PHOTO BY JESS DRAWHORN
For many years, somatic counselor tayla shanaye has been a guide for the Loam community. As the author of Nourishing the Nervous System and Locate Your Liberate, tayla shares practices and prayers for healing on the knife edge of collapse.
Recently, tayla launched Healing the Healers, an 8 week virtual group coaching program to connect folks with the tools to regulate your nervous system, rewire your brain, and step back into the world with a renewed sense of embodied sovereignty and self-compassion.
For those of you interested, you can learn more about tayla here as well as apply to the program here. And be sure to scroll down below to read a powerful essay from tayla on the role of somatics in troubled times. First published in 2022 and adapted for Substack, this reflection continues to resonate.
Somatic practices are an invitation to publicly pray for the possibility of collective healing in the midst of the sixth extinction. They are tools for turning toward the collective fear, so that we may better learn from it, tend to it, and grow big enough to be with it. In my own life, I’ve found that by being with the pain of the world, and the ways it stirs the pain in me, I am better able to be guided by my love for our Earth rather than fear of our collapsing entangled systems.
The compounding crises of human and white supremacy, ecological collapse, economic enslavement, and state-sanctioned violence are preparing us for what is next. And I feel it in my bones that what is next will not be easier or freer. What is next will be the implosion. War. Disease. Collapse.
What could lie on the other side of an apocalypse? On the other side of extractive capitalism, heteropatriarchy and systemic supremacy?
I’m gonna say something really sticky here.
Collapse holds the potential for liberation.
What I mean is this:
The collapse of Western Civilization will be staggering. And, from its ruins, everything and everyone that was suppressed, repressed, and oppressed will once again feel the sun.
Dominator culture privileges the rational over the emotional, the material over the spiritual, the masculine over the feminine, the mind over the body. These dichotomies only further a culture of disconnection.
To thrive at the end of the world means we ought to get to work reviving, nourishing, and supporting those “inferior” aspects so that our wholeness can burst into being. We must align, attune, and become accomplices to body, place, love, and connection. We must become human animals again, at home in ourselves and in the Living Earth. From here we can re-member that Earth is not resisting civilization; civilization is resisting nature, and nature always emerges resilient.
Don’t get confused here. It’s not cute. It’s devastation.
But I hear promise in it.
Possibility and dread in one breath.
But what does somatics have to do with negotiating the collapse of Western Civilization and liberation? Two things come to me.
First, oppression in the form of racism, sexism, and capitalism are not simply ideologies but rather enactments that play out on the human body. Oppression shapes how a body responds to existence within the systems that form Civilization. How a body moves, breathes, functions, and postures is directly influenced by assumed and projected sociopolitical beliefs. Consequently, understanding the sociopolitical context we’re shaped by allows us to better contextualize our responses and relationships.
Secondly, as we actively practice accessing a felt-sense of safety in our bodies, we become more resourced to engage in the political project of true liberation. We are able to attend to the ways in which Western Civilization’s ideologies limit our capacity to fully occupy our embodied self. We begin to move out of the survival mode required to navigate systemic and pervasive, traumatic oppression so we can grow our capacity to be with the current moment with responsiveness and agility. If we avoid this personal work, we further the colonial project by affirming relationships to people and places that are extractive and exploitative. As our capacity grows, we have the internal resources available to resist and dismantle systems of oppression and/or begin cultivating a world more aligned with our healing.
What do I mean by healing? Healing as in the ongoing process of getting with the current moment and responding in regenerative, accountable, and loving ways. Healing as in the difficult labor required to see ourselves with clarity and compassion as we humbly nurture practices that foster awareness and accountability for our interconnection and aid in emancipation. Without the dual work of transformative upheaval and tender sowing, we run the risk of depleting all of our resources – before we can refill and after they have been exhausted.
Liberation is an integral aspect of decolonization. If decolonizing can be seen as the breaking apart of limiting and violent constructs, liberation is the stitching together of emancipatory and creative realities. In this sense, to find liberation through somatic practices is to create as well as to deconstruct at the level of our physical bodies - in solidarity with our breath, movement, postures, and sensations.
Liberation has been a constant struggle for so long, specifically among oppressed communities, that to dream into it is to get tangled in struggle. But liberation itself is not struggle. Liberation itself is joy, belonging, the belief that we are meant to be here and that our lives are worth our participation. And to feel free, we must first be able to feel ourselves fully. In this way, healing (and the role somatics plays) is a reclamation process of our wholeness - recovering those parts of our complex personhood that dominant culture has marked disposable, bringing them home, and loving ourselves fully, unapologetically, and righteously.
This experience of liberation is challenging and sometimes even excruciatingly painful. Our bodies have been conditioned to oppress or be oppressed, to harm or be harmed, to frighten or fear. We are no longer well-conditioned for true freedom, liberation, honesty, or joy.
This is not our fault. This is how white supremacy, extractivism, and civilization work. This is how trauma works. Something happened to us, collectively, to staunch our capacity for joy by demanding we utilize all of our internal resources to survive.
This is, and it doesn’t have to be forever.
Whether it comes through policy or perspective change, our willingness to be with what transforms directly informs how deep liberation is able to send roots. We must condition our bodies to be in the felt experience of something as profound as liberation. We must practice making space for our joy, for our uncompromising existence. We must get bigger in mind and body to begin accommodating our liberated selves – the versions of us that may be louder or softer than we’ve ever been allowed to be.
Somatic practices will not save the world. They will not make things “better” or easier. They will not stop the chaos. They cannot fix all that is broken.
But they will help us remember. They will help us grieve. They will help us be tender and fortified, open and rooted. They will welcome us home. They will help us rest. They will help us be here for the end of life as we know it, here for welcoming the liberated world(s) that will emerge through collapse.
If anything, I pray that you don’t get stuck. I pray you don’t feel driven by fear and terror. I pray that your life continues to be guided by love and that you remember the sacredness of that love. I pray that you cool down when it all feels too hot. I pray that you stay here in the current moment, not trapped in the regret of moments past or the worry of what’s to come. I pray that you never abandon yourself, but return home to you everyday - alive and intact.
While these are end times, love what you love with reverence and dignity. That is what these bodies are meant to do. I know this because my body knows this.
In love and madness,
TAYLA SHANAYE