Feeling Whole as a Mixed Person Starts with Feeling Held
“Identity, conferred by humans and histories, has come to resemble mere genealogical scratchings cobbled together and amounting to lists of names, recent stories, half-remembered dates, and a handful of photographs and old objects that will risk being meaningless two generations on. A place confers identity, for humans or for animals. In other words, we are named by Earth as belonging where we are now. Identity is not a possession or something we confer. Earth cares not what we name her – do it as you please, but know that it is she who confers identity upon us as kin.”
- Amba Sepie, Settled Kin: Coming Home to Where We Now Belong, in Kinship: Belonging in a World of Relationships, Practice Volume
Stop Trying to Find the
Perfect Words to Defend Your Identity
Feeling whole as a mixed person does not start with the perfect words. It doesn’t start with breaking yourself down into fractions to make sense to other people.
It starts with a body that feels held.
A lot of mixed people try to think their way into wholeness by perfecting their explanation, because it feels like if you can just explain your identity clearly enough, people will finally accept you and you will finally feel like you belong.
But then you leave every room more exhausted than when you walked in.
It’s like chasing a dangling carrot - especially since race is socially constructed and so context dependent. You’re never going to make everyone happy with your explanation.
I spent years describing myself in fractions so I would make sense to other people, and it never once made me feel less alone in the room. And even when I felt staunchly rooted in my identity, that didn’t mean I automatically felt at home with everyone else who shared that identity.
What to Focus
on Instead
That’s because belonging is a felt sense in your body – not a verdict other people hand you, not something you earn by fitting in. And you’ll start feeling it the moment you stop auditioning for it.
Because, at the end of the day, what you’re really searching for is a place where you can trust your enoughness instead of trying to prove it. Because when you feel like enough, there’s no reason to prove your wholeness. You can finally feel whole and held in ALL your complexity.
Which means you can stop scanning the room for who might reject you and you can actually be present instead of performing.
So how do you get there – especially if you don’t feel like you’ve never felt relaxed around others or held by anyone?
You have to pay attention to the sources of support and validation that are already available for you.
Because they will give your body something to settle into. Something to be held by.
Decolonizing Belonging
Through Animist Practice
Your body possesses innate, primal capabilities that can help you connect with your environment and feel held by it.
All of our ancestors knew - we are not so separate from the natural world. You are nature. You are constantly in relationship with other aspects of nature – the land, the plants, the air, the animals, the ancestral realm.
“With every breath, every sip of water, every meal, we are reminded that our lives are inseparable from the life of the world.”
- Gavin Van Horn, Kinning: Introducing the Kinship Series
Which means that you are never alone. You are always held by something.
This is animism - a worldview which sees all living things as possessing energy, spirit, consciousness. And this was the kind of worldview that existed before forced conversation to Christianity that started in the Middle Ages, an ongoing factor in the crisis of belonging we’re experiencing in our time.
“To successfully colonize a people, you have to destroy their relationship with their ancestors, human and otherwise, their old people, their children, their land, their animal and sacred kin, their rituals and way of being... What it means to be colonized is to be dislocated from living in a traditional Earth-oriented way, and this ultimately requires violence to be successful.” - Amba Sepie, Settled Kin: Coming Home to Where We Now Belong, in Kinship: Belonging in a World of Relationships, Practice Volume
The capacity to actually feel into the support of land, ancestors, and other elements of the more-than-human world has been stunted through the trauma of colonization, which disconnected our ancestors – and us – from our relationships with land and the more-than-human world.
I know, even now as I’m writing this, that imagining land or water as a source of profound support might feel lofty, intangible, insufficient for some. And imagining that you could feel connected to your ancestors? That might feel fucking complicated as a mixed person.
This speaks to just how deep that colonial wound goes.
Colonialism, capitalism, and white supremacy keep us in our heads, always seeking the next best thing, or worrying that we won't be able to find it. That feeling like you are enough or having enough relies on seeking, searching, conquering, dominating, amassing - land, animals, and other human beings. It’s a never-ending power struggle and it’s exhausting.
Luckily, there’s another way.
Practice Time
Think about what happens in your body when you feel anxious about your identity or belonging feels scarce. Where does your attention go? What happens in your body? What posture does your body take on?
A lot of my clients say that their shoulders and hips get tight, they lean forward, their mind starts spinning, the energy moves up and they feel like a head without a body, they feel like they are floating in a dark, spinning vortex of nothingness.
Now try this – what happens when you intentionally feel into the land underneath you? What happens when you press your feet into the ground? When you notice the weight of gravity holding you here on earth? When you consider that gravity is proof of your inherent belonging on this planet in this moment in time?
For some, this may immediately offer a sense of grounding, containment, comfort. For others, it may be that - right now - it’s hard for your body to really trust that earth will catch you. That makes sense, given that you’ve been conditioned not to trust support, but to constantly seek safety and acceptance.
Learn More Strategies
in the Collective
That’s why inside the Mixed Race Belonging Collective, I’m teaching a workshop in August called HELD. In the HELD workshop I’ll be teaching you tangible somatic strategies for repairing your broken connection with the natural world and sensing the support that the land and more-than-human world continually provide.
This is work that actually gets to the root of your belonging wound - and the generations-long history behind it.
Even if you’ve never felt held anywhere, by anyone, in your life, what you’ll learn inside the August workshop will give you hope for feeling less alone and finally finding that sense of belonging you’ve trying to explain yourself into your entire life.
This workshop is part of the larger Belonging Building Blocks curriculum - a powerful 6-month curriculum focused on the somatics of belonging.
Learn about the mixed race belonging wound and the generations-long history behind it.
Find out your belonging archetype by taking the Belonging Wounds & Wisdom quiz. See where your system is still protecting old pain, the places where you’re already thriving, and what your next growth edges are.
Experience soothing practices that will help your body feel safe enough to be more open and relaxed in the right relationships instead of constantly questioning what they’ll think about you. (**This is part of what we’re doing in HELD**)
Learn mindful strength exercises that will help you feel more confident in who you are so you can comfortably take up space and hold your boundaries instead of playing small.
Create an action plan and a toolkit of practices you can use to feel closer to loved ones, make new friends, and be more audacious in your everyday life.
This is the same curriculum that has helped past biracial and multiracial clients:
Stop feeling so defeated when someone reads them as white and focus on finding the right people.
Feel more relaxed while visiting family in their ancestral country instead of questioning how others are perceiving them.
And feel grounded when they get criticized while marketing their business on social media instead of running for the hills.
As soon as you sign up for the Mixed Race Belonging Collective, you can catch the recording of the first workshop in the Belonging Building Blocks series, The Belonging Blueprint, which took place in July.
You’ll also get immediate access to:
The Inside-Out Resource Library, full of audio and video somatic practices you can use in a pinch
A link to book a free 15-minute welcome call with me
All the discussion forums, so you can start connecting with the other MRBC members
HELD is going down on Sunday, August 9th from 1-3pm. I can’t wait to see you there!
