Glimmering in Uncertainty: Decolonizing Healing

With Pride Month beginning to come to a close, I am glimmering with emergence of a new version of self and the reminder that healing actually means becoming comfortable with uncertainty.

Queer to me, is constantly redefining the self. Queer is emergence. Uncontainable. Queer resists definition. Much like art. Much like nature. 🏳️‍🌈 🌎

Like many who come to Sovereign Somatics for a different kind of healing, I too was conditioned from a very early age to conform, adopt definitions, fit in rather than make waves, and I found most of my life to be adversarial to my way of being because I was brought up in a culture that had no definitions for what “queer” was or could be. My coming out story was not neat, orderly, according to predetermined social media scripts & social justice frameworks because those things didn’t even exist accessibly to me when I “came out”… what I’ve come to know as a lifelong process of BEcoming… And while I identify now also as nonbinary and (late life uncovered) neuroexpansive, even now I find myself resisting labels not out of uncertainty, but an unwillingness to conform to other people’s predetermined expectations of me, based on what these terms mean to them.

I have noticed the people I challenge (ahem, piss off) most in the world are folks adhering (mostly unconsciously) to institutional norms. And because most of these folks are LGBTQIA+, people of the Global Majority, or at least have a decent understanding of intersectionality & marginality if they happen to exist within the cishetwhite part of the spectrum of human life, the fact that I still piss them off by my way of BEing and thinking tells me this has nothing to do with labels, and everything to do with being comfortable with uncertainty.

My Buddhist Dharma practice is genuinely what prepared me most for this. Well, and, my extensive trauma + apparent warrior-like, annoying will to live & defy expectations that only a latchkey, xennial, Aquarian, anti-authoritarian could make as natural as breathing.

Tibetan Buddhist master Chögyam Trungpa (paraphrased by one of my favorite Buddhist author’s David Loy) describes “healing” aka “awakening” aka...

"Enlightenment is like falling out of an airplane. The bad news is that there is no parachute. The good news is that there is no ground."

And I find this to be a somatic match for what I am feeling & experiencing shifting into eldership in this queer-femme body at this revolutionary time period of what Joanna Macy describes as “the Great Turning.” This moment of shifting from a life-destroying society into that of a life-sustaining one. There is absolutely no ground where I am going. Where any of us are going. There is no such thing as certainty. There is no roadmap. We are co-creating the map as we go along and this is so fucking much at odds with what has come to be expected of “healers” (guides, teachers, menders) in how we reach you, due in fact to the same capitalistic, extractive marketing forces that have produced the patriarchal technofascism it’s nearly impossible to break through the algorithm to find you in.

Healing & “wellness culture” has stood on the same branding & marketing frameworks requiring certainty, authority & reliability. How the fuck are we supposed to “market” healing in a world where absolutely nothing is certain…

Except change……?

As a Dharma practitioner, I have to giggle at this predicament I’ve placed myself in. Almost as if my own karma chose it….

I am grappling with what it means for people, for you, to come to me for guidance, healing & transformation, and what it means to illustrate the “certainty” that you’ll “get what you came for” in some clever marketing speak that’ll make you want to invest in me as your guide so that I too can put food on my table & receive the healthcare that I need. I’ve been at this somatic, Dharma & meditation thing long enough to know that most folks want to reliably & consistently “get healing” each & every time they come to the mat/cushion/chair… and from my perspective this time is usually spent attending with passivity, confusion, doubt & frustration. Unconsciously mostly, I might add, because real messy humanness has been compounded by the transactional wellness expectations bred into our culture by racial capitalism. In an energetic sense, mainstream, commercialist wellness culture (& heck, most regular ol’ pathologizing talk therapy) has conditioned most folks to want to get something out of it rather than what the Dharma truly asks of your practice - to put something in.

I think many would argue that this is very distinction that Decolonial practice & healing actually means. Putting in an energetic investment in humility, devotion, discomfort, patience, grace & compassion. See how there’s no certain parachute or ground there?...

Mainstream wellness provides a product to consume, and it keeps churning for a profit. My goal has never been “profit,” in the capitalist sense (if it was, I might have an easier time covering all my monthly expenses with content I unconsciously churn). My goal isn’t profit, it’s REVOLUTION. It’s interdependent ecosystems of care. It’s 3rd spaces where cost as a barrier to participate isn’t even a thought let alone an elite status marker of “who gets to heal & thrive” at the expense of who is just trying to survive.

Yes, I need resourcing to exist in this transitioning time of hospicing the world of extraction and midwifing the world of regenerativity. AND, I am finding it absolutely impossible for my neurotype, my heart & my ethics to use promotional psychology, edgy “hot takes” and “hills I’ll die on” marketing tactics to provide you certainty that you’ll get healing & transformation from the practices I offer. Because what you'd get out of these healing modalities is not about me at all, it’s about what you put in. It’s about your motivations. Your effort. Your willingness to be comfortable with your own uncertainty and come to know it as a place of robust and unlimited potential. I have no desire to spike your cortisol as collateral damage to “how I have to speak” in order for you to trust my authority on somatic healing. Judgment brain, critique brain, compare & contrast brain derived from institutional social justice + consumerist marketing speak has done a number on humanity’s ability to discern critically, live curiously, and engage relationally and I have never been more grateful for my body’s ability to not play along nicely with institutional extractivism.

I want to close by saying accessibility & relationality are the utmost important to me in the healing & transformations I offer. I want low bars of entry, I want easy access places where depth has time to steep. I want group-oriented practice spaces because healing isn’t supposed to happen in a vacuum. I am in a place of Radically Reimagining everything and I’m having a hard time defining what that is to you in terms of certainty. I can’t give you a fully defined Sovereign Somatics because I myself am constantly redefining myself. I cannot separate my queerness from my guidance. And I want myself and my business in this undefinable state to be legible to folks out there that also court uncertainty, unknowingness, creativity & emergence.

If you’ve come here for certainty, you’re welcome to unsubscribe.

If you’ve come here for practice, for play, for curiosity, beginners mindset, wonder, humility & and a dose of surprise with your transformation, you’ve come to the right place of co-creation.

The future I want to see for queer folks, for trans folks, for Black folks, immigrants, disabled folks and for everyone whom is natural, beautiful & emergent unaccording to dominant society norms, doesn’t happen by hope, by accident or by capitalist economic & marketing standards. And I’m not gonna build the foundation of Sovereign Somatics on that kinda transactionality. So please pardon the glimmers, the shifts, the change, the realigning, and join me sometime for practice, play, depth & emergence. Bring your investment in Revolution with you.

In sovereignty ❤️‍🔥

-Deanna-

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