
Witnessing the way that queer & trans people inhabit ourselves is a source of unending resilience for me. Being around us fills me with reverence for all of creation – including the ways we are shaped by it, and the ways we shape it back. All of us are born into conditions that are out of our control, yet we have agency in how we move through them. For me, this is something at the heart of queerness.
Queerness & somatics are both, in part, about embodiment. I define embodiment as an external expression of Self that is congruent with internal experience. This means that our actions, relationality, and stance in life are a reflection of our values, our longings, and our internal states of being – and vice versa! Queer folks (as well as other folks living in identities that are strategically undervalued and/or weaponized against them by systems of power) pursue this congruence often in opposition to dominant narratives about the “right” way to be, and we look damn good doing it. I don’t mean to suggest that the liberatory practices of coming out, transitioning, & moving in a visibly divergent way is a cinch. Living more fully into our identities isn’t easy. It often comes at a variety of costs. But we keep doing it, and celebrating each other for it, because (I believe) the force that guides us into becoming more of ourselves is ancient, and powerful; it’s the force of life itself, longing to experience more of what is possible. That’s how I relate to queer & trans brilliance: the endless, curious, iterative seeking of life force energy moving through our individual bodies, trying to be expressed in as many different ways as possible.
The somatics I practice offers a pathway for coming into deeper contact with that aliveness. We can learn to feel more of ourselves, which can be quite an undertaking in a culture that usually frames the body as a fickle, uncooperative, burdensome vessel for the mind to be kept at a distance, lest it impact our ability to function. The body is not separate from our Self. The body is the very instance of our aliveness! It is the domain of our dreaming, our actions, our identities, our relationships, & our way into the future.
For me, somatics has also played a role in learning to trust a body I have not always felt exactly congruent with. Gender dysphoria shows up in many ways for many people – with the following, I do not mean to suggest that my experience is a standard one. There is no standard trans experience. The need to begin to build trust with my body became clear after a major surgery, when I realized I felt suspicious about whether I would heal at all, much less heal well. I realized that part of that distrust came from my experience of gender dysphoria, which manifested for me as a murky sort of fear that my body was malevolently “out to get me” & would betray me if it could.
As I write these words from a place of having deepened with somatics, I recognize a sentiment that many people might be able to connect to, regardless of gender identity. Surely the way distrust of my body manifested for me is distinctly colored by my journey with gender, but under racial capitalism, distrust of the body is endemic. The body is something to be manipulated, optimized, perfected, resisted, toned, tanned, lightened, tightened, and even overcome. It’s gone so far that the basic idea of tapping into the wisdom of the body is considered woo-woo, psychospiritual, verging on occult. Pretty wild when you consider that there is little more tangibly mundane than the day to day experience of moving, breathing, and eating.
But I digress! Our cultural norms around gender identity & expression shape all of us deeply, whether we are trans, cis, or something else. All of us have something to gain by checking out the ways gender unfolds in our lives, as individuals & as communities. “Shaping” is a way of talking about how the conditions under which we live impact our available actions, our skills, our beliefs about ourselves & others, our connections, our sense of our own agency & belonging (or lack thereof) ad infinitum. In my view, cultural gender norms have a huge role in shaping us into & out of different competencies such as the ability to say no, to feel ourselves & each other deeply, to overextend at times, to set boundaries, to receive criticism, to listen, to de-center ourselves, to stand up for ourselves, to express anger, and to be vulnerable, to name a few. People in all gender identities need all of these skills! Somatics offers us a way to check out how our shaping under societal conditions has impacted our emotional & relational range. It goes a step further and offers us a path toward building our skillset to include things that are missing. Clocking where & how I am shaped by dominant cultural norms about gender helps me create space for my agency in shaping back those norms inside of my own life.
In my experience as a genderfluid person, I always feel I am “shopping from both sides of the aisle” gender-shaping wise. There is also an increasingly distinct “third side” to the aisle – as in, there are cultural standards for what a nonbinary person looks like & I often feel I owe it to the world to serve that up! Obviously I don't owe anyone my gender expression, & neither does anyone else, but the rewards for adhering to the expectations explicitly & implicitly placed on us re: gender expression cannot be denied. Many of us are familiar with the ways that we put parts of ourselves away to take care of safety, dignity, & belonging. In somatics, we honor these wise adaptations toward survival. We hold our current shape with dignity by offering gratitude to the processes & practices that got us this far. We acknowledge that we are going to bring all of ourselves with us as we transform into more of who we already are.
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