RP, RCAT, SEP – Registered Psychotherapist, Art Therapist, and Somatic Experiencing Practitioner
As children we are born with an innate gift to connect deeply and to explore the world through our sensory knowing and desire to play. Play is a formative experience that allows us to radically imagine, create, explore and innovate the world around us. Following our instinct to play is often rooted in whether we have the privledge of being safe and secure in our relationships and surrounding community and whether we feel support to be authentic and true to ourselves. Experiencing trauma and oppression blocks this instinct and makes expressive play hard to access, feel or engage. Many of us as children grow up to soon and hold adult adaptive responsibilities that overtime contribute to it being a challenge to open, receive and freely express our essence and core needs. We move towards perfection and performance as self-protective efforts so that we don’t feel the underlying grief of our lost childhoods and freedoms. The dialogue between our hearts and body is incrementally diminished under the dominance of the colonized and oppressed mind and the intersectional systems we interact with that favour a culture of fitting in– sacrificing authenticity for approval and safety. We experience emotional, physical and energetic binds that inhibit expansion and expression and instead live from a more narrowly constricted state that is challenged to hold complexity and nuanced embodied wisdom.
I remember as a child building make-shift boats found from Styrofoam, straws and paper. I would sail these boats in the little stream behind my house and watch the current take hold of them. It has been most recently that I began to reflect on how as a young child, I was orchestrating a symphony of movement along with my siblings. I noticed that some boats required a big disruption or splash in order to move from a place of stuckness. These boats required me to lean in more, sometimes wading in the depths of the messy water with my siblings or cousins to uplift and pull them out of their entanglements. Other boats may have simply lost their way and were nestled into the comfort of the riverbanks—and just needed a gentle nudge to carry them a little bit further back into the flow of the stream. On stormy days when the current was less kind, it became imperative to help these boats find solace and refuge. At times, this meant going in the opposite direction of how the stream flowed and removing the barriers and debris that blocked their path. There is a beauty and mystery in the art of play and dynamic living when we notice life from the lens of nature. To notice what is flowing, alive, aligned and responsive with the current –and what is rigid, stuck and perpetuating repeat patterns that leave many isolated, unattended to and trapped in legacy burdens that were not chosen—rather given within the context of ancestral and family lineages and the larger macro-systems we live within.
Intuitivvely, I became more interested in non-verbal, somatic and creative forms of expression as it allowed for play, co-exploration and radical imagining. I felt the gifts in nature at a young age and recognize how my own relationship to my internal world reflects how I engage, treat and value nature. Following an instinctive and creative path allows us to observe a vaster landscape then the one that is read in books or provided by our educational or institutional frameworks. Being connected to both the awe and ache in nature—and our own nature supports a deep internal unfolding that brings us in closer alignment with source and in connection with our essence and truest frequency. Like water, the vibration and current inside our own nervous system is either fluid or braced. Neither way is right or wrong—better or worse. Yet, the outcome for how we approach life may be radically different. Some of us may be like the boats who stay close to the riverbanks nestled in comfort and following a narrower path. Others of us may be entangled in weeds and roots that were there long before we ever arrived and feel trapped and ensnared by the gulping waves. Trauma and the deeper intersectional oppressive systems have this kind of hold on us. They restrict or constrain our movements and inhibit deep co-exploration. This is why it is so necessary for us to get messy and wade into the depths of the water—because the only way to support fully is to see oneself as interconnected and interdependent on the other. Connecting the dots, often requires us to move outside of the traditional frames of thinking and knowing—so that we can harness an instinctive, intuitive and broader perspective that allows for generative conversations and emergent solutions to arise.
The process of therapy assists people to go inside and notice that the universe is also within us. That like nature, we have our own seasons of death, rebirth and regenerations. That allowing things to dissolve, be dismantled and disrupted is necessary for transformative growth and a deeper capacity for embodied aliveness. As a novice gardener, I have always appreciated that a seed requires both light and dark to grow and survive—and that this allowing supports us to be in deeper alignment with the co-existence of light and shadow in our human condition. The beauty of supporting nervous-system healing is that in the beginning there is separation, division and patterns of bracing that protect, guard and inhibit connection, love and radical BElonging. When there are many folx working within the same unified field and deep intention to support healing and trauma renegotiation—we can feel the softening, opening and flow of our shared humanity come into a deeper level of authenticy, aliveness, trust, restoration, embodied compassion and healing justice. Our capacity for relating with deep attunement and resonance can allow us to reconnect to the innate current and flow within each of us—and this communal flow allows for bigger ripples and oceanic waves to co-create movement of liberation and compassionate solidarity.
Being aligned with source and feeling oneness in ourselves and with each other—connects us to a deep truth that we have known all along. We are the co-creators of our experience. What we see in our world is the remnants of unresolved and unmetabolized trauma that continues to be replicated and repeated across people and systems of oppression. BEing embodied is essential for our survival. For me, this is more than learning how to regulate or manage our emotions. It is a deep dive into an inner-standing of our tender and shared humanity and a commitment to support the disruption and dismantling of oppressive unequitable systems. Welcoming all parts of ourselves and learning to care for ourselves with deep kindness, compassion and self-agency gives us a deep grounded capacity to ensure that no one is left behind, entangled or ensnared. Where liberation is possible as the intention is for us to find harmony, flow and a rhythmic pace together that honours our nature. This vibration allows us to feel how our breath and movement are interconnected and woven into our humanity and deepest nature. The same air that I breathe is the same air you do.
As a person who chooses to meet what arises, I remember being taught in school that “good girls” don’t disrupt, challenge or question what is prescribed. I was taught to conform, fit in and sever my connection to my innate aliveness in service of maintaining attachments and survival in a patriarchal hierarchical society structured by models of dominance. My colonized teachings were in the opposite direction of the play-based cultivated wisdom I felt and experienced as a child. At the same time, I witnessed and embraced my own heartbreak and the suffering of others through shared stories and experiences. As a person gifted with what I call heart-sight, I saw and experienced the subtle corrosive erosion that happens when we as humans are taught to blindly adapt and adhere to the values of a “fitting-in” culture that is rooted in fear-based oppressive thinking. I started to develop a liberation consciousness that began in my teenage years and was fostered through my love of reading, music and art. I learned that the response to grief and a deeper level of soul injury is something that radicalizes us to protect and preserve what we care about. I wholeheartedly aligned with people who spoke truth to power and knew I was a creative activist. I am deeply grateful for understanding the intersections of love and rage and how the embodiment of both allows for an ever-expanding and resonant grounded and emergent sense of hope and coherence. It is through a practice of holding space and deep listening that I learned to notice the path inside the jagged lines of hearts that are broken open. I have chosen to reclaim my embodiment and collaborate with others who are keen to do the same. Supporting embodied radical compassion in myself and others is another way to disrupt, soften and co-create seen and subversive currents that lead to an expansion of collective transformative care. I have observed how the softening and expanding of nervous systems supports a flow that assists us in co-designing more compassionate and integrative pathways of care—where we can find a deeper sense of home and BElonging together. The path towards developing a liberation consciousness that is aligned towards self-agency, self-leadership and deep processes of collaboration transcends values of traumatized systems and structures of dominance because these forces oppress the life force inside of us meant to bring harmony, peace and well BEing into our world. Being curious and asking questions has been what anchors and supports me on this journey. Becoming what I seek is my path forward and having love at the centre for myself and others supports and guides me. I am attentive and notice the frequency and vibration of what is said and how words cast spells on our experience. I have seen how what we focus on grows and have learned to be intentional and deliberate in taking inspired action. I believe that we all can deeply align to who we are and that doing so requires a persistent process of self-inquiry and unlearning the conditioning that separated us from self and each other to begin with. Our liberation is interconnected and woven together. I believe that we can co-create and usher in a softer more compassionate world that uplifts the infinite possibilities in all of us and leaves no one behind.
I am grateful and in deep awe of what is possible when we hold a liberated sense of love at the centre and co-create heart-lines and eco-systems of revolutionary collective care. I am moved by the folx that I have the deep pleasure of collaborating with as they too step into their self-led and heart-centred vision for our global world—igniting radically inclusive pathways that flow from their own essence and currency. As more of us commit to the shedding of systematic and internalized oppression—we can restore a flow that allows us to live in our bliss activating a unstoppable current that is Big enough to nurture, support and carry us all home to our own Belonging.
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