Identity, race & soma

When I first started my healing journey (my sexual healing journey I should add) I was looking for healing work that felt real to my being.

Most healing modalities I found felt surface level or were actually re-traumatising. They didn't chime with my body, or were offered by people who obviously didn't know WTF they were doing.

(Side note, true healing affects a whole person.Proceed with caution and actually talk to a practitioner before you decide to work with them)

A lot of the experts I saw where white women who were selling their success + lifestyle as part of their healing. It’s easy to get swept up in that, I certainly did in the early dayS, but I realise now that I don't enjoy that kind of marketing.

And I did seek out practitioners of colour, yet somehow I couldn't find MY person.

As, I continue to tend to the weave of my very existence, and return back to my earliest beginnings I see how I've been in a double bind.

A double bind as in feeling trapped between two impossible places.

In short whiteness was adopted by my family as an adaptation for survival.

And within that my Blackness got contorted and was used against us, a Black family trying to survive in the UK in the 1980's. Any celebration of my blackness got suppressed as the ways of celebrating my particular Blackness went underground (possibly as a survival mechanism)

I can now recognise and get some perspective on the injury that happened to me at a race and identity level. In my somatic healing sessions we could call these existential level imprints. Imprints that are invisible for a lot of us, or imprints that feel very intangible or that might evade language in someway.

I know that many of you are on a journey of wanting to remember. Of wanting to know what came before you now, and you're asking if there are ways of remembering that feel true to you.

Im here to say that there are.

Its taken time, but recently authentic, somatic remembering has started to be recovered by my being. And it wouldn't have happened without loving, compassionate practitioners who were able to hold my unique make up of ancestral injury.

Whatever people you may come from, the possibility of authentic somatic remembering is real if its something that calls to you and that you would like to explore.

And while it may not happen quickly, it can happen.

I wanted to offer these words as a possible glimmer of hope, that the body remembers, even if that remembering feels like it has been lost forever.

This kind of power doesn't get lost, it just finds new ways to survive.

Here's to your right timing,

Love, Mina