Your moral compass might be right but here is the rub. The body is political. The past, present and future is reenacting right now deep bone knowing that all humans (and more than humans) must contend with on the ground. I believe, although I’m not religious, the exodus got it right.  “The sins of the ancestors will be visited upon the heads of children.” It is happening right now and I’m guessing this is might only be the beginning. There is no going back.

Bone knowing is a deep wisdom and a deep wound. Being born “white” lower class in the United States is a confusing lineage of just scaping by and privilege. Our ancestors severing roots leaves behind a loss and our forgetting keeps us in a deep sleep for which our myths and fairytales foretell. Our sleep is dense and deep. We are under an intoxicating spell.

In this moment dissociative tears are simply the cycle of reenactment. Whatever I do or not does matters. We will participate whether that be as bystander, perpetrator, or rescuer.  Whether we think we are choosing consciously to take the higher ground and not to be involved, we are involved…messily entangled.

Any inkling of freedom from being one of “them” is lost upon our breathing tissue just as microplastics flood all our cells no matter what we eat – there is no escape. Whether or not we are frozen watching in horror, turning our backs, lifting our eyes in pray for a higher power to manifest…all physical gestures are shaping this moment.

If you like me live in relative freedom even if bound like the wolf in a trap not of our choosing – you, me and all living creatures cannot stand this one out. “Wrong question says the wolf” to the girl who asks WHY? Refusing to listen to the over-culture she goes out into the forest. She sees for herself the entrapment and takes action to free the wolf. Tending to his injured paw even when she’s been told she will be eaten.  

My point here is not why you should vote but understanding that choosing not to vote in this election will not set you free.  It does not wipe your hands clean.  Or keep them clean.

The craziness rings in my bones.  Don’t get me wrong I am not necessarily “political” but my Psoas sure is! It stands up to a deep knowing that no matter who is at the top of the heap I will participate. The choice, as American film director and social/political commentary Michael Moore calls this vote a Sophie’s Choice.  I did, by the way, walk out of the theater the night the movie played in Boston, I paid my ticket, but I cried no thanksfuriously, refusing to participant in a re-living of the agony of re-enactment.

We do not escape: this time, freezing, running or hiding. Life is requiring us white folk to make a move towards or away from Democracy. I like to call democracy a VERB – it is agency engaging our active Awareness. I am witnessing the top-down conditioning that has been internalized. A sensory awareness response means no more fawning to feel safe no more hiding to not get involved…no more looking away as a form of flaying and fragility, no more looking up as if I am better than this.  Tending our Bones, we tend our ancestors wounds still alive in our flesh. 

Nigerian Philosopher and self-proclaimed recovering psychologist, Bayo Akomolafe holds a capacity for life so inspiring it frees my lungs to exhale fully and my heart to sing.  When he humorously tells stories of watching those who care deeply about the earth sorting their garbage into specific colorful bins, he can’t help but wonder if we know that it all ends up in a mountain high heap in his country? He says he saw it with his own eyes as a kid next to where he went to elementary school. He wonders if we know that while holding our precious cell phones in our hands young Nigerian boys sacrifice their lives forced to work in dangerous mines collecting the precious metals that make our Western world comforts and conveniences.  

So here we are messily entangled in a world not necessarily of our making but nevertheless of our ancestors and it is calling on our capacity to show up and tend to the wounds. Mythologist Martin Shaw tells us we are entangled in the grip of a monster serpent that encircles the earth four-times round. Today’s story was told 5000 over years ago. 

When was the first time you heard of Genocide? I remember my exact moment. It was the movie Ann Frank playing on our black and white TV.  I stood in the middle of the living room frozen… tears flowing down my checks.  My father reading the newspaper in his favorite chair, his pipe making a gentle spiral whiff into the air.  My mother doing some manual household tasks.  I was left to wonder why?  Wrong question says the Wolf. It was a crack… a moment where my “white world” first splintered.

The movie was a foreboding tale of harm to white bodies, a loss of innocence, and a seeding of deep despair. Plans for building your own personal bomb shelters were advertised on the TV.  We practiced ducking under wooden desks when the sound of a siren rang in preparation for an attack.  I didn’t breathe terror directly; I didn’t need too; it was filtered through the heating vents and air conditioning. I was being conditioned which brings a strange combination of comfort and doom.

Raised in a segregated part of Cleveland I knew nothing about the rest of the world. I was served up a numbing pablum. The US continents original Nations Genocide story buried so deep it played out as a warping wobbling intentional lie that we celebrate as Thanksgiving Day.  

Bones now quaking there is a seeping up from within the bowels of the earth awaking living tissue and buried memories.  All genocides around the world are colloidal damage of an “advancing civilization”.

The time has come where we who have benefited may no longer gateway ourselves to safety.

As humanity is in a vicious cycle of ancestorial reenactment, what if we listened to our bones and the wisdom of the Wolf? What if we are not asking the right question? What if we stop trying to extract ourselves from harm?  What if instead of continuing to sooth ourselves back to sleep, we awoke from the deep sleep? Might it ignite a crack in our great patriarchal story of dominance over? 

Voting for me is choosing a Black Woman to oversee our Nations Ancestorial Birth Story. Why? Because my psoas tells me so…my cells know the depth of the human origin story and those DNA tracings that lead us all back to a black woman in Africa … she who bleeds but does not die. Every human being came from within and through the body of a woman to this earth. For me the small gesture of Voting is a vote for a crack in the US illusion. It is a way of holding to a reality that Bayo calls small b blackness…the dark universal unknown. 

• The Wolf’s Eyelash told by Clarissa Pinkola Estes author of Women Who Run With The Wolves

Photo sources: Otto Norin Unsplash / Torn paper Pixaby

Permission by Jami Sieber – Long Past Gone | album Second Sight

(read the complete story…or listen…but do)

I’ve been thinking myself as a container, a bag, a carrier of information that became a book called Stalking Wild Psoas. It felt to me like I was dreamed, the book was dreamed – it transcended my thinking into not something I needed to express, but something that needed to be held.  And so the field of my presence, the way I worked with it, was to set aside my life and offer myself as this space of holding,  a container, a bag, a womb in which gestated a book that when I read it today  I I know it’s moving through my tissue in language but is bringing an energy that is not mine, but ours. …

It was at that moment of holding that I had the impulse to explore the Internet to see who else was holding a container or speaking to whatever I was gestating, whatever was gestating in me I should say.  And Bayo Akomolafe showed up as did Resmaa Menakem’s work.  Bayo spoke to an aspect of my book – this being moved – being other – dissolving – becoming porous – being able to be devoured – to be utilized. So that even as a carrier there was no skin that separated me from other – there was no boundary per se. And oh that’s what’s interesting about a container that is alive ! …the porousness of the womb both protects and yet echoes memories …love ..and presence …and a direct kind of knowing that is millions, maybe billions, of years old through tissue, through cells, through all these things that we want to articulate – but actually – is a field of dimensional BEING.

It is fascinating to play with boundaries and in Stalking Wild there is an essay on boundaries because as my defenses softened, I noticed the porousness of being and what a beautiful capacity my organism has to be called – to hear the call… to respond through tissue, through movement, through fluid.  It is not about changing our thinking, although that too  –  story is important.  But the actual dissolving of insistence I believe is found within the tissue and found within a way of moving that literally deconstructs the framework of what human is believed to be… so much more…

To feel the freedom of our variability is the very thing that renders us sane  ~ Jorja Rivero

What is insane is that every woman today is captive to the top-down power over patriarchal norms and established standards that in one way or another drown out our innate knowing.  Women are invariably caught in a net of impossibility. We strive to be perfect yet feel the admonishment of failing. Self judgement can easily rein over our inner domain and within this diminished environment we do not, and cannot, fully exist as the complex and nuanced beings that we are. There simply isn’t room to flourish in a man-made culture that opposes and even hates the very nature of our being.

As women living in a patronizing ‘over culture’ Internalized misogyny seeps under our skin, bruises our hearts, and occupies our minds. Our circuitous entangled ways are not taken seriously but deemed hysterical behavior leaving women to question themselves “am I just being crazy?” and asking each other “do I sound insane?”.

To grow ourselves beyond the cultural norm requires that we pause, slow down, and take our time to really question what truly supports the growth of our personhood.  This inquiry becomes not simply a reaction to but a revolutionary practice of moving beyond social restraints.  It is a multi-dimensional and emergent movement towards being reshaped by a much larger field of life – Mother Earth.

Recognizing internalized misogyny begin by exploring the messages we have heard from our family and cultural conditioning that now speaks from within as inner demands, a voice that says, “how dare you not know why you’re feeling what you’re feeling!” Often expected to know the correct answer we falter, admonish ourselves, and get caught in a never-ending cycle of blame. Believing that we are somehow not good enough, too much, or just plain stupid we shower ourselves with shame that drowns out non-linear perceptive ways of knowing.

Working with internalized misogyny is not an easy task as every time we go beyond the insistence of our conditioning the internalized voice, aka modernity, reasserts its authority by attacking us, whipping us back into shape, or drawing us back to what is familiar, known, and where we supposedly belong.  This human conditioning runs deep within our bones. We may know in our heart that freedom is a birthright, but in every cell and within our ancestral story, freedom is not a given. Survival makes its own demands upon us.

Until there is enough room for variability, we can neither truly know who we are nor be known for all that we are.  Only by turning towards our internalized misogyny and recognizing it can we begin to face our legacy and give up any notion that we can or should be content.

 We stop striving to fix “it” whatever “it” is.  And “it” by the way, is always hard to give up striving for. You are not just going to take “it,” whatever “it” is, out of your system. There is no catharsis big enough to give you lasting relief. There is no extraction that will make you perfect and there is no sure thing in this reclamation that removes internalized misogyny completely.

What is vital to our innate knowing is valuing this process of reclamation.  By doing so we discover our own resistance to recovering what has been lost or buried alive. To begin reclaiming we start to notice ourselves colluding with the patriarchy by acknowledging the many sides of our personality that refuse to occupy a larger field of existence. We may even find ourselves surprised to uncover how complacent we are toward our own self-sabotaging strategies that plow over and bury deep the very longing of our soul.

Only by learning to value our inner experiences, entrusting the variability of life, and sensing our innate knowing does our perception and personal life expand. The instant we become comfortable with not knowing, not being right or even being all right in every moment, we sense deeper within and stand with our feet rooted into a profound cosmology of bio-intelligence that sustains and assures us of all that we are.

With time, awareness, tenderness, and spontaneous play we grow beyond the construct of internalized misogyny. We develop the capacity to not obey its voice while taking our own voice quite seriously.  As we sniff around the edges of ourselves, exploring the boundaries and challenging our thresholds, we expand and offer ourselves space for more and more of our being to emerge. Lovingly tending our inner growth, we learn to tolerate our past choices and our current discrepancies while growing fully into our integral self.

 This emergence happens faster when women work together and hold a creative space for each other. Gathering as women, we do the work that really cannot be done alone.  All mammals co-regulate, and female mammals gather and create sanctuary.  As human mammals we too benefit greatly from acknowledging our need for one another as practicing our call and response deepens our inner knowing. Ironically even our wish for autonomy emerges from this interconnectivity.

Waking up to our autonomy, agency, and audacity is a social taboo that feels very dangerous. And for many female bodies it is downright life threatening. By gathering, we protect the sacredness and strength needed for this process to unfold. The fear of annihilation or the devastation of isolation may be quite real. Yet the reality of maintaining internalized misogyny strangles our soul of existence. Every dictator knows the trick that once fear becomes internalized and the control invisible, no one needs to keep watch as dominance is maintained from within, and inner freedom is extinguished.

To be a “good girl,” the internalized voice of family and culture once told you that you must perform correctly. As a young child we instinctively learn to shape and manipulate ourselves to fit into whatever spoken or often-unspoken behavior is required for safety.  It is here where some form of admonishment or deprivation occurs that ends up leaving a woman feeling fundamentally broken and explaining it to yourself as “I’m bad,” “deficient” or “not enough.” To continue, however, overriding our true feelings, thoughts, and sensations into our adult lives cuts us off from the complexity of knowing ourselves. It is exactly this complexity we are naming as variability that we betray. Once self-betrayal is normalized you will keep betraying yourself.

As women growing up in a male dominate culture, we do not yet know how not to keep betraying ourselves, so we keep asserting control over our behavior. Every time we bump into our uncertainty and feel the paralysis of fear, indecision becomes the crossroads of not confidently standing in our truth. Standing alone feels isolating and how scary is that.  I am now responsible for understanding myself and I am responsible for making mistakes. It takes us all the way back to our young child who is so precious but whose confidence was thwarted.

The healthy response to being trapped in this cycle of self-betrayal is anxiety and depression and as a result, the early stage of dissolving our conditioning often happens through crying.  The crying confronts the vulnerability of childhood and the sadness in recognizing our self-sacrifice. “I am no longer a child, yet until today I was living as if I were a child.” The tears can be compassionately understood as metabolizing conditioning. In this moment we start to create or deepen into a good alone place. To hold ourselves in love.  It is not that we now have life figured out, but it is where we can begin to live deeply within our core and thrive as adult women.

 Gathering supports this natural unfolding and self-witnessing. We do not analyze; we simply name what is showing up. Group work has a potency and a strength like an elixir; it can have magical properties. There is no hand holding or pacifying but there is a sense of support. The process is fluid – a murmuring of sorts where our group energy begins to weave a coherent web holding each of us and all that is emerging. This synergy moves us one way and then another. We may fall away, and we fall deeper into and out of the gratifying unexpected. Held by our own surprise, we keep exploring our natural movement and nurture the delight of confidence.  No one has to say whether I agree with you or not. Instead, you simply sit in your own knowing that “this” is what is right at this moment.

To grow confidence without self-sabotaging also takes paying attention to what is emerging.  By doing so we move from reaction and strategy to spacious inquiry.  As we keep this practice of inner knowing alive, we begin to trust what we are experiencing. We gather the confidence even to say “I am going to pause right here, and I am just going to let myself feel all that I am feeling while I keep sensing”.  “There is nothing I need to do. I do not need to pull my words coherently together, make sense, supply comfort, or show up and speak to the group in some specific way, but I can allow myself to notice whatever is going on within and simply stay curious.”

While all the “shoulds” keep surfacing and you are comfortable challenging them by listening to your true voice, nudges, and impulses, you are growing your capacity to be present to what is emerging each moment.  Creative confidence flourishes as our lives navigate variability. We simply know that we do not know.  We grow, we pause, we collapse, and so it goes.

Each time we begin noticing the insidious forms of internalized monitoring like a surveillance camera planted within, the corrective voice becomes noticeably separate from that which is you.  Every woman has this internalized voice. It speaks at her, not to her.  Part of the reclaiming of self is to invite this voice to come talk not to you but with you.  In other words, by including our conditioning we take back our agency, our hearts, and our sanity.

NOTE: This musing is a braiding together of a recent conversation with relational therapist Jorja Rivero, LCSW.  We are coming together Monday September 25^th to offer our next 3-hr zoom women focused class on the Paralysis of Indecision.  And we are forming in 2024 a Women’s Group that will meet once a month working with Internalized Misogyny through reflection, somatic movement, sensory awareness, creative play, and deep listening.

** Sane – The root word is the Latin  sanus, which means healthy

Photo credit: Chris Lejarazu Unsplash

L I S T E N

Listening to core psoas calls for a broader and deeper understanding of health and primal responses. Gaining this understanding involves challenging our hyper-focus on categorizing the nervous system under the umbrella of “trauma.” Captivating our attention, the cultural reductionist perspective of body (made up of separate parts) distracts us from moving in dynamic emergent ways. It is not to say that we do not want to be able to recognize the qualities of overwhelm (e.g., playing dead, flailing, flooding, fawning, freezing, flighting, and fighting) or give name to these expressions. Rather, I am challenging who, how, and why we think about pathologizing biological gestures and attempt to resolve these dynamics with specific solutions and instructions. This insistence on correctives to mitigate the “dysfunction” as quickly as possible limits the capability of all living beings to innovate in unknown and transformative ways – to thrive rather than simply survive. Instead of therapizing, I find resolving, integrating, and metabolizing gestures enhance naturalizing*

My caveat here is that I am not a trained therapist or a certified bodyworker. Yet, many wonderful human beings who are, show up on my doorstep eager to learn about the role psoas plays in trauma. As a conceptual artist, I have no formal training. My interest is human potential explored through awareness, specifically our innovative sensory systems. It’s what I’ve called Core Awareness for 40 plus years and is now referred to as embodiment, body integration, and somatic education. Perhaps by not being professionally trained, I can offer a different perspective on both psoas and what is currently defined as “trauma.”

Recognizing what seems invisible, like the fish swimming in the ocean metaphor, is that Western Modernity is the dis-ease we are trying to recover from. Colonizing Western strategies for trauma are therefore inherently incoherent as they emerge from this estranged, entangled, colonizer preceptive of hyper-individualism. A top-down, paternalistic model for controlling the human body to make “it” stop being an animal and a strong and pervasive impulse to conquer the Wild.

Rather than being the solution or even simply a healing balm, focusing on getting rid of trauma, unwittingly colludes with the insidious traumatizers. In other words, the most well-intended therapists can even play out their own “tend and mend” sympathetic expressions. These strategies are simply a result of the systemic over-culture that focuses on the specific individual’s self control and ignores the field of inter-relationships within a larger eco-community.

Throughout Modernity humans as multi-organisms with primal expressions have been hijacked, masked, buried, intellectualized, violated, reduced, and individualized. Therefore, moving through these natural responses, as mammals (as all life does) becomes in the Western therapeutic and fitness industries a dysfunction needing to be corrected by way of teaching social skills and managing reactive, exhaustive, and cathartic behaviors of overwhelm.

Moving into coherency in real-time requires a nuanced dance with the Great Mother – planet Earth. Gestures of longing and signaling are calls and responses within flesh, blood, and bones locating us here on Earth. Dissolving the top down control-over system, whether that be emotional, physical or spiritual, renders us humble within the interplay of millions of years of flowing proprioceptive expression. Nevertheless, showing up in this way ignites a primordial capacity to enter harmonic rhythms of life and be deeply moved.

The need to value gestures may seem obvious but it is not what I see in the somatic experiencing world in which subtle mind over matter still predominately dictates what is appropriate and acceptable behavior. Western culture is terrified of the Wild. Masking our entrained fears, even empathy can become a form of manipulation. The Cultural imperative  for safety and acceptance can impede human beings vital biological calls of distress.

What I am suggesting is that by following our primal gestures specifically through our internal and external sensory systems, we can quite literally land and locate and thus be moved by organic rhythms of living earth that are not simply in remission but are a continual life-and-death fluid expression.

At this moment in our space time continuum, human-centric behaviors are overwhelming Mother Earth. We, humans, are so abundant we are now a powerful force on nature. If we wish to survive and potentially thrive, it behooves us to recognize how we have been conditioned to micromanage our natural impulses while we simultaneously turn towards our innate biological wisdom. By being curious of our entanglements with non-human kin we not only decenter ourselves but also allow our organism to root into our physicality, not simply “embody” a specified form we call human.  It liberates us to become a larger body of intelligence called Earth. It is an awakening of a visceral remembering of real relationships fostered by natural, restorative gestures. Gestures that have the potential to bring us from distorted states of being into rhythmic flows within a living bio-dynamic process – unfolding and enfolding possibilities and potentials. Instead of reacting to, we begin participating with.

* To naturalize = to establish a plant or animal so that it lives wild in a region where it is not indigenous.

As I sit on zoom with “bodies of culture,” the expression Resmaa Menakem author of My Grandmother’s Hands uses when referring to BOC folk, I sense something stirring deep in my bones…something tragic and mournful traced through the lineage of my ancestors. Images, sensations, a feeling of dry bone emerges that does not elicit dancing skeletons but instead burnt, white dust. These ancestors trekked across an ocean to land weary. My mother’s father’s, fathers’, father’s, father’s mother made from the dirt of this continent was born in 1732. Peering back beyond those 289 years, I wonder what was the impulse for crossing the ocean? Did a coldness set in long before they arrived as “settlers?” Where did these farmers’ ancestors turn a blind eye when they participated in torture and witnessed their loved ones ripped apart? Perhaps what was witnessed was too horrific to speak about, too much to feel, to hold, or to endure? When did the split in their heart and soul give them the right to re-enact and participate in hideous crimes of the First Nations genocide?

Sitting on zoom I listen to people discuss the oppressor’s intention to accept nothing less than a full annihilation of a people. Together we read how genocide was consciously enacted and sanctioned openly by the United States government and we let it quiver in our bones. This group of people on zoom are members of a book club who are reading and discussing Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz’s book An Indigenous Peoples’ History of the United States. Picking up threads dropped we begin weaving them back and forth, making meaning between our personal lives, our educational recollections, National celebrations, and our systemic experiences of violence – what Dunbar-Ortiz titles one section as “the persistence of denial” in the making of the United States. With entrails of horror so sickening that some of us admit to having difficulty reading this chapter, I reject seeing the words on the page. It feels almost impossible to stay present and hold in focus this soul-sucking ferocious God-hell-fire- shit we call a Republic and our homeland. To read the devastation Europeans thrust down upon familiar communities thriving on Turtle Island is a level of inherited shame.  I sense intuitively I must bear it – a reckoning whose time has come.

This historical account, make no mistake, is incredibly well researched and beautifully articulated but the facts.  Without any added drama the account is profoundly heart wrenching and soul sucking. To recognize I am part of this ancestral lineage is a bitter pill to ingest, yet it sits in my mouth, rolling around on my tongue waiting to be swallowed. I know it is the medicine for this reckoning – I am the seventh generation. The time has come to gather together to metabolize our collective pain by acknowledging and offering real reparations in both word and action if we are to heal my ancestors, First Nations, and the land.

Together there is a consensus among the men and women in the book club that Manifest Destiny is not over and done with. It is not the past to be mourned; it is the present unfolding right this minute as history is here sitting with us today and weighing on our existence. The stories we tell of the soulful longing of our ancestors who were innocent peacemakers, settlers, brave pioneers seeking a better life (e.g., the “myth of the essential white American”) is an insidious misconception..and essentially – at the heart of it all a rotting lie. The United States is not built on we the people, it is built on the bones of destruction and devastation and we, the inheritors of this legacy, must face it if we hope to have core integrity. Because, whether we like it or not, at the core of the United States as D.H. Lawrence so potently articulates is an American soul that “is hard, isolate, stoic, and a killer. It has never yet melted.”

Dr. Darrell Sanchez is a licensed somatic psychotherapist, Rolfer, and dancer who has designed a tool for exploring vertical fluidity. By attuning with gravitational flows the Original Tuning Board offers a psycho-kinetic tool for activating a free flow of sensory and motor possibilities. Liz Koch and Dr. Sanchez discuss how engaging with our fluid verticality changes our state of being, grows our confidence, and fosters our human potential.