Ancestral Healing & Embodied Decolonization
artwork by Alyse Ruriani
Embodied Movement Practice for Decolonization & Ancestral Healing
I bring to my work as a therapist experiential practices I have explored throughout my life, incorporating aspects of somatic resourcing, interpersonal neurobiology, authentic movement, conscious dance, boundary-work, embodied decolonization, cultural resilience, and (optionally) somatic touch for support and bodily awareness. .Sessions may involve standing, walking, & moving and are typically not done primarily sitting. I draw specifically on somatic experiencing and somatic resourcing.
Through expressive movement & the developmental of somatic resources you can shift patterns of oppression and colonization in your bodily experience, contact your true needs and values, and develop ways of being in the world, being with others, and building community more radically and deeply aligned with healing justice and decolonization.
Oppression can show up in your body as disconnecting and constricting our breath, sensation, impulses, instincts, muscles, energy, movement, heart, emotion, sensuality, from each other. Our bodies are shaped by the social structures we live in. Colonization, white supremacy, heteronormativity and other forms of systemic oppression are toxic social structures that lead us to constrict or disconnect from our bodily experience and live isolated lives in our minds, ripe to be controlled by toxic narratives we internalize. Freedom and Liberation require more than intellect and even more than action.
Whether you are an educator, activist, therapist, bodyworker, dancer, parent, healer, or just a concerned citizen wanting to explore personal and collective healing, this work can be of help to you. Through the intersection of social justice & somatic movement practice your body can learn newer ways of sensing, feeling, breathing, and being with more creativity, expansiveness, aliveness, vitality, freedom, & flexibility. By contacting your bodily experience you can find your truth, express your voice, rediscover who you actually are with fresh eyes, find ground and center, unwind chronic tension patterns, contact values, & find & speak your true “yes” and true “no”.
You will learn viscerally through expressive movement how you hold power, privilege, & oppression in your body. Together we will play and work to help you unwind & reform bodily patterns more in line with your values. We will explore and build somatic resources to help you connect to
ancestral wisdom
cultural resilience
non-verbal expression
sounding
grounding
centering
inner orienting
outer orienting
sensory landscapes
proprioception
weight & balance
touch
giving & receiving
modulating patterns of connecting, disconnecting, & boundarying
movement from different sources (mind, heart, solar plexus, belly, joints, bones, muscles, fluid, fascia)
fundamental movements (reaching, grasping, pulling, pushing, crawling, rolling, standing)
dynamic gesture repetition
posture
non-verbal empathic mirroring and being mirrored
responses to feeling seen or unseen
ritual
inner visualization
breathwork
play & seriousness
flow and structure
containment and release
allowing & withholding
“It is no measure of health to be well-adjusted to a profoundly sick society”
— Jiddu Krishnamurti
11 principles of decolonized embodied learning & healing
Activate Indigenous Pedagogies
Foster Interconnections with Land and Cosmos
Understand the Kinesthetic Impacts of Colonialism
Know Through Experience
Breathe
Relax
Ground Yourself
Release Tension and Obstructions
Unlearn and Relearn Movement Patterns
Develop Embodied Consciousness
Find Your Voice and Express Your Truth
Decolonizing means that I
commit to decentering the normative standards of white, upper class, able-bodied, gender-binaried, patriarchal, heterosexist dominant social identities.
commit to helping to helping you build radical rootedness to traditional, ancestral, intergenerational, cultural forms of healing, knowing, & relating, including storytelling, touch, meditation, movement, dance, ritual, play, improvisation, sounding, singing, music, art
commit to supporting and helping you to connect to your embodied lived-experience within your multicultural and intergenerational frame.
commit to using the therapeutic modality best aligned with supporting you rather than imposing a singular modality on you
commit to not imposing my definitions of health and wellness on you.
commit to support you in clarifying and connecting to a definition of health and wellness that is true for you in the context of your life and your being in the world.
commit to showing up in the truth of who I am to see, hear, engage with, relate to, and collaborate with you as you are towards the achievement of your goals.
commit to examine, interrogate, and shift my own patterns of cognitive dissonance
Decolonizing aims to help you
Recognize the larger social frame of colonial oppression and intergenerational traumas.
Reframe struggle not as evidence of inherent pathology but as a courageous struggle to reshape your life and community in the face of larger systems of oppression.
Release inherited stories, narratives, and ways of being that undermine your sense of worth, no longer serve you, and are no longer aligned with your values.
Reconnect to and reshape inherited cultural modes of being, knowing, playing, envisioning, connecting, storying, and healing that support your sense of worth, are aligned with your values, reflective of your cultural heritage, and supportive of your path in life.
Reclaim body, creativity, community, and ancestral wisdom is a vital part of managing burnout, fatigue, and exhaustion in navigating systems of oppression.
How do I know if Decolonized & Somatic Therapy is for me?
Many who feel drawn to a Decolonizing approach are deep feeling, connecting, thinking, envisioning, valuing folk who may be activists, organizers, community leaders, tutors, mentors, educators, exiles, immigrants, code-switchers, intellectuals, union leaders, authors, scholars, professors, artists, bodyworkers, therapists, healers, and others navigating the spaces between, within, or at intersections of multiple forms, languages, cultures, and identities.
Many called to a Decolonizing approach want to integrate their calling to join the struggle for freedom and self-determination on socio-political levels with the ways in which they engage in healing practices, including therapy.
Many feel called to explore, identify, and dismantle ways in which long-standing multi-generational patterns of oppression live in them and in their relationships and communities.
Many feel called to reconnect with and ground healing in their own cultural embedded healing practices, and who do not want to be evaluated, diagnosed, stigmatized, and pathologized in therapy for not aligning with the socially accepted norms of racist, patriarchal, classist, heteronormative social structures.
Many who feel called to Decolonizing approaches have tried “traditional” therapy forms and felt unheard, hurt, and further marginalized in therapy, and are seeking therapeutic forms that are based on mutual respect, collaboration, and dialogue that makes space for everyone’s lived-experiences in the full socio-political situatedness of human life. Many called to a Decolonizing approach are tired of silent therapists who only stare and nod and give out worksheets, but never actually engage one socio-political human being to another. There are many who deeply yearn for another way. If this is you, then a Decolonizing approach to therapy might be for you.
Many are tired of endless mental analysis and “talk” therapy and want to reconnect with their direct bodily experience and find what is really true for them on an inner, visceral, immediate level
“The biggest weapon wielded…by imperialism…is the cultural bomb. The effect of a cultural bomb is to annihilate a peoples belief in their names, in their languages, in their environment, in their heritage of struggle, in their unity, in their capacities and ultimately in themselves. ”
— Ngugi wa Thiong’o
How does Colonization manifest in your heart, mind, & body?
The cumulative historical impact of colonial oppression has resulted in personal, cultural, and intergenerational patterns of harm to the mental health of BIPOC and Immigrant communities. Colonization Trauma can result in
chronic stress, cultural fragmentation, self-blame, self-criticism, domestic violence, community violence, perfectionism, imposter syndrome, codependency, isolation, cultural alienation, dislocation, disconnection, despair, rage, grief, sense of loss, impermanence, powerlessness, & meaninglessness
Somatic trauma patterns: chronically tight muscle patterns, constricted breathing, panic, dizziness, spaciness, blurry vision, racing heart, sweaty palms, flashbacks, nightmares, racing thoughts, ruminating thoughts, hyper-arousal, hypo-arousal, and patterns of fight, flight, freeze, feign, & fawn.
Internalized Oppression: BIPOC and Immigrant folks taking in, believing, and retelling toxic colonial narratives of their cultural inferiority & powerlessness
Mandated performances of adherence to normative standards of whiteness within the homeland or colonial state
Emotional labor in having to adapt to white norms while suppressing ones own cultural forms
Estrangement from ancestral language, wisdom, traditions, rituals, & healing practices
Rage, fear, despair, isolation, self-blame, worthlessness in living in oppressive systems
“There must exist a paradigm, a practical model for social change that includes an understanding of ways to transform consciousness…linked to efforts to transform structures.”
— bell hooks
“The business of obscuring language is a mask behind which stands the much greater business of plunder.”
— Franz Fanon
What is Colonization?
The injustices of Colonization, Slavery, and White Supremacy have led to violence, wounding, death, and oppression to the cultures, communities, and identities of Black, POC, Indigenous, Immigrant, and Diaspora populations.
Colonization is Cultural, Historical, Ancestral, Intergenerational, Developmental, & Embodied
Oppression & wounding in exposure to forms of colonial violence are not just single events, but structural forms of violence that are chronic, pervasive, systemic, and taken for granted. Exposure to colonization trauma creates a pervasive atmosphere of stress and oppression that is passed down through generations and manifests as a hidden form of complex, childhood developmental trauma and a multigenerational, cultural, & collective soul wound.
Overt examples of Colonization
forced relocation, displacement, dislocation, family separation
slavery, Jim Crow, redlining, mass incarceration, racial wealth gaps
war & regime change
land theft
state, police, military, revolutionary violence, oppression, & surveillance
political, ethnic, cultural, racial, or religious persecution
cultural erasure
economic exploitation
resource exploitation
environmental racism & climate injustice
Subtle & Covert examples of Colonialism
cultural appropriation
micro-aggressions
othering, exotification, sexualization, spiritualization, orientalism
the use of literalism and legalism to deflect attention from colonization and insist on ahistorical definitions of harm that invisibilizes systemic oppression
defensiveness & passive-aggressive condescension
lack of representation of BIPOC & Immigrant folks outside a white perspective or narrative
social adaptation to whiteness and superficial displays of surface happiness
either/or thinking and zero sum political, relational dynamics
zero sum politics or economics
reframing white cultural subjectivities as individual, ahistorical, value-less, objective, & grounded in fact
dismissal of BIPOC lived-experiences and truths as subjective feelings
insistence on third person intellectualization rather than direct embodied lived-experience of sensation and feeling
false binaries (gender binaries, mind-body dualism, freedom-determinism, self-other, self-world, self-nature, personal-political)
centering of white folks feelings, comfort, voices, ahistorical perspectives that take up all space
Objectified mass media representations of BIPOC and Immigrant populations as dangerous, criminal, foreign, barbaric, uncivilized, uncultured, invading, exotic, or strange
Privileging of white values, norms, and ways of being in legislative, educational, criminal justice, judicial, political, institutional, relational, and workplace domains
Gaslighting, invalidation, mystification, minimization, dismissal, retaliation when speaking the truth of one’s lived experience or articulating oppressive social contexts
“Without a sense of identity, there can be no real struggle”
— Paulo Freire
“Exile is the…rift forced between a human being and a native place, between the self and its true home: its essential sadness can never be surmounted”
— Edward Said
How have white euro-american centered mental health practices, pedagogies, psychotherapies, and psychologies functioned as forms of colonial oppression?
Centering a pervasive, unanalyzed, & invisible valorization of conformity to white euro-american ways of being in the world as the normative standard of health, normality, and wellness.
Unacknowledged re-enactments of colonial oppression in therapy that do massive social harm to black, indigenous, POC, immigrant, migrant, & diaspora populations, including erasing, othering, dismissing, invalidating, & pathologizing the narratives, contexts, traumas & lived-experiences of BIPOC & Immigrant populations.
The pathologization, stigmatization, and othering of BIPOC and Immigrant community modes of being not in alignment with white norms, values, and social structures.
The ontological assumption of scientific reductionism, the encoding of human lived-experience into psychological jargon, and the application of the medical model are three sources of violence, weaponized by white colonial psychologies, that render human experience absurd and nonsensical and strips it of meaning, destroying the shared cultural narratives of BIPOC and immigrant communities through the reduction of the rich holistic tapestry of human embodied social life to an internal atomistic assortment of meaningless symptoms that are presented as racially coded evidence of mental diseases.
The uncritical acceptance of forms of structural oppression in individualistic, reductionistic, militaristic, hegemonic, capitalistic, dualistic, white, straight, male, cis-gender, christian, neurotypical, able-bodied, middle-class society.
The dismissal of historical, ancestral, indigenous, immigrant, and POC cultural healing practices as uncivilized, unscientific, and superstitious by professional boards governing what constitutes evidence-based practices and insurance companies lack of coverage for non-white healing modalities when mainstream society cannot monetize those practices for white culture
The theft of BIPOC and Immigrant cultural healing practices (e.g. meditation, prayer, movement), the stripping from those practices of all social-historical-cultural context, and the repackaging of these practices, now stripped of cultural context, into white healing practices offered by white professionals at high prices that cannot be afforded by the very BIPOC therapists, psychologists, and healing practitioners from whom these ancestral healing forms have been stolen.
The unanalyzed internalization by socially privileged healing practitioners of modes of domination inherent in white colonial society.
The acting out of those modes of domination in relationship with BIPOC and Immigrant clients, coupled with the gaslighting of those clients as “resistant” or “too much” when they refuse to acquiesce to the relational enactment of oppression.
Cognitive Dissonance
How does Intersectionality inform Decolonizing?
Intersectionality describes how our lived experience of any one aspect of our social identity is inexorable, intertwined, and interwoven with our entire constellation of social identities at intersections of race, gender, sexuality, gender expression, sexual orientation, neurodivergence, class, education level, socioeconomic status, documentation status, bodysize, and disability.
Intersectionality describes how these social identities are not merely additive but create unique gestalts that are greater than the sum of their parts. For example, the experiences of being east asian and queer are intertwined in each other, such that one experiences queerness through being east asian and experiences being east asian through queerness, thus creating a new experiential gestalt greater than merely the addition of queer and east asian identities.
Intersectionality reminds us that in our personal and ancestral stories are far more nuanced than the singular reductionistic identities of oppressed vs oppressor, that although some communities face unimaginably more oppression, that our experiences of power, privilege, and oppression are intertwined with each other and woven throughout the net of all our social identities. Intersectionality brings a rich, vivid, fine-tuned, tapestry to the telling of our collective stories.
How Do I Start?
Read my Practice Policies page
Contact Me at 707 732 4525 or Nima@somatictherapynorthbay.com and schedule a 15 minute free consultation
After your initial consultation, if it seems like we’re a good fit I will email you a link to Simple Practice for electronically completed intake paperwork
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