying myself along the rhythms of music. And my breath, like always coming back to my breath.

And I want to own as somebody who has a settler history, a colonizer history. I have been guided to these practices by folks that carry a much more indigenous relationship to the land and have taught me practices. And so I don’t want to say this starts with me, by any means. 

But I think in part it starts from recognizing how similar we are to, how a part of nature we are, a part of this Earth. That the separatism that has been sewn into our narrative is a false one, and that by virtue of all breathing the same air and sharing the same electromagnetic field and resourcing from one another, it’s wherever you find your ‘click’.

So some folks I know are going to be more drawn to being in the mountains. Some folks are going to be more drawn by being near the water. Some folks are more drawn to getting their hands in the dirt. And it does require us to slow down, because nature moves in some ways a lot faster than us, but also a lot slower than us. And, kind of tapping into what’s your rhythm and where can you find that rhythm in nature to be able to feel it? 

For anybody, I think, in their pursuits of wellness, I would hope that we can continue to instigate and perpetuate in a good way, perpetuate messages of how wise your body is and to emphasize the badassery of anybody’s survivorship. I hope that we can continue to focus on narratives that your body has everything that it needs to tell you what it needs.

And it also has everything that it needs to be able to heal already well-equipped inside. And we can resource from Mother Nature and from each other.