The Expansiveness of the Body
“Your body comes from — and is an expression of — creation itself. It's an ever-emergent, ever-unfolding process. Ask any physicist.
"Your body is also an ongoing source of great resilience, resource, and wisdom, even during the worst of times or your darkest of moods. Ask any somatic therapist.
"Your body is also a brilliantly organized system of interacting bells, bowls, diaphragms, and antennae. Ask any physiologist.
"Your body, like all human bodies, is fundamentally good and lovable. You might have a hearing loss or a missing hand or chronic illness or a heart defect. But you are not defective. Just ask someone who loves you. Or ask me.
"Do you begin to see how your and others’ bodies are the keys to healing trauma? To preventing — or swiftly ending — a civil war? To creating a living anti-racist culture?
"Your body — every human body — has an immense capacity for resource.”
— The Quaking of America
Forms Trauma Takes When It Is Normalized
“Unhealed trauma acts like a rock thrown into a pond; it causes ripples that move outward, affecting many other bodies over time. After months or years, unhealed trauma can appear to become part of someone's personality. Over even longer periods of time, as it is passed on and gets compounded through other bodies in a household, it can become a family norm. And if it gets transmitted and compounded through multiple families and generations, it can start to look like culture.
"But it isn't culture. It's a traumatic retention that has lost its context over time.”
— My Grandmother’s Hands
Healthy Bodies Can Create a Movement
"Few skills are more central than the ability to settle your body. If you can settle your body, you are more likely to become calm, alert, and fully present, no matter what is going on around you. A settled body enables you to harmonize and connect with other bodies around you, while encouraging those bodies to settle as well. Gather together a large group of unsettled bodies — or assemble a group bodies and then unsettle them — and you get a mob or a riot. But bring a large group of settled bodies and you have a potential movement — and a force for tremendous good in the world. A calm, settled body is the foundation for health, for healing, for helping others, and for changing the world."
— My Grandmother’s Hands
The Myth of White Fragility
"This collective story of martyrdom has been held tightly in many generations of white bodies. It is of course patently untrue. Americans of European descent have histories that demonstrate great courage, ingenuity, ability, achievement, and resilience in virtually all aspects of life but one: their relationship with African American bodies. In this one realm many feel frightened, vulnerable, and small — emotions that are nothing more than a trauma-driven, racialized phobia.”
— My Grandmother’s Hands
The Promise of Resilience
“Resilience isn't just about responding to — or getting through — a difficult experience. … It’s a way for our body to access possibility and coherence, regardless of the circumstances. It's not so much a response as it is a way of showing up, a way of tapping into the energies that surround and move through everything in our world.”
— My Grandmother’s Hands
Racism as an Embodied Phenomenon
"Most Americans — Americans of all skin pigmentations — have racialized trauma stuck in their bodies. White body supremacy is embedded in our institutions, our laws, our language, our religious organizations, and our codes of behavior. It is equally ingrained in our habits, norms, assumptions, vibes, and expectations. Recent discoveries in epigenetics have revealed that it is literally in the cells of our bodies. As a result, racialized trauma has become a common, chronic, unexamined, and unhealed condition of most American bodies."
— The Quaking of America
Resisting Authoritarianism
"Don't let anyone conflate resistance with politics. When someone calls you a radical, a liberal, a socialist, a traitor, or anything else, shake your head and say, 'I'm doing this as an American. This isn't about politics. It's about standing up for justice and an unfettered democracy.' "
— The Quaking of America
What Trauma Is
“The lizard brain does not pause. Trauma responses are all about speed.”
“Trauma is anything that the body perceives as too much, too fast or too soon.”
— My Grandmother’s Hands
White-body Supremacy Diminishes Self-awareness
“On the surface, white-body supremacy looks like a highly favorable arrangement for white people. They get to reap a wide range of benefits, while forcing other, darker bodies to bear all the costs. This does not tell the whole story, however, which is that white-body supremacy comes at a great cost to white people.
"There is the moral injury, which creates shame, and ever more trauma, in white bodies. But white body supremacy also greatly diminishes white Americans’ awareness of their own strength and abilities. As a result, while the most overt and vocal white supremacists trumpet the superiority of European blood, many white Americans cower in fear and trembling — or beg for help and comfort — in the presence of people with dark skin."
— The Quaking of America
