Words for the wondrous
These times are longing for our alchemy.
I’ve been working on my website this week, trying to find the words to articulate what I do all day and why. It’s nearly our national elections here in Scotland. We’re voting for power across everything that’s devolved to this country’s parliament: Health, Education, Housing, Justice, and Environment… all the systems that embody who and what we care for as a society.
The far-right party has candidates across almost every one of the 73 local constituencies in Scotland, and across every regional seat.
Can we just take a breath together with that truth?
Unflinchingly, be with it for a second.
Just. Here we are.
In all the ways I’m in touch with you here, in everything that I offer, I’m basically saying the same thing over and over:
we have to remember how to love us all.
we have to remember how to care for us all.
we used to know this, a deep-time knowing that our bones still hold.
we can practice the skills to get us there
until we get there.
it has to be beyond ideas.
it has to be embodied in our ways of being.
An inkling, unsettling, came first, for me: “I think I won’t love myself until I learn how to love us.”
Within the lineage of politicised somatics I practice within, there’s an invitation to embody something you’re committed to. To seek to live into this commitment, to remind yourself of it often, to let it rearrange how you move in the world.
A few years ago, this was mine:
“I am a commitment to remembering how to love people like me.”
Ooft, right?
I had realised that as much as, theoretically, I was all about loving Black people like me, loving people of mixed heritage like me, loving brown people like me, loving children-of-immigrants like me, loving queer people like me… this wasn’t the reality I embodied. Apart from my siblings and some family members, those people weren’t present in my closest relationships. I didn’t see myself represented in most of the spaces I chose to be part of. I defaulted to the expertise of people whose lived experiences were nothing like mine.
I can bring some compassion and logic as to why this was. I could talk about 4% demographics, and rural counties, and the vulnerability of flocking together, and cultural context. That feels like a different article, almost irrelevant at this point. It doesn’t matter where we live. We are always here. I am here.
What felt most important after that realisation was: so, recognising that truth, how do I need to be now?
I am a commitment to remembering how to love people like me.
It required intention. It required grief.
It required risk. It required work, a willingness to tell the truth to myself about the waters I’d been swimming in. Showing up. Leaving places. Shedding that not-Black-enough not-queer-enough bullshit and meeting people in the shedding of theirs. Falling in love with the Arabic language. Noticing what happens within my body when I’m in certain spaces. Reminding myself of my lineage, of all the domination that this deep-time-body has known. The particular texture of Empire – within Britain and in its colonisation of Sudan – that has imprinted upon this lineage. Meeting people in the differing ways it’s imprinted upon theirs.
This commitment was a commitment to my healing, which was a commitment to collective healing.
Sometimes, often, I look at the work I offer and can’t believe I get to do this. Look at how I get to love. Look at how I get to learn. Look how gorgeous, how boring, how brilliant, how ordinary, how kind, how weird, how courageous we all are. I wish everyone could experience the felt sense of warmth & connection & relief & possibility that’s present in embodiment spaces that name all that is here.
Like I said, I’ve been trying to find words for the wondrous.
Here’s some of what I’ve landed on, some sentences from my website:
.
I love holding space for us to return to our bodies as trustworthy landscapes... where the mystical, the poetic, the cosmic, the ancestral live & breathe.
“Trustworthy”. Again, ooft, right?
.
To honour the truth of all that is here - the harm, the systemic oppression, the grief of it all - while aligning with spaces & beings & practices that feel like freedom.
To return to ways of sensing & knowing that transcend the bounds of social conditioning.
To befriend & cultivate the ancestral wisdom that’s alive in our bodies through our lineage & heritage.
To be in all this exquisitely, expansively, ever so queerly.
.
Somatic practice is a non-linear process of returning to an embodied way of being that is attuned to, welcomes & honours all that is here: our felt sense, energetic awareness, physical sensations, emotions, thoughts, ancestral wisdom, and everything else that is present... so that we can respond choicefully from our whole knowing.
In my role, I have the honour of keeping you company in this emergent process of aliveness, spirals, unfurls & magic, and witnessing the ripple effects as you move in the world.
And the answers, the embodied changes, slow and non-linear in their own sweet time, come through being held and witnessed within an ecosystem of relationship.
.
I hold courageous-soft space that centers the alchemy of queer / Black / BIPOC experiences, to embody our visions for collective healing, so we can be with all that’s here and act in alignment.
.
Lineage feels like stories swirling, like tides meeting. This work is a continuation of the labour, energy, care, knowledge, commitment, fight, courage & generosity of those who came before us.
.
Embodiment practice is about partnering with all that is here, including the ways we’ve been shaped by culture.
.
… that’s what I’m up to over here, that’s some of how I’m trying to live into my commitment.
In England and Wales and in some places here in Scotland, the Greens are offering a vision of collective care that’s explicitly multiracial, explicitly queer. In England and Wales, their party slogan is “make hope normal again.” I’m holding that truth, too, that wider geographical UK context. And in May, when my neighbours and I go to vote, where we live, we won’t have the option of choosing that vision on the ballot paper.
That doesn’t mean we can’t embody it anyway.
Whether the far-right party get into power or not, our work is the same:
we have to remember how to love us all.
we have to remember how to care for us all.
we used to know this, a deep-time knowing that our bones still hold.
we can practice the skills to get us there
until we get there.
it has to be beyond ideas.
it has to be embodied in our ways of being.
These times are longing for our alchemy.
Another breath here, I think.
And so.
A Workshop Invitation, to Unearth Your Words
I think words became my jam because I often need to be non-verbal. I’ve got pretty good at expressing myself through the written word. I studied words, loved them, figured them out. I know that’s not easy for everyone.
If you hold back from sharing what you want to offer in the world because you can’t find the words to express it to others, this upcoming online workshop is for you:
Rooted in my 20 years’ experience as a freelance writer helping people to tell their stories, my experience as an embodiment practitioner, and my lived experiences as a sometimes-hermit who wants to create beauty in the world.
Come along live or sign up for the recording.
This workshop is for everyone.
And, there’s a little 10% discount if you’re coming from this article, as a thank you for being here. Just type the code WONDER in the ‘discount code box’, on the page where you put in payment details at checkout.
Let’s offer our magic together.
Or, if these words have felt nourishing to you, I welcome your support - please consider becoming a paid subscriber or buying me a coffee.
Thank you for being here.
Big love, til next time,
dia