Let’s just do this: straight, no chaser.Something that has come to me through my experience within the politicized somatics industry, is that the majority of what is taught as embodied/spiritual activism, is charismatic people asking you to jump through hoops of ‘discomfort’ to embody certain ideological programming. If you are following me, the above is…
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…
Lately, I’ve been thinking a lot about my ancestral traditions of Japanese folk animism. For those who may be new to Japanese spiritual traditions, Shintoism, the official animist ‘religion’ of Japan, that declares it a nation of “Yaoyorozu-no-Kami (八百万の神)” or 8 million spirits, has multiple strains that reflect Japan’s history of class and racial-cultural struggle.…
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 article is written as a guide for people who are newly interested in a practice sometimes referred to as cultural somatics and want to know how to set their bearings for their journey. While it is perilous for any one person to claim to have nailed down the foundations for an emergent work such…
This article assumes you have some basic working knowledge of attachment theory. If the term is new to you, you can go here to read more. One of the key aspects of the cultural somatic approach I employ is to understand oppressions, not necessarily just as socially programmed thoughts and actions, but as cultural attachment…
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…
In this piece, I would like to speak to a question that many of us in social justice community have asked since the beginning of Trump’s presidency: is this the foreboding of a terrible sickness overtaking our culture or the beginning of a deep healing process? My understanding is that the above two possibilities are…
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…
