My link to this work is via the Embody Lab. The program I took was 6 months long. I did it twice with slightly different teachings. It is enough time to have a grasp of the knowledge and be able to utilize somatic exercises to help people access their own bodies in a deeper way. It is not enough time or the right container to develop and practice a felt sense of the work within a direct mentorship. Or to call myself a “somatic practitioner”. I use some somatic tools and experiments to bolster my embodied peer support work. My work is ever evolving.

I want to acknowledge that “Somatics” is the name given to a specific, westernized approach named and led, predominately, by white people in the 1970s. The origins of the mind-body practices that led to the development of this approach extend many thousands of years beyond this and have been appropriated, particularly from Asian, Indigenous & Black cultures.

 There is a paradox for me in this work of needing to recognize these lineages and who is most affected, and believing deeply in our need (particularly myself & other white people) to become embodied in order to affect social change, including the ways we cope with and enact our whiteness in the world.

That said, I am committed to continuously evolving my understanding of this work and assessing my roles within it. As part of my own accountability to this work and it’s lineages, I am committed to financially redistributing a portion of my pay to racialized people.

At the moment, as a disabled trans person who is slowly getting back to work, I am barely able to meet my basic needs. For the time being I am able to commit 1-2% of my pay towards reparations. When I am more financially stable I am hoping to increase this number to 10%. This intent has been communicated to my accountability pod.