I, perhaps like you, always struggled with my sense of belonging. As a child and teen I lived in a really segregated town, but I moved in, out, and between communities - I went to a primarily All-Black school, but took dance lessons at a predominantly white studio. My family members that I spent time with were primarily Black, but my neighbor, and best friend by default, was white as they come.

I experienced racism and bullying from every angle - micro and macroaggressions - and, despite my parents best efforts, I internalized it. I actually have worksheets from my high school therapy sessions where the key thought I was tussling with was that I was inherently unlikeable.

Talk therapy helped…a bit. I learned how to put one foot in front of the other without shrinking myself. But on the inside, I still struggled with how I saw myself. I carried a tremendous amount of shame and grief. I felt shaken up when I felt misunderstood.

Things didn’t really change for me until I discovered somatic healing approaches.

After college, I started practicing yoga. I took a teacher training and tapped into something inside me that made me unendingly curious about body and spirit. I exclusively taught yoga for a year and a half before going back to graduate school, because yoga just wasn’t paying the bills.

And after graduate school, I began working as a therapist and trained extensively in body-based approaches for trauma. I started working with a somatic therapist myself and finally found a sense of liberation through learning how to accept all the different parts of me - my anxious parts, my Blackness, my proximity to whiteness, my neurocomplexity, my quirkiness, my longings, and so on.

With a somatic approach, I built self-trust in my ability to take risks and deal with big feelings. I no longer felt like I was just pushing through. I felt like I could exhale and enjoy life, in spite of the ongoing presence of trauma, oppression, and relationship ups and downs.

I also felt like I finally knew my place and purpose in the world. After toggling between being overly accountable for my privilege, and burning out of resistance work altogether, I found a way to engage that felt balanced, sustainable, and impactful.

I believe that as mixed folks we have something to offer to collective liberation work - we have a knack for seeing connections across cosmologies. We can be the bridge that’s needed between communities who are all fighting for the same thing - justice, freedom, liberation. But first, we need - and deserve - to feel held in our healing work ourselves.

While the world is falling apart, it is more important than ever that we all see ourselves as inherently worthy and capable of belonging.

I have used a somatic approach - with success - with dozens of mixed clients, helping them to build a sense of inner and outer belonging. I’d love to share this soul work with you, too.