On Somatics, Safety, and Who Gets to Feel at Home in Their Body

I have been working in therapy for years to feel more connected to my body. Somatic practices have been especially hard for me, and for a long time, I internalized that difficulty as a personal failure, like something was wrong with just me. Lately, I have realized how common this experience is among Indigenous people and other people of color. We do not all process through our bodies in the same ways, and I have noticed that many of my white friends often experience these practices with more ease and describe them as liberating or immediately healing. And that’s not to say somatic practices cannot be healing for people of color. And it’s not to say white folks don’t struggle with somatics. I just want to point out what people often forget, and to invite some historical context.

Imagine what it has meant to be Black or Indigenous over the last few centuries. For many, survival required a forced disconnection from our physical bodies, from sensation, and especially from the safety of being present. That kind of history shapes how emotion is processed and expressed through the body.

Dance and movement are central to so many of our cultures, but we often express ourselves in ways that do not match what white people expect to see. We may not react immediately to things that deeply outrage us. We may appear calm while something is burning beneath the surface. I have noticed that white folks can sometimes be more outwardly reactive when discussing realities we have been carrying and processing for generations, including mass violence, loss of life, and loss of autonomy, realities shaped by ongoing colonialism and global imperialism. As imperial violence becomes increasingly visible through the lens of social media, many are encountering these realities from the safety of their screens, without having ever encountered them in their daily lives.

Recently, Minneapolis, Portland, Los Angeles, and other major U.S. cities have become focal points of what it looks like when colonial and imperial power is exercised within U.S. borders. Increased immigration enforcement and the visible presence of federal agencies have brought long-standing systems of surveillance, policing, and displacement into public view. For many communities, this has meant heightened fear, a new urgency in community organizing, and calls for accountability and abolition of the existing systems, not because this violence is new, but because it has become harder for others to ignore. Minneapolis, in this moment, reflects the everyday reality of state violence that many communities of color have lived with for generations. For Indigenous people in particular, this is painfully familiar, echoing the violence faced by land and water protectors at Standing Rock during the Dakota Access Pipeline protests, and more recently, the killing of Tortuguita, a land defender shot by police while protecting the Weelaunee Forest in Atlanta.

This reality came into sharp focus during the 2020 uprisings following the murder of George Floyd in Minneapolis, a moment that did not end, but continues to shape what is unfolding there now. While the scale of the uprising was unprecedented, the conditions that gave rise to it were not. The Black Lives Matter movement had already been building for years in response to the killings of Black people by police and armed vigilantes, including Trayvon Martin, Michael Brown, Eric Garner, Breonna Taylor, Ahmaud Arbery, and so many others. For many, the uprising was not a moment of sudden awakening, but an eruption of grief and rage shaped by generations of lived experience with exactly how state violence operates. What changed was not the violence itself, but the scale at which others were forced to witness it.

At the same time, the world has witnessed renewed attention to Gaza, particularly after October 7, 2023, when images of the siege began circulating widely across social media. For many people, this marked a first sustained encounter with the realities of Palestinian life under occupation. But this violence did not begin then. It long predates social media, emerging from decades of settler colonialism and imperial control. Many were previously unaware of the terror of the Nakba in 1948 and the mass displacement of Palestinians that had already taken place long before the current siege. What has changed is not the existence of the violence, but its visibility. Seen alongside moments like those unfolding in Minneapolis, where the deaths of Good and Pretti have been met with urgency and calls for abolition, this recent history exposes a divide. Some deaths are treated as intolerable losses demanding immediate response, while others are absorbed into the background of history, long justified by those who have benefited from the very violence that made their insulated lives possible.

It is within this landscape of silenced lived experience and normalized violence that questions of safety and healing begin to surface. What does healing look like in the body when the world around us feels poisoned? What does liberation mean under systems that deny the possibility of ever feeling truly free?

In this context, it makes sense that many of us may not feel fully safe engaging in somatic or healing work within white-led spaces. Even when practitioners are well-intentioned, gaps in lived experience and historical understanding can shape how much safety and trust are actually possible. When a body carries generational memory of surveillance, displacement, family separation, and state violence, being asked to “drop into the body” or surrender to our physical selves without that context can feel exposing and exploitative rather than reparative. Naming this is not only about cultural appropriation, though that context matters, particularly when discussing cultural practices like reiki and yoga. It is also about power, and whose bodies are expected to feel safe by default.

It is okay to need spaces led by people who look like us, who may carry more shared personal and ancestral experience. This is not about exclusion. It is about feeling seen and understood without having to translate your history first. While this is not true for everyone, it is a difference worth naming.

So if breathwork, meditation, or getting into your body does not feel rejuvenating for you, now or ever, please be gentle with yourself. This can also show up in intimacy, which is something many of us struggle to speak about openly. If fully feeling joy, pleasure, grief, or even sadness feels distant or inaccessible, that does not mean you are doing it wrong.

We all deserve to feel at home in our bodies, and at the same time, that desire does not exist in a vacuum. For many of us, the dangers our bodies learned to adapt to are not only historical — they remain present in our everyday lives. Trauma survivors understand this intimately. If somatics feel complicated for you, that does not mean you are failing. It may mean your body has been doing exactly what it learned to do to keep you alive.

Something else I keep sitting with is the irony that so many somatic and “embodiment” practices being popularized right now are rooted in Black and Indigenous cultural traditions. Breathwork and movement, call and response, the ways bodies regulate together in community, are not recent innovations. These traditions have lived in our cultures for generations, carried and protected through forced migration and separation from our native territories or senses of home. And yet, many of these practices are now most visible and accessible, or viewed as valid forms of healing, when they are repackaged through white institutions, white teachers, and white wellness spaces. They are often stripped of historical context, detached from the very people whose bodies held them through attempted erasure.

There is something deeply painful about being told that our bodies are resistant or disconnected, while watching practices born from our lineages be marketed back to us without reckoning with the trauma those same systems created.

From an Indigenous lens, the body has never existed in isolation. It is in relationship with the land, our communities, and all who came before us. Disconnection was not a personal shortcoming. It was a survival response within systems designed to sever us from our ways of knowing. So when somatic work feels complicated, activating, or inaccessible, I do not see that as a contradiction. I see it as an intelligent response to context.

There is also another layer here that often goes unnamed. Being BIPOC and living with disability, chronic pain, chronic illness, or a body already managing limitations can make somatic work even more complex. Many embodiment practices assume a baseline of physical capacity that is simply not available to everyone. When pain or unpredictability are already present, being asked to turn inward without adaptation can feel overwhelming or unsafe. This is where practitioners must slow down and reflect on how their work is being received, not just how it is intended.

At the same time, somatic practice does not have to begin or exist only within formal healing spaces. Many of us already engage in embodiment practices in ways that feel safer and more familiar to us. This can look like being in relationship with land or bodies of water, engaging in cultural movement or music, imbibing in substances, tending to daily rituals, caring for plants and animals, cooking foods that carry cultural memory, spending time in community, or noticing small moments of sensation without forcing meaning. Somatic connection does not have to be dramatic or visible to others. It can be subtle. It can be slow. It can happen in ways that prioritize our agency and autonomy. Alongside working with practitioners who share lived or ancestral experience, reclaiming these personal and cultural pathways allows embodiment to unfold on our own terms.

Even the idea of healing as a marketable skill or service to be provided by a designated practitioner reflects a hierarchical colonial logic that values extraction and expertise (often defined by colonial standards) over relationship.

Healing is not something one person delivers to another. It lives in shared knowledge, mutual care, and the conditions that allow people to reconnect with themselves in ways that feel grounded and self-directed. Healing, in this sense, is not about fixing our bodies, but about restoring our relationship with our physical vessel and the world around it. It is about getting better in tune with what we need, and what we need may sometimes be to be alone, or in a room without white faces. And that is okay.

For readers who want to explore generational healing in more depth, I highly recommend these books by authors of color:

• Decolonizing Trauma Work by Renee Linklater
  An Indigenous framework for trauma and healing that centers land, relational accountability, and resistance to colonial models of care.

• As Long as Grass Grows by Dina Gilio-Whitaker
  An examination of Indigenous sovereignty, environmental justice, and the ongoing impacts of settler colonialism on Indigenous bodies and land.

• My Grandmother’s Hands by Resmaa Menakem
  A somatic exploration of racialized trauma that traces how violence and survival live in bodies across generations.

• What My Bones Know by Stephanie Foo
  A personal and investigative account of complex trauma that connects individual experience to family systems and cultural context.

• Pleasure Activism by adrienne maree brown
  A collection of essays and practices that reimagine pleasure, embodiment, and liberation as collective and political acts.

• Trauma Stewardship by Laura van Dernoot Lipsky
  A reflection on caring for ourselves and others while living in constant proximity to trauma, violence, and systemic harm.

Part of an ongoing reflection. Thank you for reading.