I spoke with my mother today about her poetry. She’s been thinking of releasing a volume of her poems from various ages that have gone unpublished because she did not pursue a career in it. So she wanted me to take a look, see what I think. She also told me that my grandmother, her…
Transparently, this article started off with a cascade of titles. “Cultural somatics is dead” “Who killed cultural somatics?” “A farewell to cultural somatics” You can probably sense my grief, disdain, and resolve. I think the way I have been writing over the last few years, under the anguished moniker of ‘Selfish Activist’, these would be…
It is an odd thing for the person who is the object of a call-out (that’s me) to offer a breakdown of it but this is the weird world I am in where I’m a ‘leading expert’ in the field of speaking about call-out culture and its relationship to collective neuropsychological phenomenon and also a…
Over the last few years of working on the development of an animist-somatic practice, often alongside my frequent collaborator Dare Sohei, I’ve observed that we may see there are three pivotal points of the trauma resolution cycle. These are orientation, differentiation, and integration. In this piece, I would like to share a model for trauma…
This is a compilation of selected articles that I’ve written over the last four years, plus a free webinar, on the subjects of whiteness, trauma, and allyship. Particularly, within these works, you will be introduced to what we call a ‘cultural somatic’ framework, a constellation of ideas pivoted around the fundamental principle that groups of…
What happens to a people when they lose their ways? Well, one thing we do know is that they lose their medicines. They forget the names of plants and other beings in their world that can help them restore their balance. They forget the rituals that are able to activate the natural healing mechanisms of…
A SPECIAL NOTE ON ‘WHITENESS’: This article refers a lot to whiteness. Heck, its in the title. If I am honest with you, I have lately been developing a lot of weariness around how language such as whiteness or (toxic) masculinity can imply a person’s body is the source of violence. As a somatic therapist, I…
For a long time I have asked myself: what does it mean to decolonize activism itself? The answer I have come to is: it means building my understanding of ‘social justice’ on top of practices that are ancestral to me, rather than constantly refer to dominant activist discourse, which is inevitably informed by patriarchy, capitalism…
Cultural complex trauma Resourcing the immense amount of emergent learning from members of the Authentic Allyship Coaching Group and the work of my many colleagues*, I want to conceptualize Whiteness, a set of internalized unconscious behavioral patterns that violently upholds White supremacy, as something born from what we might call cultural complex trauma, a product of painful…
Context This video is centered around healing white masculinity. Related to this, we both understand that it is a slippery slope when men (although I identify as non-binary) come together to speak about misogyny and feminism. I also want to let the view know that I recognize that body-centred healing around cultural trauma is something…
