Inviting Tenderness: My Healing Journey
January 25, 2022
“The reason why some things feel too big to be felt alone is that they are. A lot of our distress is bigger than one body, or one generation. We need the alchemy of witness, ceremony, ancestors to feel.”
Calling In & Honoring Ancestral Guides
Three ancestors I’d like to acknowledge and name as my keepers and guides on my path towards healing are Olivia VS Helms, Lois Marie Hutchinson, and Toni Morrison. They all, in their own ways, serve as mirrors to me, reflecting my own power, divinity, tenderness. They each have affirmed the parts of me I was too timid and unsure of to share by holding them with care.
Somatic Pause: Place your hands on your heart. Close your eyes or cast a soft gaze. Think of an ancestor (familial, kin, spiritual, movement) who inspires your path towards healing and liberation. Say their name. Visualize them. Take 3 deep breaths and honor them. You are part of their legacy.
My Healing Journey
I took my first yoga class at a local community college when I was 16 years old and have practiced off and on for the past 18 years. In the past 5 years, I have intentionally sought out courses to practice with Black instructors. Sometimes that deliberate choice materializes my desires to be in community and folks occupying the space are also brown-skinned like me, sometimes they aren't. However, seeking racial affinity in spaces that are often homogeneously white has given me lots of filling and joyful experience - if for nothing else than getting to stand strong in warrior II with a dope hip-hop/R&B playlist in the background!
The summer of 2019, I took a pop-up yoga class with Jessamyn Stanely at a studio in Oakland, CA. For me, yoga is a practice of centering, slowing down, and somatically exploring gratitude. When I move into postures and poses, I inhale - grateful for what my body allows me to do, feel, emotionally process, experience.
As I entered the room to unroll my mat to start a familiar practice, I looked around and held my breath. If you have a yoga practice you know that this is a no-no. So much of yoga is really just breath work. Breathing into the spaces and muscles in your body, locating warmth and heat, and using breath to guide movements.
Somatic Pause: Breathe in slowly counting to four. Feel the air enter your lungs. Hold your breath for 3 seconds. Slowly exhale through your mouth for 4 seconds. Repeat steps until you feel grounded.
I looked around the room and there were, as I hoped there’d be, brown and Black bodies. But there were also rows and rows of glorious fat bodies. There were rolls and folds, fleshy arms and legs, round faces, and cute yoga outfits stretched over bellies. In an instant I realized that in 18 years of yoga, I have never taken a class from an instructor who identified as fat, queer, and femme. And more remarkably, I’d never been in a room full of bodies that looked like mine!
An air of magic settled as Jessamyn entered the space and we began our practice. I expected to find familiarity here, but I did not. She gave cues and language to poses in a way I had never experienced. She talked about how to move our flesh under our sit bones to root into our mats. She spoke to our bodies in all their shapes and asked us to make space for them when we stretched. She even offered language and invited us to move our bellies, not to hide or suck them in, but rather to position them to make poses more accessible, comfortable, to embody and make them ours. Her words, gentle, inviting, funny, and sure gave me a pathway to explore my body in a way I hadn’t before.
As we finished the class and laid in Shavasana, the resting pose of most yoga classes, I cried. This was not a class where I had to think through my own modifications, or feel shame if my belly was exposed from my top rolling up. I did not feel embarrassed if the shape of my pigeon, cobra, or boat was rounder than others. I had a truly embodied yoga practice and the swell of gratitude, joy, and profound sadness that washed over me was unbearable.
I stayed after class with others to thank her for the practice, and get a photo. When it was my turn to share a moment with Jessamyn, she smiled and complimented my tattoos. She opened her arms to hug me and when we embraced I lost it. I cried in the arms of someone who very likely has held many other crying fat people. Held in her softness and strength, I let myself cry for a moment. There was a deep knowing that I now had in my bodymind: things can be different. I allowed the hug to linger a bit longer, savoring all of the sweetness, fatness, intimacy and tenderness of that 60 minute practice.
Somatic pause: Find some softness on yourself. Your legs, arms, or belly. Maybe you can rest your cheeks in your palms. Hold that soft place on you. Take a deep breath. Can you connect it to a soft place in you?
Image description: Two fat, Black, femmes, Jessamyn and Brittnee, embracing in a hug. Jessamyn has short buzzed hair is wearing a light gray set crop top and yoga pants. Brittnee is wearing glasses and a a neon pink tank and black yoga pants, braided hair in a bun and arm tattoos visible.
Until that yoga class, I had been searching for a sense of place outside of myself. I adorned my home with 100 houseplants and collected art by queer, Black, and women artists. Home and a sense of place have always been political for me; the richness of Black life represented and most intimately felt in domestic spaces. My houseplants remind me of my childhood home. Touching waxy verdant leaves and washing soil from under my nails are physical forms of my longing to repair and reclaim relationship to land and non-human kin in nature that dominant culture has stripped from Black folks descendent of chattle slavery. My summers growing up were spent with my great Aunt Lois in Central California and the safety, wonder, and adventures I had in her garden shaped me. Under her care, her snap peas and I would grow towards the sun. I’d twist to release blackberries from the bushes lining the fence and climb to grab fuzzy peaches off her tree, their juice running down my brown arm leaving a sticky and glistening trail in the sunlight. We’d make preserves with the fruit and eat them with homemade biscuits in the morning. Their thick pillowy insides the perfect resting place for a heaping scoop of preserves I’d dig from canning jars. I remember those summers as a time in my life when I could tune my body to the hum of nature. I am healing and repairing to be able to trust and listen to that knowing in my body again.
Somatic Pause: Take a breath. Can you recall a time where your body was aligned with the rhythm of nature? Have you ever danced, waved, or bobbed your head the way leaves fall? Fluttering, slow, twisting, and carefree. Can you surface or notice that unique sensation of movement in our body?
My partner, a friend, and I recently spent a day visioning for the new year. In the daylight hours leading up to January’s Wolf Moon/Full moon in Cancer, and guided by the areas of focus and prompts shared by artist and activist Favianna Rodriguez, we journaled and vibed to lo-fi sounds. Then, we poured over images, words, stickers, and other objects to collage our visions. Between moments of giggles and quiet reflection, we’d touch old papers gently tearing and cutting in search of resonant images. Repurposing images and objects and giving them new life and meaning was a cathartic activity. The journaling we produced with our left brain was made more vibrant and alive by creating our collages with our right brain. My sun sign is in Cancer and I reveled (and of course cried) at the soft and tender vulnerability we all felt as we shared our creations in the hour before the moon was at its most prominent. As I look through my visioning journal, words like nurture, cultivate, tend, and grow give me permission to be a gardener of my own healing -planting seeds of intimacy, softness and care that I will harvest through the year. One of my well-being visioning goals for 2022 is to, “treat myself as the divine, brilliant, loving, radiant being that I am.” I am excited to see what juicy luscious fruit that vision will bear. This practice was also healing.
Image description: Open journal with a list of visioning/dreaming statements that are connected to well being on the right page. The left page is a collage with a photo of two Black queer/trans people at the center, their image is surrounded by stickers of LGBTQ fists, mushrooms, The High Priestess tarot card and leaves/nature images. An image of a sea creature is in the background creating a halo around the central queer figures.
“Community offers individuals, some for the first time ever in their lives, a taste of that acceptance, care, knowledge, and responsibility that is love in action. Rarely, if ever, are any of us healed in isolation. Healing is an act of communion.”
What’s at Stake, What’s Possible
Attending to Healing has entered into our dominant lexicon particularly for those of us who do equity and liberation work; it is even one of our Liberatory Design mindsets. However, conceptualizations of healing too often are resonant of the individualized “self-care” mantras that white supremacist capitalist patriarchy culture (bell hooks describes this system of domination in Writing Beyond Race: Living Theory and Practice) has appropriated to sell us products. Some of the paths and tools I have explored for my healing journey have included: reading Toni Morrison and Audre Lorde, keeping a radical self love journal guided by Sonya Renee Taylor’s The Body is Not an Apology, tending to my plants, working through Mia Mingus’s frames of Pod Mapping, taking somatics courses, dismantling internalized fatphobia and ableism, exploring creative outlets like ceramics and quilting, freedom dreaming, embracing my wildness, queering nature with Shelterwood Collective, and holding the soft parts of myself.
While nature and plant care have been places of returning and healing for me since I was a child, I have also recognized the need to make space in my healing practice for finding place and belonging within myself. Jessamyn’s yoga class revealed how disembodied I was; how much of a war I had been waging against my own flesh and spirit and the urgent need for me to heal the terms of my existence and make peace with myself.
During a somatics course I took last year, two questions were posed: What is at stake if you don’t heal? What is possible if you do? I am still exploring my answers for myself, but in my notebook I wrote, I heal because:
Our lives depend on it
There is freedom on the other side of my shame and grief
I have the capacity to dream of new worlds
There is safety in softness
I want to live a wonderful, vibrant, magical life
My healing practices are collective and communal because they must be. I heal to practice love in action. Yoga, meditation, mindfulness practices, ceremony and rituals, connecting with nature, and now collaging are some of the pathways to healing that I have explored and only represent a fraction of what is available to all of us to move towards greater liberation.
“if time actually healed people, no one in the world would be hurting. time is simply space, what matters is how you use it. if you feel your time intentionally with self-love, letting go, and building new habits your being needed, that would make a real difference.”
Image description: Brittnee and their dog are looking towards the camera on a hiking trail and surrounded by redwoods. They are both wearing sweaters and Brittnee has on a beanie and mask.
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