The way we relate to our bodies matters.
How to stop battling yourself and cultivate internal safety...
The way we relate to our body matters.
The way we ground into it each day matters.
We are living through unprecedented chaos and uncertainty. Every day sees an onslaught of new atrocities and crimes agains humanity, and it’s starting to get to the point where we can’t even keep up with what’s happening around us.
Our respective governments’ complicity with the genocide in Palestine continues to weigh really fucking heavy.
In the last fortnight (at the time of writing this), Israel has started bombing the shit out of Iran as well. Things feel really tense. World War Three, maniacs in positions of seemingly ultimate power, all that jazz.
I’m living on unceded Dharug and Gundungurra lands in so-called Australia, and even here, things are starting to feel really scary. I can’t imagine what it’s like for my comrades living inside the belly of the beast, with more geographical and political proximity to it all.
I want this piece today to be an invitation into deepening your practices of care.
May we all continue to show up from a place of rootedness, groundedness, responsiveness.
Making sure we’re as effective as we can be in our work is resistance too.
Safety in the Body…
For me, my biggest red flag of “going off track” so to speak, and slipping back into my colonised mind (where everything is productivity and heirarchy and individualist urgency) is when I stop feeling like my body is a safe place.
We MUST be prioritising body-safety.
Let me explain what I mean here.
The world is becoming a more and more overtly dangerous place. The future feels terrifying.
As someone living in a white body with a huge amount of unearned advantages and privileges due to the white supremacy and bodily heirarchy of the world I was socialised into, I spent a lot of my life being largely shielded from how dangerous the world is for people of the global majority.
Of course I got glimpses of it, I was socialised as a woman, and patriarchy doesn’t like women very much.
But on the whole, it wasn’t until I started actively participating in intersectional resistance movements (about 15 years ago now) that I really got to see how physically dangerous the world is for so many.
This feeling has only intensified over the past couple of years, since Israel began their full-scale genocide on the people of Palestine, with the seemingly unconditional support of my own government, the US government, the UK government, and basically every other settler-colonial state in the world.
We’ve been seeing the illusion of so-called “democracy” falling away before our very eyes.
We are watching as more and more billions of dollars get funnelled into war and annihilation, catapuling the effects of climate change forward in terrifying ways, with seemingly no money left over for such trivial things as housing, food, education, social infrastructure.
The feeling of the world I live in is overtly and objectively unsafe is increasing all the time.
I’ve been having a difficult time with this. My body has been changing and adapting to the amount of stress I’m feeling, and that stress has manifested itself in new and weird and kind of scary ways.
Before this year I’d never experienced a panic attack before. Before this year (since I recovered from my stage 4 endometriosis) I’d never experienced such debilitating womb and cervical premenstrual pain that I couldn’t move or speak. Before this year, I’d never had night terrors before.
I’m saying all of this out loud here (so to speak) because I want to normalise the fact that we are experienced a possibly unprecedented level of stress at the moment, and our bodies are possibly going to be doing potentially unprecedented things to help us navigate and process that stress.
If your body has started doing some whacky stuff it didn’t used to do over the past year or so, same. You’re not alone in that.
But, the way we relate to our bodies as they’re experiencing + metabolising this stress, matters.
I spent a good few months caught up in my own stress. I was battling it. I was too swept up in the fear of what I was experiencing to recognise the fact that little by little, unnoticed by me, my body had suddenly become a dangerous place for me to hang out in.
And, as you can imagine, living in a dangerous body in a dangerous world is not a recipe for a good time, nor is it conducive to good activism.
This, for me, is the subtle red flag. It’s the invitation back in that starts as a whisper and eventually turns into a scream.
When I begin battling against my body, instead of against the world, I am lost.
And honestly, up until about a week ago when I finally clocked it, this is what I was doing.
What it means to be battling the body, and how to stop:
When I say I was battling my body, what I mean, in an over-arching sense, is that I was assuming that my body is wrong.
There was a feeling of panic and urgency in the way I was relating to my body. Underneath all of the “symptoms” I was experiencing, all of the messages my body was trying to communicate to me in the language it knows best, there was a feeling of oh no make it stop please make it stop I don’t want to feel this way anymore.
In a sense, I was trying to shoot the messenger. What a cliche.
(Maybe you’re trying to shoot the messenger too?)
When we pathologise what our bodies are doing in response to the stress we’re feeling, instead of listening and moving with the messages our bodies are communicating to us, we make our bodies into unsafe and hostile places.
The world is already unsafe and hostile. Our bodies don’t have to be.
In fact, it’s really important that they’re not. How can we show up consistently and regeneratively in an unsafe world if we have no sense of safety and groundedness inside our own bodies?
To be clear here, none of this is to say that in order for our bodies to feel safe we have to not experience any stress. That’s not a reasonable request to make of our bodies in times of collapse and upheaval.
If you’re paying attention, chances are your body is going to be feeling a certain type of way about everything right now.
The difference is in how we relate to our bodies, as they are experiencing + moving the stress they’re feeling.
For example, panic is safe.
Whatever your body does when it panics, is safe. The internal experience you’re having as a result of external stressors is utterly perfect and good and poses no threat to you.
Panicking about panic? Not so much.
Panicking about the panic is battling your body.
Living in fear of the somatic experience of fear is battling the body.
Getting angry about the fact that your body is experiencing anger is battling the body.
Essentially what it comes down to is that the external stressors we’re facing are dangerous and scary. The internal experience we’re having in response to those external stressors MUST be allowed to be safe.
Otherwise, we’re fighting on two fronts.
We’re distracted.
And as a result, our work suffers, our relationships suffer, our activism suffers.
Take time to soften into the sensory experience of the stress your body is moving through.
How do fear and panic show up for you, in your body?
Maybe there’s a tightness in your chest, a racing heart, a feeling of constriction in your throat.
Maybe it’s a full-blown panic attack, or night terrors, or whacky stuff happening to your digestion or menstrual cycle.
Ground yourself into those sensations.
Use your breath to meet them, fully.
As you move towards them, notice the tendency to make meaning, or “find a reason”, or instinctively attempt to fix or numb them in some way.
As those instincts come, gently call youself back into the breath, and into the sensory experience your body is having.
What would it feel like to feel these sensations with more acceptance?
How does your relationship to your body and its experience change when you consciously decide to welcome the internal experience you’re having, rather than fight it?
What comes up for you here?
These questions are important. The way we relate to our bodies matters.
The world outside is getting more and more unsafe. We MUST be prioritising the active cultivation of safety and groundedness within.
This is how we keep showing up regeneratively.
Love you. Thanks for being here ❤️
P.S. - I know this is a really difficult time to be in a human body and also be paying attention. If you are struggling to cultivate body-safety on your own, and are desiring some in-depth support and a community of decolonising feminists around you, REWILDING is currently open to new applicants.
Inside that space, you’ll learn how to work with the overlapping cycles of Nature that move within you and around you to disentangle from colonial capitalist indoctrination, reconnect with your humanity, and show up for revolution regeneratively.
Right now, there are only 4 spots left, and doors close with the full moon.