Often, what they bring to the space is a sense of dissonance and internal struggle.

Neglecting the self comes with a material cost, but caring for the self comes with a spiritual and emotional one.

“How can I worry about myself when my people are struggling?”

“How can I focus on healing myself when the entire world is in shambles?”

“How can I care about my own needs when so many people around the globe don’t even have their basic needs met?”

And I understand. I feel the same.

So I do not perpetuate the same harm I experienced when I brought this to my old therapists and coaches. I do not preach the necessity of self-care. I do not talk about how it held movements together, or how it’s an act of resistance.

Instead, I say: You are absolutely right. In the larger scale of things, your care for yourself doesn’t matter.

AND, who is it and what is it that you’re actually caring for here? Is it you? Or is it this life that you have been entrusted with, and which is asking you to care for it?

Subscribe now

I didn’t know this until I felt it through my own people, our struggle, and in my individual body: we are all part of a collective web of life, and we have all been entrusted with the life that lives inside us.

As long as it’s there, it will ask for our attention. That is the nature of something alive: it moves, it swells, it contracts, and it expands. So when we care for the life that is here, we are also caring for the sacredness of life itself. We are tending to that web.

Life-care is not self-indulgent, it doesn’t have to be elaborate or cost us anything.

Life-care is the simple and yet powerful act of paying attention to the quality of life and spirit within us from moment to moment, and responding to it accordingly.

Where self-care exists in service of the individual self, life-care exists in service of life, all of life. Especially if one comes from a group of people who are, or have been, fighting for dignity and survival for generations.

Denying our own life care might feel like the loyal thing to do. It might help you feel connected to your people through self-imposed neglect and suffering. It might clear your conscious for a moment. It might even help you tame survivor’s guilt.

AND, the life that is still in us and with us will persist. It will still ask for our attention, care, and presence.

Subscribe now

So maybe the question isn’t:

“How can I care for my self so I can be of better service to others?”

Maybe it’s:

“How can I make my care for life, including my own life, part of my service?”

And no, this is not a trick or a simple reframe. This is a practice.

If life comes calling through the body, it is rarely personal or individual. It has arrived to us through the collective web of life.

So being with that life is also being with that web. And we don’t know how that care will ripple through it, who else it will touch, or what effect it will have on the collective. All we know is which part of it we are being entrusted with in the moment. Trusting that there’s a reason it has chosen to show itself to us and through us in that shape and form.

So how can we care for life that is still here, in us and with us?

And what pay-off do we get from denying it care?

Not when I trained to be a trauma-informed practitioner, not when I temporarily used the term for the lack of a better option, and not as I finally sat down to write this essay.

Before I became a practitioner, I had spent years entering therapeutic and healing spaces that describe themselves as trauma-informed, and yet I didn’t always experience them as such. And I finally understand what my body knew and which I couldn’t yet articulate.

As someone with both, cPTSD and systemic trauma—and who arrived to this work through the extreme ecology of her own body and the lack of holistic trauma care in therapeutic spaces—I don’t believe trauma is something we can simply be informed about.

Trauma is something we touch or are touched by.

To be informed about something is to have a certain distance from it. To treat it as an intellectual exercise, a body of knowledge, and a protocol. To be informed means you have done the intellectual due diligence of gathering enough information about how to approach something in the most standardized way possible. And you have probably landed on the information through a third party that has claimed to be an authority on the topic. Often, a third party that got there through scholarship, and not through lived experience.

But trauma is not a third-party experience. Yes, you can, of course, study trauma. But even then, we know that much of the research surrounding trauma, and the interventions developed from that research, has historically centered on the experiences of predominantly male, Western military and veteran populations.

So whose trauma are we being informed on exactly? Which trauma are we being informed about? Who conducted the research? What did their sample look like? And through which lens did they filter the information and create their protocols?

Trauma is alive and pulsating. Trauma is ancestral and historical. Trauma lives in our bodies, individual and collective, and moves through our relationships. It shapes the way we perceive and interact with the world, ourselves, and one another. And the bodies that have historically held and hold the highest degrees of trauma are deeply misrepresented, understudied, and misunderstood.

What happens when we try to standardize the way we approach trauma through institutions and official bodies, and turn it into something we can be informed about?

What happens when the professionals creating that body of knowledge and training others in it are aligned with systems or ideologies of harm?

We create even more distance between the person who carries the trauma and the person who has been informed about it and is now responsible for treating or mitigating it.

We amplify the distance that is already inherent to the nature of the relationship that was shaped by inequality and power. And that distance, no matter how well-intended, isn’t neutral. It is political, structural, and systemic.

Let’s not forget that many revered voices in “trauma healing” are operating from within, and benefiting from, systems that are oppressing and traumatizing others through modern-day colonialism and imperialism.

And yet, we continue to entrust them with instructions on how to create trauma-informed protocols and spaces.

The issue with being informed

If we look closer, this colonial power dynamic has always existed in the name itself.

The practitioner is the one who is informed. The one who has gathered the knowledge. The one who is in charge of setting the scene and creating the space accordingly, within the limitations and constraints of often-traumatizing systems.

The person bringing the trauma into the space becomes the recipient of that knowledge. In this context, their somatic intelligence, their unique shaping, their nervous system, and lived wisdom, which may be pointing directly at oppressive systems, can easily be presented as something fragile and in need of care. Rather than something alive and in need of containment, integration, and relationship.

This distinction becomes even more interesting when we look at where the term trauma-informed came from.

The concept is generally credited to psychologists Maxine Harris and Roger Fallot, who articulated it in 2001 through their work on mental-health and social-service systems. Their argument was a significant shift away from asking: What is wrong with this person? Towards: What happened to this person?

There is something important and benevolent in this shift. But the question itself still comes from institutional managers rather than those who are governed by institutions. The traumatized person remains the subject, and the institution remains the one asking the question. And the practitioner remains the one holding the knowledge and power about how the system and the body should interact.

What began as a shift in how institutions understood the people they served has since evolved into a formalised field, with frameworks, principles, training programmes, government guidance, and even accreditation standards built around what it means to be “trauma-informed.”

SAMHSA’s 2014 framework, for example, gave the field a set of guiding principles:

Read more

“How could you, a UX Team Lead and woman in tech, who is logical, pragmatic, and methodical, believe in mysticism?”

When I contracted her for a project, I asked about her astrological sign to make sure we were compatible. And while we worked together, I told her about Human Design and other mystical systems I used for work, such as tarot. Simultaneously, our work together was very analytical and data-driven. What drove our decision-making in the project was not superstition; it was rigorous research.

So I was surprised by her inability to hold space for this duality at the end of our collaboration. Clearly, these two things can co-exist. And out of everyone I’ve worked with, I thought she’d understand. After all, she was a Libra rising.

Subscribe now

Our addiction to reason

How could I not believe in mysticism? And how could she not?

We were powerful women in male-dominated fields who got to where we are by navigating consistent uncertainty, rejection, friction, and ridicule. There were moments in our careers where we had to rely on a different kind of knowing. A type of room and people reading that went beyond the average fraternization, so we could leave a strong enough impression to be chosen over the usual suspects.

And what is it that drove us forward? That kept us pushing against closed doors? What is this inner resolve if not “qadr”—divine destiny?

What did we hold on to in our darkest moments of the climb if not some form of trust in things working in our favor? We didn’t have to name it to lean into it. And yet ironically, naming it is what created dissonance and distrust.

We now know from science that stress is the somatic reaction to uncertainty1. We also know that rituals reduce stress2. And yet there is this strange resistance to embracing mysticism as the most ancient system of navigation for dark and uncertain times.

What’s the difference between a money spell and a seductive line of micro-copy under a “buy now” button? Both needed attention, precision, and intention. Yes, you can measure the number of clicks in the latter. But you can also measure the number of new clients or purchases after the spell.

What’s the difference between hiring a consultant to create a risk management strategy deck and hiring a tarot reader to take a peek into the future? Yes, the former is a Deloitte or Mackenzie consultant with a briefcase full of corporate jargon that hacks your brain into feeling safe about an uncontrollable. But in both cases, your intuition would have to call the shots while relying on speculative data.

Before we all got infected by the European Cartesian view of the world, logic and mystery occupied equal seats at the decision-making table.

Bye Bye Girlboss

Lose your mind—abandon common sense

The best decision I’ve made in the last two years was to allow myself to “lose my mind”. To permit myself to make what feels like “irrational” decisions. To follow something deeper, more ancient, and more sacred than the thinking mind. To abandon “reason” and “common sense…

Read more

a year ago · 8 likes · Tania S. Shoukair

In some of the most advanced civilizations, mysticism was considered a navigation technology for moments of uncertainty. Mystical practices and rituals tame the mind, ease the spirit, and return the flow of trust back to the body. Handing over control to something that feels more equipped to deal with the situation lowers our cortisol. It loosens our grip on what feels unsolvable, so that we can focus on what can be solved. The lowered stress hormones allow for the flow of new ideas and solutions.

So what feels like divine intervention can also be seen as the somatic process of redirecting the mind and body towards agency and choice, instead of hyper-fixating on their lack thereof.

And yet, we have the audacity to pretend that advanced civilizations, which relied on divination and mysticism as much as they relied on science, the same ones that allowed for ours to flourish, had a less complete view of the world. We, who have surgically removed an entire dimension of the human experience, the dimension of the soul.

Subscribe now

It wasn’t logic or science that pulled me out of my burnout. It’s not Marxist and scientific literature that pulls me out of the grief of watching my home endure ethnocide and ecocide again and again. It is my deep knowing and its trust in the unknown—this push and pull inside my soma between what I can and can’t control, and the trust that whatever I can’t control isn’t mine to work with.

And it’s the same push and pull that returns agency to my client’s stressed, burned-out, and overwhelmed bodies. We don’t spend our sessions having reasonable debates about an unknown future, although some of them would love that. We spend our time locating where the body is clinging to uncertainty and holding the entire system hostage to resolve something unresolvable.

Often, what they need to move on is not a solution, but an effective method of working with uncertainty without collapsing or remaining stuck.

The power of being unreasonable

We are in the dark winter of the human soul, also known as the polycrisis. Logic alone will not pull us out of this place, because logic doesn’t know how to reduce stress or build trust while navigating unknowns. Strategy will only get us so far. Horror and fear will not recruit the numbers we need to create change. For that, we need story, we need ritual, we need myth.

There is a reason why the patriarchal capitalist empire has always persecuted witches, mystics, and animists. Do you think our collective disdain towards them is a coincidence?

Why do witches and mystics continue to be looked down upon by revolutionaries and change-makers when some of the world’s most successful revolutions were kicked off by rituals3?

So no, I will not succumb to this dichotomy that was born from the limitations of the White European male imagination. I am both deeply mystical and deeply logical, revolutionary and esoteric. I know how to work with different research methodologies, how to analyze data, and read research papers. And I also know how to rest in the unknown or pull a tarot card to get through a tough day. They are not mutually exclusive, and to think that they are is a sign of a lazy mind looking for easy black and white answers and unwilling to play with the greys.

Whether you’re a corporate baddie navigating the darkest chapter of the space with the introduction of AI, or a leftist baddie interested in organizing, or both, I invite you to get off your reasonably high horse and to step away from your Marx or Simon Sinek altars.

Go talk to your local witch, sit with an herbalist, or a tarot reader. Book a session with someone who can teach you how to talk to your ancestors. Book a session with someone who can show you where the empire controls you from within. Challenge yourself, challenge your mind.

The deepest thinkers are not purely intellectual or mystical; they are somewhere in between. They respect all knowledge systems simply for their ability to organize knowing and perception. All knowledge systems have their limitations, even the most reason-focused.

Seek knowledge where it has been ridiculed, and you will quickly understand why you were taught to dismiss it.

If you were intrigued by this article and feel like dipping your toes in the practical work that is attached to The Deep Knowing philosophy, join my Lunar Writing Club for FLINTA.

Our next gathering will be held on August 13th at 19:00 CEST, on the New Moon in Leo, which meets a Solar Eclipse. All paid subscribers will receive the writing prompts for free, minus the guided somatic meditations and visualizations.

Sign up here

I’ve always had a vibrant imagination. Primarily due to my nature (my moon is in Pisces if that means anything to you), but mostly out of necessity.

My ability to toy with reality and possibility propelled me to timelines and spaces I had no business being in, because I wasn’t born with the right papers, in the right geography, or into the right social strata. Daydreaming, before it became intrusive and I had to relearn it, saved my life.

But as time progressed, the world chipped away at that imagination little by little. First at school, then at university, and then at various corporate jobs. Borders, visas, and financial limitations did their part, too. Then, of course, war and grief caused the heaviest and most recent blows. Reality overrode imagination—a reality that someone else imagined for someone like me.

And still, I managed to retain some of it. There were cracks in the fabric of my being through which I could peek into other worlds and pick what I needed. Even if it was just tiny crumbs.

That is, until March and April came, and my connection to this realm was cut off completely.

Furuticide and the collective body

As I watched entire Lebanese villages get blown up in my native and beloved South Lebanon. As I recognized the childhood streets and landmarks that were now erased and crumbled. And as I read and heard firsthand accounts of more and more lives, homes, and livelihoods being destroyed and stolen, all while no one lifted a finger of condemnation or effort to stop it, grief flooded my system. And the stream of possibility ran completely dry.

I became “uncarable” and “unreasonable”. No one around me knew how to care for me or how to respond to my grief, shock, and loss.

And then, I stopped feeling time.

The entire month of March and most of April were a continuous stream of horrific news. Days no longer mattered. Nights didn’t matter either. They merged and blurred into each other. The time of day didn’t matter either. Time itself lost all meaning.

I felt suspended in a strange and unchanging “now”, but not in an enlightened kind of way.

I had no words for this feeling. It wasn’t depression, it was suspension. My mind was unable to move backwards or forwards in time, as I watched the past and future get destroyed simultaneously.

It is estimated that the Israeli entity has destroyed over 60 villages, some centuries old and containing historical and archeological landmarks. It has also demolished over 20,000 homes. A lot of the destruction is taking place during “ceasefires”.1

The human toll has risen to over 4000 dead and 12,000 injured. Almost 15% of Lebanon’s population remains forcibly displaced.2

The agricultural damage in South Lebanon is estimated to be over 1 billion USD3, and 22.5% of Lebanon’s agricultural land has been damaged by bombs, white phosphorus, and Israel’s scorched earth policy4.

Yes, it is genocide. Yes, this is urbacide. Yes, it is domicide. And yes, it is also ecocide.

AND this is also Chronocide and Furturice.

It is the destruction of timelines, past and present. It’s the severance and disembodiment of reality through the erasure of continuity. It is the future made impossible and inaccessible by the systemic erasure of urban and rural life.

Erasing the continuity of time and, consequently, shared history, ancestry, landmarks, and land practices, uproots the collective body and abruptly suspends it in an uncertain and unknown timeline.

You can think of Futuricide, the destruction of collective futures. It is the consequence of Chronocide: once a society loses its temporal continuity, it also loses its collective imagination for what could come next.

My inability to feel the passage of time and my lost access to future-building as a skill and feeling were echoed by many Lebanese people around me. Our collective body was under attack.

If our imagination is our capacity to inhabit the "not yet" or “what if”, then Futuricide is the systematic destruction of that capacity. It is not only the elimination of future opportunities but the erosion of the cognitive, emotional, and cultural conditions that allow a people to dream, plan, hope, and create.

So when April 29th came, and I packed my bags to go on an “Imagination” retreat that a friend was hosting in Algeria, I asked for divine guidance. I wanted to know if there was a way to move past this suspension, to return a sense of continuity to my body.

And the answer came to me in threes.

Read more

Safety, somehow, has become the holy grail of nervous system regulation work. The body as a “safe space” is a hymn sung and repeated by nervous system coaches. “Safe spaces” are marketed as havens, promising shelter from emotional triggers and harm.

But rarely do we get to dive a little deeper and ask:

What is safety? Whose safety? What kind of safety? And why safety?

Can safety even exist when we all live under systems that profit from making the world increasingly unstable, unpredictable, and unsafe? Systems that gamble with our lives, futures, and predetermine our choices and experience in the world for us?

What is safety?

What is safety under capitalism, colonialism, and patriarchy?

What is safety when the average person is estimated to be just one or two missed paychecks—or a single significant financial crisis—away from homelessness?1

What is safety when nearly 1 in 3 women globally, aged 15 or older, have experienced physical and/or sexual intimate partner violence or non-partner sexual violence in their lifetime?2

What is safety when projections suggest that climate change could displace between 200 million and over 1.2 billion people by 2050 due to sea-level rise, floods, droughts, and extreme weather?3

What is safety for communities that are being stripped of their humanity, land, self-determination, and livelihoods?4

When we examine safety, truly, we realize that it’s not a realistic outcome in a materially unsafe reality.

Chasing nervous system safety traps the chaser in a perpetual state of feeling defective, orienting towards an unpredictable and uncontrollable outcome. But that’s what makes selling and marketing safety so effective. Something unachievable is also something that is highly remarketable and resellable.

One of my biggest beefs with the Western Wellness industry is how safety keeps being presented as something that must be cultivated from within instead of something that must be dismantled from without.

Without engaging with why feelings of threat were seeded in the soma to begin with, the perspective remains narrow, and so do the healing protocols. Because if you dig a little deeper than the family system, the reasons are often systemic and endemic. And systems require collective solutions.

Whose safety?

The nervous system, by design, is meant to continuously keep track of safety cues, making safety one of the most somatically dynamic, unstable, and unpredictable experiences. Combine this with inherently unsafe systems that have a cast-based approach to who gets access to material safety, and you realize just how porous safety is.

Women and femme somas feel unsafe in the world due to misogyny, femicide, and patriarchy.

People who grew up with financial instability or with no access to generational wealth feel unsafe due to predatory capitalism.

BIPOC somas feel unsafe due to white supremacy and racism.

These feelings of threat are not only due to childhood conditioning or internalized “limiting” beliefs. They are also rooted in the possibility of future injury, in how vulnerable and exposed the soma is to potential systemic harm and transgression. And there is wisdom in that predictive intelligence, as it allows the soma to create very useful strategies to adapt to that potential harm.

So when working on restoring safety post-trauma, per se, the soma’s inability to fully let go of feelings of potential harm and threat is not an indication of the soma’s inability to harvest safety from within or to reorient itself towards safety. It is also a sign that the soma is in tune with the larger, unsafe reality that surrounds it. The coach’s, therapist’s, bodyworker’s, etc., inability to see it as such could be an indication of their failure to reckon with their privilege, and how it intersects with their own feelings of safety in the world.

“Safety is built from within” only works when the system has already deemed you worthy of safety, and your soma doesn’t have to rearrange itself to do the necessary systemic work from within because it has too little support from without.

What kind of safety?

Because decentering safety in healing spaces means having to examine the real root cause of why so many people feel unsafe in their bodies, because it means facing the fact that we’re all immensely exposed and vulnerable to a varying degree, many of us refuse to do it. Letting go of safety means letting go of control, and letting go of control means having to reorient towards something uncontrollable, something collective and expansive.

There is no long-lasting nervous system healing in a world that has deemed you, your communities, and your predecessors unworthy of safety. There is no real safety knowing that your humanity and rights can be stripped away from you at any given moment.

But there is something else. There is dignity and belonging.

Dignity is the embodied experience of one’s inherent worth. It’s a life safe from humiliation and exploitation, where a person can exist without having to prove their humanity in order to deserve care, respect, or belonging.

Belonging is the embodied experience of connection to people, land, spirit, and self. It’s a life rooted in support and care, safe from isolation, alienation, exile, and erasure.

In a world where our worth is attached to wealth and privilege, and care is a commodity, the path to safety is through reclaiming and reattaining access to dignity and belonging. Dignity and belonging are the very foundations of safety—a life rooted in inherent worth and care is a safe life, where adverse experiences are inevitable, but the path to recovery from harm is clear and guaranteed.

The reason we’re obsessed with safety is that we’re trying to control the inevitability of harm, knowing very well that if it happens, no one will show up for us. What we should really be focusing on is the inevitability of recovering from harm, and that requires systems thinking.

It requires building systems of care and dismantling systems of exploitation. It requires examining where our agency was taken from us and by whom, and working together to reclaim it.

Safety was never meant to be an emotional state. It’s a collective goal attained through consistent and communal labor. It only became what it is today because we are trying to solve a collective problem individually.

Safety is the embodied and devoted practice of building new systems that center dignity and belonging for everyone, not just certain individuals, so that when harm does occur and safety is breached, everyone has a place to return to so they can recover and rebuild their capacity to trust life again.

Some questions for healers and space holders:

What would nervous system work look like if we stopped centering individual safety and focused on belonging and dignity instead?

What would a somatic session look like if the aim was not only to orient the soma towards safety cues, but also towards cues that might feel and be unsafe first, but ultimately could shift reality towards a more dignified future?

If this article tickled or moved something in you, join my Zoom conversation on May 19th at 6:00 PM CET with Zeena Ismail—a somatic liberation practitioner and grassroots educator based in Amman, Jordan, and my dear friend, where we will be diving into the importance of decentering safety when working with non-Western clients.

This conversation will take place from a SWANA perspective. Non-SWANA participants are invited to decenter themselves and show up from a space of support and curiosity.

You can register here.

Dear reader, before you begin:

Material support is nervous system support. If this essay helps you in any way, I invite you to practice reciprocity by buying me coffee.

I also invite you to support forcibly displaced people in Lebanon through mutual aid.

In a world of paywalls, I am keeping this article free because I’m hoping it reaches as many people as possible.

With love and fire,

Tania

Intro: When the West Asian “Nobel Savage” Meets The “Western Witness”

No one loves the myth of a brave and honorable Indigenous person fighting for their land as much as colonizers do. The Indigenous person is glorified through movies, myth, and story; unyielding, otherworldly, courageous, and unmovable. There is almost something mystical about their ties to their ancestral land and their willingness to fight for it, which becomes their main differentiating feature from the colonizer.

The Indigenous person resists and sacrifices, while the colonizer back home observes—or more recently “bears witness”—awed and moved by their deep, unwavering faith. And yet, never truly or significantly interfering to change the narrative or outcome.

And it’s in that mystification, which requires distance, where the power asymmetry lives.

The indigenous person can only maintain their mystical status as long as there’s a safe space between them and the watcher. For once the line is blurred between the watcher and the watched; it becomes clear that there is nothing “mystical” about them.

They cease to become a source of spiritual and moral enlightenment for the watcher. They become flawed, vulnerable, and exhausted—a mirror for the colonizer’s complicity and inaction.

The watcher’s risk-free offerings of help—which today can be summarized as mutual aid, protests with permits, and social media reposts—are a calculated, albeit often unconscious, strategy. It gives them the right dose of moral indignation without them having to give up anything of real material substance to the oppressed Indigenous person.

And so the watcher watches the Indigenous person from the safety of their screen, banishing their pleas for direct political and revolutionary interference into the domain of cognitive dissonance.

One has to ask, who bears the real cost of “bearing witness”?

Subscribe now

The West Asian “Noble Savage”

The “Noble Savage” is a Western trope and myth1 that portrays Indigenous and non-industrialized peoples as inherently pure, morally superior, and closer to nature than “civilized” societies. It emerged during early European colonization and Enlightenment thought, often linked to Jean-Jacques Rousseau, reducing complex cultures to idealized symbols shaped by colonial perspectives.

The “Nobel Savage” is both, an object of awe and pity, idealized and condescended. As much as they are idealialized for their purity, Western perspectives also view them as tragic, doomed, or vulnerable victims of “progress”.

Since the beginning of the Gaza genocide, the world has been taken by storm by Palestinian steadfastness, faith, and attachment to their land. Often, border-lining on idealization. Moments of collective sacrifice, courage, suffering, and grief while Palestinians fight for liberation have been captured and immortalized as quotes, symbols, and tokens. Photographs of real people became idols; something to marvel at instead of someone to fight with and for.

West Asian and Palestinian Indigenous dances like dabke, dishes like makloube, and symbols associated with survival and resistance like the watermelon, have been extracted, capitalized on, and regurgitated to maintain a sense of closeness through distance; a noble and ideal “them” teaching and showing a less noble and ideal “us” how to navigate loss, grief, and hardship.

And although Palestinians and West Asians have instructed that same Western audience to focus on taking direct action and confronting their own governments, governments that are actively funding and supporting genocide2, occupation, and land theft, these are not the symbols and quotes that have penetrated mass consciousness.

This can also be seen in how the Western left idealizes and mysticizes West Asian armed resistance, while simultaneously keeping their own resistance at the level of intellectual discourse and reformed or conventional political action. Only a small radical minority—often criticized by the same intellectual left for their lack of “political vision”—end up engaging with direct action, offering an emotional outlet and catharsis to the rest of the group.

Subscribe now

The “Western Witness”

Across history, the act of bearing witness has carried profound social, moral, and political weight. While its formalization as a term is difficult to trace, its essence is deeply rooted in theological and spiritual traditions.

In Christianity, figures like Mary Magdalene3 stand as key witnesses to the crucifixion and resurrection of Jesus Christ. In Shi’a Islam, Sayyida Zaynab (sa)4 plays a similarly pivotal role in preserving and testifying to the events of the Battle of Karbala5 following the death of Husayn ibn Ali . In both traditions, witnessing is not passive observation but an active moral duty: to remember, to narrate, and to resist against the erasure of the great injustice that was witnessed.

This moral dimension of witnessing extends into modern secular history, where it becomes intertwined with systems of justice and the duty of collective memory keeping. The atrocities of World War II, with particular focus on the Holocaust that targeted Jews, Roma and Sinti, disabled people, and queer communities, foregrounded the critical role of witness testimony and collective memory in the West.

Survivor accounts, alongside documentary and material evidence, were pivotal in prosecuting Nazi officials during the Nuremberg Trials6. In the aftermath, the phrase “Never Again” emerged as a moral imperative, reflecting the aspiration of the West to prevent the recurrence of such atrocities.

These moments, stories, and symbols suggest that bearing witness operates across time and beliefs as both a moral and political act: one that observes and preserves truth to confront injustice, seeking to transform witnessing into accountability.

Today, the term “bearing witness” has become inseparable from the ongoing genocide in Gaza, which has since escalated into Lebanon and Iran. This sentiment of moral duty to “bear witness” can be summarized by viral phrases like “All Eyes On”. With “All Eyes on Rafah” being shared over 47 million times on Instagram as of May 30, 2024, becoming one of the most viral images in the platform’s history7.

The Price Of Bearing Witness In West Asia

In Arabic, “bearing witness” holds a very different weight. “Shahid” or a “martyr” comes from the root “shahed” which translates directly into witness8. A “shahid” is someone who died bearing witness to a great injustice, becoming an eternal witness.

To be a West Asian witness is to bear witness to genocide and the ethnic cleansing of your land with your own body, with your own life. Sometimes having no other choice but to save your testimony for a benevolent and just God.

Since the beginning of the genocide, West Asian Palestinian and Lebanese journalists have been systemically targetedby Israe9 due to the significance of their role in witnessing and documenting war crimes. This punishment is two-fold: for witnessing and documenting the truth, and for embodying it into action by sharing the truth with the world. Bearing witness in West Asia comes at a high cost, it is inseparable from risk and sacrifice.

To be a “Western Witness” is to bear witness with your mind without the necessity or urgency of involving your body, and to have the choice to opt out of that role at any given moment without having to pay a hefty price.

The “Western Witness” suffers mentally and emotionally, their suffering induced by their own sense of powerlessness. But they have no actual skin in the game, and their sense of suffering gets exacerbated by their inability to embody it into action. The emotional suffering is real, but unlike Palestinian or Lebanese suffering, it is not material.

Unless the “Western Witness” turns their suffering into political disobedience to dismantle the systems that oppress West Asians, they get to keep their comfort, privilege, safety, and life. At least, for now.

This emotional suffering, trapped in a body that doesn’t know what to do with it, becomes cognitive dissonance. It fuels feelings of shame and guilt, but rarely gets transmuted into anything materially useful to the West Asian “Noble Savage”, who is tied to their mystical land and “willing” to become a “shahid” to protect it.

Subscribe now

The Bystander Effect Rebranded as Bearing Witness

The term interpassivity10 was first coined by Robert Pfaller in 1996 and later employed by Slavoj Žižek to refer to cultural phenomena in which one can delegate one's own passivity, enjoyment, or consumption to an external agent. From a somatic perspective, this can also be categorized as a form of disembodiment, where one can engage their mind to create the illusion of engagement without involving their body in the matter.

In a world governed by visual and social media, the West Asian “Nobel Savage ” has become the “Western Witness’s” redemption arc. The “Western Witness” gets to experience suffering and sacrifice interpassively through them without having to make any sacrifices or concessions themselves. They cry, they feel, and then they roll over and put their phone away to return to their own lives.

I’ve heard multiple “Western Witnesses” refer to bearing witness to the Gaza Genocide as “life-changing”, emphasizing how watching Palestinians navigate suffering and hardship has made them better people. But what has this personal growth arc offered the Palestinians in return? Did their lives materially change through the presence of the “Western Witness’s” gaze?

Bearing witness, in its theological, spiritual, and historical essence, was never meant to be a passive act of visual consumption and mental archiving. Its importance lies in the witness’s ability to embody the unbearable pain of injustice into action—into risk and sacrifice. Doing everything in their power to either stop the injustice or make sure it never happens again.

Most of what is currently being called witness-bearing in the West is a compulsive repetition of the Bystander Effect11; watching horror unfold while waiting for someone else to actually interfere and take action.

Without sacrifice and risk, this ritual of witnessing ongoing and escalating atrocities leads to the internalization of powerlessness and helplessness, allowing Moral Injury12 to take root in the body until watching becomes unbearable, and opting out altogether becomes reasonable and justifiable.

Subscribe now

On Embodying Sacrifice — A Somatic Guide

Religious beliefs aside, let’s deconstruct the moral of these stories.

Witnesses of the crucifixion and resurrection of Christ were instructed to carry the message forward, to do something, to live by certain values. And as a result, early Christians were persecuted and brutally punished by the Romans for going against Roman values and introducing a new and “radical” view of the world.

Witnesses to the battle of Karbala were instructed to live a life of perpetual sacrifice and resistance in the face of injustice—to choose death over humiliation. Humiliation being a life lived under unjust and tyrannical rule. The collective Shia psyche has been shaped by this moral duty, as to stand idle in the face of injustice is to go against one’s own nature and identity.

The secular battle cry of “Never Again” was meant to justify doing whatever it takes to prevent mass atrocities and genocide anywhere. And although the phrase itself is devoid of action, it does imply it. For something to never happen again, it must first be actively prevented.

These are calls to embody sacrifice—to give up something of substance in the fight against injustice. Bearing witness means carrying the weight of what you’ve witnessed, not with the mind, but with the body. We can even see this in the English etymology of the phrase:

“Bear” — to carry, endure, bring forth.

“Wit-ness” — to embody knowing and understanding.

Bearing something without forward motion traps the energy necessary for cathartic and material change in the bearer. It turns that vital creative energy into dis-ease and stagnation.

Think of “bearing a child,” for example, or bearing life in general—bearing means bringing something forward after holding it. There is a reason why we associate motherhood with the ultimate sacrifice; that primordial act of bearing and birthing is the root system that holds all life in place.

The cure for the Western Witness’s “mental ills”, for their spiritual torture and deep-seated guilt due to what they’ve witnessed, is sacrifice. There is no other way. That is the necessary alchemy for witness-bearing to exit the realm of thought and enter the realm of material reality.

Sacrifice that hurts. That’s irreversible. That gives more than what is safe. That changes the witness’s life materially.

Subscribe now

You will know the lines have been blurred when you are no longer bearing witness to injustice, but are actually living it. And you will know that you are sacrificing when you are giving away something of great importance to you without knowing if you will ever get anything in return.

This clashes fundamentally with Western culture and patriarchal values, designed around preserving, hoarding, and benefiting the individual self.

The “Western Wintness’s” growth arc is not witnessing how and what the West Asian “Nobel Savage” sacrifices in their fight for liberation, but in embodying that sacrifice in their own life.

Luckily for us, cultures shift, move, and change with time. Even what we know as Western culture today was invented to serve a systemic purpose, and a new identity can be created from its ashes to build new systems.

Consider this essay a seed. It is not a call to look away, to stop bearing witness altogether; it is an invitation to step out of interpassivity and disembodiment, and into embodied action. To balance the watching with doing.

Sacrifice is vital to bearing witness, to holding it until it’s time to move the energy forward; they need each other. Without it, what was witnessed loses its momentum and vitality and turns into a perpetual “loop of death”.

The next time you bear witness from the comfort of your home, and start feeling the stabbing pain of injustice in your chest and the powerlessness that comes with it, I invite you to pause, sit with this birthing pain, breathe with it, and ask yourself:

“What am I unwilling to sacrifice to bring this forward?”

Or

“How can I birth this deep sense of powerlessness into power?”

And then I invite you to note down that sacrifice and start working towards it instead of wallowing in your powerlessness and pain, and entering a death loop. For those who are truly hurting, those who are sacrificing everything and are afforded and promised nothing, can no longer afford you not to.

We have enough West Asian martyrs and idols to carry us through the century; it’s time to preserve West Asian life as life, and not as death turned into immortal symbols for the next generations to learn about.

This newsletter is a space of decolonization and regeneration, a space of undoing while learning how to do things differently. But to undo something, you need focus, energy, and resources, the very things colonialism steals from you to build its own vision of the world. Or perhaps nightmare would be a more fitting word here.

When I make care guides for my community, or for the people who care for my people, it is the deepest form of using embodied expertise. This is not the realm of citations or sources, although they can co-exist. This is the realm of somatic excavation—communing with the nooks and crannies of my body and digging into its somatic archives for answers.

Yes, I can add citations. Yes, all of this can be evidence-based. But the evidence we need is before our eyes, the steadfastness of indigenous people in the face of incomprehensible violence and dehumanization. My people are my teachers, their words adorn my altar, and their courageous actions are my creed.

But I digress.

This guide was created with one main thought at its center: care for the caregivers, for those who can’t relate to “self-care” as a path for replenishment. It reframes self-care as life-care; a duty, nay, a care ritual, to maintain whatever life continues to exist when desecration and erasure become the rule.

Care in times of crisis

The primary focus of this care guide is the soma in crisis and the somatic states associated with it: dissociation, grief, (repressed) anger, anxiety, and panic.

While somatically excavating my own experiences with war and displacement, these are the factors I considered:

• Lack of privacy and space

• Lack of energy and resources

• No cultural references to self-care

• No prior experience with somatics

• No container for catharsis or full embodiment (somatic opening, awareness, integration)

In most cases, there will be no somatic or therapeutic guide with nervous system capacity to hold the space for the reader. These resources might be skimmed on a phone in a tent that is being shared with family members. Or it might be screenshot and left sitting idle, until a crisis hits and shaky, sweaty hands scroll hastily to find it.

These are the things I excavated from when I was fifteen and displaced:

• Bathrooms and the roof of the house we were renting were my only private spaces

• Space was tight; we shared mattresses on the living room floor with my entire family, while the extended family shared the remaining spaces

• The constant feeling of being the other after being transported into an ecosystem that’s not mine, and where I have no community or friends

• Regret became my main coping mechanism. I kept thinking of all the things I couldn’t bring with me and all the things I took for granted

• Sneaking around to smoke cigarettes was my main form of regulation (breathwork wasn’t a thing then)

• Music helped more than anything. I was lucky enough to bring my CD player with me

• The crushing anxiety of not knowing anything. Will the war end? When will it end? How will it end? What will I find back home when it does?

These memories became my guides as I picked micro exercises and movements that displaced people could pick up. And of course, anyone could pick them up, including the diaspora. As space and distance from immediate danger make them even more approachable.

The main thing to consider here is this: life-care is simple.

Think of watering the plants, feeding, or bathing. These are not revolutionary acts; these are things we’ve always done for survival and continuity. And I refuse “survival” being used as a derogatory word. I’m proud of descending from a line of survivors; it is in those parts of my soma where my ancestors live and where I meet with them.

How to use the guide

The guide is available on Notion. Anyone is welcome to use and share it.

Anyone with an understanding of somatics, embodiment, and (mental) health care is welcome to contribute to it.

My only ask is this: if you are still in a position of privilege and safety, consider donating to those who are most affected by Western-backed colonial violence: the forcibly displaced and unhoused. You can do this here.

My heart goes out to everyone who, like me, is on the outside, doesn’t know what the future holds for their home, and is sick with worry over their loved ones.

And my guide goes out to everyone who is protected by any form of privilege, and is still withholding care because they think their “discomfort” is more important than our shared humanity.

Share this with the silent people in your networks, and remind them that care is a basic human decency. You don’t have to educate them; you don’t have to say anything. This guide will do it for you.

With care and fire.

Read this if you’re still protected by some form of privilege

This is a care guide for people who are still protected by some form of privilege, and who have immigrant and diasporic friends, partners, colleagues, employees, neighbors, etc., who are caught off from their home and support systems, and who are forced to navigate normality while being torn apart on the inside.

Experiencing war and disaster while in the diaspora is isolating, distressful, and harrowing. Watching horror unfold back home while people around you cower, fall into silence, or use you as their personal educational resource instead of extending actual care is also traumatic—it reinforces the idea that you are not worthy of safety, that you are a care provider but not a care receiver.

Care is deeply political. We know this because care can also be commodified by systems, weaponized by people, and withdrawn as a form of political punishment.

The inability of the majority of the Global North to (emotionally) care for their immigrant class is also political. The extractive systems that create this class also depend on their constant dehumanization. The absence or the lack of care for this class is not only part of that dehumanization process, but it’s also the embodiment of these systems in the form of values and norms, which trickle down to social behavior.

If you are (still) protected by borders, papers, circumstances, and systems, withholding your care from those who don’t have your privilege is a form of violence. You can end this violent cycle by stepping into care.

And as you do, use this care guide of six do’s and don’ts to make sure you don’t cause more harm to someone who’s already hurting.

The Six Do’s and Don’t of Care

1. Don’t: Ask why their family, friends, and loved ones are not leaving the country, or if they’re planning to leave.

By asking this, you are projecting your own privilege (socio-economic, political, etc.). Not everyone has the privilege of moving across borders or starting a new life.

You are also projecting your Western norms of self-preservation over the collective values of many cultures that view steadfastness as part of resistance. Especially if this is related to land-theft, people’s decision to remain steadfast is part of their identity and connection to their land.

Do: Ask what you can do to help them support their loved ones.

Listen and then offer help where you can using your networks, resources, and privileges. Do not assume what that help looks like based on your own lived experience, and refrain from projecting what you would’ve done under the same circumstances. This is also an exercise in humbleness and cultural exchange.

2. Don’t: Turn the interaction into a political debate or expect them to be “rational”.

For you, this is politics; things you read at your own pace on your own time. For them, this is their life. This is their body, nervous system, family, heritage, land, fate… You cannot expect someone who’s in deep distress to abandon their emotional experience to provide you with an intellectually stimulating experience.

That is coloniality in action; a form of erasing someone’s reality to avoid claiming responsibility and facing privilege.

Do: Decenter yourself and your worldviews. If your culture has socialized you to view “rationality” as the highest form of relating, then take this as an opportunity to learn how other cultures relate.

Do not force your reality on others; instead, allow their reality to challenge yours. Allow their experience to shed light on your privilege.

3. Don’t: Focus on the silver lining, or say things like “It’s good that you’re here”.

Whether it’s toxic positivity, a way to fill uncomfortable silence, or your own inability to make sense of the situation, when someone is in shock, grief, or distress—and is possibly experiencing survivor’s guilt—the worst thing you can do is tell them to focus on the positives or tell them how grateful they must be for having something their loved ones don’t.

You are once again projecting your individualistic conditioning that prioritizes self-preservation over belonging and collective experiences.

Do: Make space for their reality.

This means listening without interrupting, not offering solutions while the person is trying to express themselves, and remaining uncomfortable by feeling powerless in the face of their grief and distress. This is not about you; you can process your own feelings in a different setting.

Your emotional powerlessness is also part of locating your own responsibility outside the relationship; the areas where you do have power and influence.

4. Don’t: Ask them to do your homework for you.

Gouging someone who’s going through emotional distress for political information is selfish. People from political violence and disaster-affected areas do not owe you information, explanations, or education. But as a fellow human being, you do owe them care, compassion, and empathy.

There is already a power dynamic at play between you; assuming that they owe you free labor in the form of political education is part of perpetuating that dynamic.

Do: Educate yourself on the matter, but don’t let it stand in the way of care.

There are infinite resources, and a lot of them are free. If you’re not sure where or how to start, ask someone who is not directly affected, and whose very limited cognitive and emotional resources (due to stress) you’re not depleting.

Your care shouldn’t depend on how much you understand the matter at hand, or how well-informed on politics you are—care is not rational, it’s relational.

5. Don’t: Prioritize your discomfort over their distress.

Yes, it’s uncomfortable to check in on someone who’s going through something you can’t even imagine. But your emotional discomfort is not the same as their emotional and psychological stress.

Silence and avoidance are you prioritizing your discomfort due to privilege. It’s a loud proclamation that you have nothing to lose and everything to gain by not engaging.

Do: Reach out, check in, offer help, and ask what they need.

Especially if you are part of the local population, it is your duty to check on people who do not have your safety nets, security, and social resources. Hoarding safety, security, and resources by not offering to extend them in the form of personal and relational care is also colonial violence.

6. Don’t: Assume their needs by excluding them from the decision-making process.

If this is someone who’s from a different culture, care might mean something else entirely for them. Some cultures view food as care, others physical touch, and others acts of service.

If your culture practices care by giving someone space and staying out of their business while they grieve, for a different culture, this might be the epitome of carelessness.

Do: Ask them how you can take care of them.

People will often tell you what they need. Sometimes it’s something as simple as helping them with practicalities, sometimes it’s the question itself. People’s cognitive abilities suffer greatly under stress. Sometimes care is helping someone do their taxes or open their mail.

Care is deeply personal and cultural, and there’s a lot of shame wrapped into asking for help. Initiating a conversation and getting curious about someone’s needs is also a form of care.

If care is political, then choosing not to care for someone or about something is also political.

We all know (knew?) how to take care of each other, we would not have survived this long if we didn’t. So somewhere deep in your body lives the memory of that care, and a muscle that will only get stronger the more you use it.

But no matter how you do it, how you show your care, the most important thing is that you do. Because each time you choose to prioritize your emotional comfort over care, you are loudly declaring that you are entitled to comfort. And each time you choose to withhold care, you are perpetuating a violent system that thrives on emotional neglect and unequal (emotional) labor exchange.

“You can also do injustice by doing nothing.” — Marcus Aurelius

Have you ever truly asked yourself, “What’s love”?

Love is the gaping wound on a heart that tore itself open to receive life. All of life.

It’s an ache so deep that you cannot bear the sight of lovelessness anywhere because the pain brings you to your knees.

And what is the absence of love if not injustice? What is the absence of love if not cruelty and greed? They say the opposite of love is fear, but between the two is an entire road avoided by cowards.

Fear is not the opposite of love; it’s where you end up when you’re too afraid to ask for directions.

They made us focus on a love that keeps us caged under the patriarchy’s roof when there’s an entire world to fall in love with. Loveless and detached, we obsess. We fantasize about specters; our mind sucking on our thumb to nurse us through the agony of hunger.

Stories of limerence and lust are not stories of love; they are stories of a love that was taken from us when we most needed it—when we were children, and the village that was promised to us was too busy clocking in and out of some capitalist’s factory.

I want you to stop falling in love with ghosts and start falling back in love with the idea of the village. And then, I want you to stop falling in love with the idea and to start falling in love with the commitment of building it.

Abandon the shallow declarations of love when there’s an entire to-do list to go through before love even dares to make an appearance. When there are fences to tear down, fields to plow, and seeds to sow, before love can rise into the open blue sky without the fear of being cut at the root and put on display.

They took love away and sold it back to us with a hefty price tag. Each year, they take some more and hike up the price.

I urge you to leave the supermarket aisles and go plant flowers in your community garden.

Next year, when your patience blooms, we can sit around your harvest and start talking about love.

I’m in an apartment, it’s safe and quiet. But from the enclosure of this “safe space,” I can hear the hum of an Israeli surveillance drone—a slow, steady, and continuous tension. The kind of sound that is uncomfortable even when you don’t know its source or meaning. But I know its meaning. It means that my personal and collective boundaries are being crossed. It means I’m being watched. It means the data on my phone is being harvested. It means that the safety and dignity of my people and land are not respected. And this activates my nervous system.

I want to fight, but the opponent is invisible. Concealed and protected by distance, height, and international law that is as useless as it is meaningless.

The discomfort becomes increasingly unbearable. I can, of course, dissociate. Scroll on my phone, or put on my earphones. But I don’t want this experience to take root in me, to live in my soma as poison and sediment. So after an hour or so of paralysis, I get up, go to the bedroom, and start pounding my fists against the mattress. And as I do this, after a couple of repetitions and breaks, I remember “The Window of Tolerance”.

I remember each time I felt like a failure because I couldn’t “regulate” my nervous system in the safe and quiet Netherlands. How in the back of my mind, I just couldn’t turn off this deep somatic knowing that it’s not that I’m unable to tolerate stress, it’s that I’ve tolerated too much stress. Stress that my therapists couldn't understand or relate to, so they didn’t know why their tools weren’t working.

This is the somatic origins of the Window of Choice, whose seeds were planted earlier that same month. But more on that later.

Subscribe now

Rethinking the Window of Tolerance

The Window of Tolerance (WoT)1 theory is attributed to psychiatrist and Harvard graduate Dan J. Siegel. The term and the frameworks attached to it have become something of a holy grail in trauma-informed practice. It is used to describe the range of nervous system activation within which we can function, feel, think, and relate to others with relative steadiness and balance.

According to the model, once we move outside our WoT—our optimal zone of performance—we enter states of hyperarousal (fight/flight) or hypoarousal (freeze/fawn/dissociation). These activated nervous system states are more aligned with survival and action than with rest and connection.

For a long time, both the name and the framework felt neutral to me. They offer a visual metaphor, map nervous system states, and give coaches like me, clinicians, and educators a shared language. They also invite empathy by framing emotional “dysregulation” as a complex process rather than a character flaw.

But when I began examining the WoT through a collective trauma and liberation lens, cracks started to appear. Not because it doesn’t work for individuals, but precisely because it does—it works for individuals. Certain individuals, to be precise.

On the limitations of Western therapeutic knowledge systems

Dan J. Siegel’s nervous system work orbits larger frameworks within Western psychological knowledge systems—systems that attribute much of our psychological shaping to childhood attachment and trauma, and that prioritize personal growth and self-actualization over collective meaning and purpose2.

Within this paradigm, emotional regulation work is largely done in service of self-improvement, and its primary tool is self-regulation: the process of building somatic safety through and with one’s own nervous system.

Yes, depending on the therapist’s lineage and training, it does leave room for co-regulation. And yes, this work does improve relating and relationships. But that is not its primary aim—it is a secondary outcome. And due to the context in which this work was developed, the relationships in question rarely extend beyond the nuclear family, or even beyond the human relational field.

This emphasis aligns well with Western cultures, where people are shaped more by their nuclear family than by collective or spiritual experiences, and where self-preservation and personal development sit at the epicenter of human life.

But what about other people and cultures?

What happens when a person’s worldview does not center on personal development? What if their well-being cannot be separated from the well-being of their people? And what if their relational field extends beyond the nuclear family—or even beyond the human relational field?

The WoT also assumes that certain conditions are met before the work can begin—conditions disproportionately available to people from specific socio-economic and racial backgrounds, often protected by geographical and political stability.

One of these conditions is the absence of life-threatening stressors, which allows a person to safely practice expanding their window within a predictable container, while learning how to tolerate “daily stressors”. This requires political stability and environments where basic needs are met and human dignity is protected.

In trauma discourse, the work often centers (C)PTSD—Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder—while failing to include those living in ongoing traumatic conditions, or for whom expanding the WoT is neither safe nor logical.

Finally, Western psychiatry has a long history of diagnosing, controlling, and pathologizing somas deemed “other.”3 Its frameworks and nomenclatures are entangled with Western values, dominant knowledge systems, and supremacist ideology. Introducing a politically charged word like tolerance into nervous system regulation—without cultural or political context—opens the door to bias, misdiagnosis, policing, and harm.

Tolerance takes on an entirely different meaning when the nervous system belongs to people with a history of oppression.

Subscribe now

The problem with “tolerance”

Tolerance is one of the moral virtues historically demanded of the colonized, marginalized, and oppressed long before it entered therapeutic language. It functions as a mechanism through which resistance, disagreement, or refusal is reframed as incivility, shifting the responsibility for ending conflict onto those subjected to harm.4

And as Paulo Freire notes in Pedagogy of the Oppressed5, systems of domination persist by teaching the oppressed to internalize endurance as virtue and rebellion as moral failure.

Within the self-regulatory framework of the WoT, which was created without any political analysis, tolerance becomes a pedagogical tool: a demand to adapt to harm and remain functional rather than to dismantle it and risk “dysfunction.”

Somatically, tolerance implies discipline and control. When applied to emotional regulation, it suggests that the goal is to withstand internal experiences rather than respond to external conditions, which could also include harm. It frames interoceptive endurance as more valuable than embodiment or expression, and trains the soma to prioritize going inwards to re-establish a sense of safety.

This framing leaves little room for the necessary messiness of social and environmental justice work—the emotional discomfort, upheaval, grief, fear, and unrest that arise from joining collective liberation and resistance movements.

Social justice complicates emotional regulation. Grief may pull us into hypoarousal; sacred rage may propel us into hyperarousal. While this may appear counterproductive to individual well-being, it makes sense within a collective trauma and liberation framework, where self-preservation is not the central value.

Collective trauma is not healed by expanding a people’s capacity to tolerate stress—especially when that stress is inflicted by an oppressor. It is healed through collective meaning-making, expression, connection, and choice—even when that choice involves sacrificing personal comfort in pursuit of dignity, sovereignty, and liberation.

A nervous system shaped by chronic harm is not seeking more endurance; it is seeking completion, safety, and agency, often only accessible by making risky and destabilizing “dysregulatory” choices.

Furthermore, for historically oppressed people, framing regulation through tolerance can be re-traumatizing. It reinforces the idea that both problem and solution lie within the individual soma, absolving harmful systems of responsibility.

But survival strategies and adaptations of the nervous system are not pathology. The pathology lies in systems and people who remain content—or conveniently oblivious—while benefiting from pushing entire populations and ecosystems to the brink of survival, erasure, and extinction.

Subscribe now

Compliance as emotional regulation

One of the most concerning consequences of normalizing the WoT without political critique is how easily it becomes a moral instruction. In the hands of an “apolitical” practitioner, “Expand your Window of Tolerance” can quietly become “Learn to tolerate harm.”

In abusive relationships, workplaces, institutions, and even therapeutic settings, people are still encouraged to regulate themselves rather than confront or change harmful conditions, and sometimes even praised for remaining “in control” in dynamics that violate their boundaries.

When authority rewards compliance and punishes resistance, submission is reframed as cooperation rather than coercion.6

Tolerance can make compliance look like resilience, and harm endurance look like virtue. This is especially common among populations conditioned to suppress power to access “safety.”

For example, traits culturally and traditionally associated with femininity, such as submissive, cooperative, modest, and passive, echo freeze or fawn responses.7

A nervous system that does not protest may appear “healthy,” but it is not necessarily sovereign or embodied. Freeze, fawn, dissociation, and learned helplessness can easily masquerade as regulation until they start to interfere with other avenues of well-being and health, or start manifesting into debilitating symptoms like chronic fatigue or depression.

When tolerance becomes synonymous with nervous system health, systemic harm remains untouched. As long as you function and are productive, why disrupt the status quo?

Subscribe now

The Window of Choice—trauma, agency, and repair

Back in December, right before my trip home, as I added the WoT framework out of habit to a decolonized nervous system workshop, something already felt off.

Tolerance: What exactly am I inviting people to tolerate?

As a politicized somatic coach, centering tolerance felt irresponsible, knowing that we inhabit systems that depend on our endurance rather than our pushback or refusal.

Choice is about agency. It is about awareness, orientation, and movement. To choose is to invite something into our relational field—to expand our intimacy with life.

In traumatic experiences, choice is often what is taken from us. This loss of agency contracts the soma, narrowing its available responses. Under stress, our muscles tighten, our breath shortens, our vision narrows, and our attention orients toward threat. From this contracted space, integrated and embodied choice becomes limited. The soma steps in and chooses survival before cognition can even intervene.

Survival adaptations (flight, fight, freeze, fawn, dissociate) are somatic choices. Choices that precede thought. We have associated choice with thinking processes, but so much choice takes place in our soma before we can even assign meaning to it.

When we experience trauma, narrative comes later, sometimes much, much later. Often, bringing shame or self-blame to the table causes more disembodiment. We lose trust in the soma’s wisdom and ability to take care of us. Not knowing that it’s always oriented towards safety, belonging, and dignity, while trying to preserve and safeguard life. 8

Repair begins when we return to the soma and ask: Why did you choose that? What were you trying to protect me from?

These questions are our first steps towards repair and integration. The answers are often essential for healing, as they allow the soma to explain and reveal itself to us—to speak up as our protector and caretaker.

This is bottom-up processing: the body leads, the mind follows, and the nervous system reharmonizes as the soma repairs and rearranges itself.

Nervous system healing is also about restoring trust in the body’s capacity and wisdom to choose healing. Reclaiming choice restores agency, invites expansion and curiosity, and propels our movement toward somatic safety.

We are always choosing from a deep well of somatic wisdom, even before meaning arrives. But when we learn how to actively step into our WoC, more becomes available to us. And the more we engage with choice from that space of conscious contact, the more somatic choices open up to us, including somatic expression—the range of choices available to us to fully express ourselves.

Subscribe now

The 4C’s: Stepping into the Window of Choice

Read more

Those of us who struggle with chronic activation, operating from a narrow window of tolerance, which affects our health, relationships, and choices, did not choose to exist in this state. The choice was made for us.

Maybe we grew up in environments that demanded our nervous systems operate at full capacity, often from a young age.

Maybe our bodies are built differently, epigenetically wired to be more high-strung or more docile.

Or maybe we experienced something traumatic that put our nervous systems into override, ensuring we stay vigilant to prevent the traumatic event from happening again.

Whatever it was, we had little to no agency or choice in how our nervous systems were shaped. And because chronic dysregulation creates a state of overwhelm and reactivity, further reducing our choices and bandwidth, our somas shape themselves around chronic hopelessness, helplessness, and shame.

Our personalities then develop around a wound we did not inflict, but one we add salt to every time we interact with life, and can’t show up in a life-affirming way. Healing begins when we start to understand that to heal the wound, we must first release the shame around being wounded.

Subscribe now

The chronically dysregulated

When I burned out from chronic and prolonged nervous system activation, the people in charge of my well-being, i.e. Western physicians and psychologists, didn’t understand the nature or roots of my “pathology.” They advised deep rest. They told me to slow down, take things easy, and try living day by day.

But I couldn’t.

I had survived by constantly being on the go—by strategizing, planning, and assuming the worst.

Asking a chronically activated soma to “sit with its feelings” is like asking a house on fire to stop itself from burning. It is not realistic. Nor is it kind. It can add to the existing internal state of hopelessness, helplessness, and shame.

As the days went by and I tried to rest, my shame deepened. Why can’t I just calm down?

When I look back at my life, my strategy of hyperactivity and hypervigilance has been incredibly useful. Being overly prepared, in a world that was not built for a woman from the global majority with no generational wealth and one of the weakest passports in the world, has granted me access to geographies and spaces that weren’t meant for me.

Asking myself to calm down was also asking myself to give up a strategy that had kept me safe my entire life.

This professional advice was also unfolding against the backdrop of genocide, war, and my family’s displacement from South Lebanon. My diasporic life became entangled with their daily life under bombardment and uncertainty in Beirut.

My collective somatic field was under attack. My system was flooded with adrenaline and cortisol. I was fully mobilized, with no ability to release or fully integrate the pent-up energy. This showed up as fatigue, insomnia, and muscle tension. I felt completely alone.

The historically dysregulated

Asking a chronically activated soma, whose ancestors and kin have survived, and continue to survive, by being chronically activated, to operate differently without acknowledging the wisdom of that shaping is erasure.

It’s a form of colonial violence.

Chronic nervous system activation is historical, epigenetic, cultural, and political. It does not exist only in the realm of the individual body, and it is shaped by something much larger than just our family systems.

Yet no practitioner I worked with was able to look beyond my biological parents, often attributing my resistance to an inability to accept my parents’ failure to fully show up for me.

Meanwhile, what I was voicing was my non-Western lived experience and understanding of the world, and my ability to see and experience my shaping beyond the nuclear family.

Subscribe now

My parents were also shaped by forces outside of their control. Their inability to help me regulate my emotions does not exist in a contextual vacuum either. Their own chronic dysregulation has kept them safe, and in a way has provided me with survival strategies that have proven to be necessary—no matter how uncomfortable, unpleasant, or unsustainable.

My deeper healing began when I accepted that my Western therapist’s hyper-fixation on my “resistance to healing” was their own projection.

They were refusing to take responsibility for a system that keeps them and their families safe, while actively endangering my loved ones and me. They were also refusing to acknowledge the limitations of their tools, frameworks, and knowledge systems.

Therapists who do not invite the history and ancestry of the chronically activated into their healing spaces cannot truly call themselves healers. They are mechanics, keeping the soma functional enough to get back on the road of systemic dysfunction.

Individual solutions for collective problems

Western healing methodologies are built around the individual. And whatever is borrowed from Eastern and Southern cosmologies around the topic of collectivism—concepts like oneness and non-duality—is used to justify dissociating from a complex reality by framing it as a pure and altered state of cosmic belonging.

But “belonging” is a verb. Experientially, it behaves like one too. It’s not a fixed state we arrive to by the power and will of our own minds. Belonging is something we practice through presence, participation, and vulnerability. Belonging is not granted once and for all but needs to be continuously enacted—it’s something we do, renegotiate, and practice, moment by moment.

It’s not pure or holy; it’s dirty and carnal. It invites us to get our hands soiled with human relating; with grief, heartbreak, rupture, repair, and responsibility.

To achieve an actual and integrated sense of oneness with humanity, one must learn to allow humanity into their soma. Breaking their own hearts in the process to offer it as a home for the joys and sorrows of the world.

For the chronically activated, those who have been cast out by Western therapy for being “too resistant” and incurable, the cure lies in being dirtied by the mud of relating: to be seen, held, touched, and accepted by others who are just like them.

Sometimes we are not ready to hold ourselves. Sometimes we need a larger container; something or someone who can hold us.

Subscribe now

For me, this looked like chanting at protests, allowing the larger container of bodies to hold my anger and grief.

It also looked like pouring my heart out on stage at open mics, where my grief poems could be received by a receptive audience. And when I was at the end of my rope with worry over my family, dedicating myself to community work and mutual aid provided me with the necessary cure: a sense of belonging to something larger than myself.

My nervous system needed to learn that it didn’t have to solve all my problems on its own, and that it didn’t have to be “regulated” before I could show up in the world. I didn’t need to rest, I needed to connect—to belong. Icould show up undone and still be with others. I could allow myself to be held, or to hold others, before I was ready to hold myself.

Collective wounds need collective cures

Many of us, especially those from marginalized and historically oppressed backgrounds, are waking up to our full worth, dignity, and potential. What we need are space holders, healers, and collective spaces that understand our shaping. Those who can hold us where we are not yet able to hold ourselves.

Healing starts by acknowledging what is, befriending, tending, and allowing it to exist. Healing is not possible. It is also essential.

A chronically activated soma operates from a window only large enough for survival. Through no fault of its own, it does not yet have room for creative choice or the emotionally demanding work of a new embodiment.

Consider this: maybe there is nothing wrong with you.

Maybe you have simply outgrown your individual and collective nervous system shaping, and you are yearning for a new shape, one that allows you to take risks and make bigger life changes.

Consider this: you are not alone.

Many others just like you are yearning for that same expansion. And what a single nervous system cannot yet hold, a group gathered for the collective purpose of healing and liberation can.

🐚 Did this article speak to you? Join my Nervous System Recalibration Workshop on December 22nd at 5.00 PM CET. More information here.🐚

We don’t have an exact equivalent in Arabic. When speaking of a traumatic injury, physical or psychological, we use the word “sadma” صَدْمَہ. But if you remove the context, “sadma” means “shock”, something sudden that catches you off guard and leaves a strong emotional imprint.

When I think about my trauma, and the collective trauma of my people (Lebanese, Palestinian, Syrian), “sadma” doesn’t sit right with me.

Our collective wounding is not a shock, although sometimes it can be; it’s a slow, ongoing, and deliberate erosion—a persistent chipping away at our humanity that makes existing on our lands, or away from them, heart-shattering and nerve-racking.

Trauma doesn’t do the job either. It’s a word inherited from Greek and originally used for physical wounds, especially those sustained on the battlefield. It does not hold the weight of the horrors endured by the colonised at the hands of their colonisers.

Trauma, in the Western therapeutic lexicon, once diagnosed, becomes PTSD or cPTSD. “Post Traumatic Stress Disorder” insinuates that:

1. The source of the traumatic stress lives in the past.

2. The emerging symptoms are disorderly.

But what if the traumatic stress is continuous? What if collective trauma is not the real pathology but the behaviour of the group inflicting it?

The same group responsible for our collective trauma is also tasked with labelling, diagnosing, and creating treatment plans for it. As colonised peoples, or people with a history of Western colonisation, can we truly trust that Western therapists have our best interests in mind?

And what role do we play in freeing ourselves from the Western clinical therapeutic chokehold as we work towards our collective liberation?

To begin answering these questions, we must look at those who have survived the wound and lived long enough to tell their story, not those who continue to hold the spear.

Note: A significant part of this essay draws on the work and research of Dr Eduardo Duran. I am grateful for his work, and the work of his community, ancestors, and elders, and the wisdom it has offered me in healing myself and guiding my own community.

Soul wound

What the Western world calls “collective trauma” has a different name and meaning within the Native American cosmology, where historical and generational trauma becomes “soul wound”.

In “Healing The Soul Wound”, Dr Eduardo Duran defined the “soul wound” as deep spiritual, psychological, and cultural injury inflicted by colonisation: forced loss of land, culture, identity, systemic violence, and oppression.

And because many of the past traumas remain unacknowledged or unhealed, their impact affects the descendants through grief, depression, addiction, spiritual emptiness, and internalised oppression (internalising the oppressor’s rhetoric).

The Western mental health system is not designed to heal “soul wounds”. It matured alongside Western medicine, and both are rooted in reductionism, where larger systems get broken down to small, treatable and “manageable” parts. The soul doesn’t have a role in the Western therapeutic lexicon, nor does the collective.

Most therapists and psychologists are trained in Western individualistic views of trauma and the family system, an important foundation, but not enough to address the actual roots of the trauma, which always happens in a social and historical context.

This is why Western psychology has mostly focused on managing the symptoms of the “soul wound”, like depression, anxiety, and addiction. That is, if it’s not adding to the “soul wound” by denying the patient their own cosmology.

Soul study

The term “psychology” is derived from the Greek words psyche, meaning “soul” or “mind”, and logia, meaning “study of”. This also applies to psychiatry, where the Greek root iatreia means “healing”.

The respective translations of psychology and psychiatry are “soul-mind study” or “soul-mind healing”. But traditional Western psychology and psychiatry have diverted from this original root meaning; the field does not concern itself with the soul, it only concerns itself with the mind—with objectivity, logic, and data.

Read more

When I started learning and practicing somatics, I also started remembering what it was like to be in the grips of addiction. To be so disconnected from your soma, so overtaken by something outside of your body that you begin to forget your essence, your sacredness. Fish don’t know they’re in water, and humanity has no idea just how addicted it is. Nor does it understand the full collective toll of addiction.

I joined the 12-step program 8 years ago, and that’s where I learned that addiction is a ‘spiritual disease’. But I never learned what caused it or where it came from. It was this elusive thing that I had to carry for the rest of my life. “Once an addict, always an addict” is a widely accepted saying in these rooms. But this didn’t sit right with me. I needed answers. I need to know if there was a cure strong enough to heal and repair the human essence.

Subscribe now

Dis-ease

To understand where my disease started, I had to trace my lineage and figure out where and when the seams started to fall apart and changed the epigenetic fabric of my family.

This is how I found myself staring colonialism, capitalism, and patriarchy right in the face, the root causes of some of the biggest stains on humanity, and the orchestrators of the majority of our collective diseases. I wrote about this in my personal Substack, about addiction as the ultimate coping mechanism, and trauma as a common denominator.

Trauma comes from the Greek τραῦμα (traûma), meaning “wound”. In classical Greek, this referred specifically to a physical wound, especially one inflicted by a weapon. Even in its earliest form, trauma was never just about the event itself but about the rupture—a break in the body’s integrity. The psychological meaning later continued that lineage: a rupture in the continuity of being, something that uses force to intrude on and overwhelm the system.

This is what psychological trauma does: it overwhelms our system, including our nervous system. An invisible spear that alters the system’s ability to work in our favor. And so the system has to work twice as hard just to continue existing, overriding its own capacity to attain a certain level of normalcy.

In the twelve-step program, we used to say: If you can feel it, you can heal it. But what we didn’t say is that first, you must build the capacity to feel. You must build the container. But what if what must be felt is too big for the current container?

That’s where community comes in. That is the wonder of co-regulation.

I could’ve never done any of this alone; there is no sobriety without community. Under capitalism, the burden of regulation falls on the individual, but the wounds inflicted on us are collective. They are far too big for one single body to carry.

And finding a community that understands the political nature of addiction is key.

It is a spiritual disease, one that became widespread and contagious when humans discovered how lucrative it is. When they betrayed their own by building a system that centers capital, piercing through the sacred bond of human kinship. The antidote is in reversing that motion, in restoring that sacred bond. It’s in creating a common understanding that addiction is a collective wound that has touched or is touching all of us on a certain level.

Subscribe now

Yes, you are also an addict

Despite what we like to think, addiction is everywhere, hidden between the cracks of societal normalcy. We still like to think of it as an anomaly reserved for hard substances, but for capitalism, addiction is the baseline. Most of us rely on addiction for self-regulation, while capitalism relies on our addiction for its survival.

My favorite definition of addiction is: ‘Addiction is about using something, anything, to keep our real emotions at bay’. (The School of Life)

As an ex-addict, I can testify, yes, it really is that simple. And it’s also that prevalent and normalized.

Addiction makes complete sense in a capitalist reality because compulsion is good for business. Since the system’s inception, capitalists have been extracting substances from colonies and “new worlds” and altering them to profit from our compulsive and repetitive consumption.

Think tobacco, cacao, coffee, coca, opium, and even cobalt for electronics. These substances are not inherently addictive. Native American tribes used tobacco1 ceremonially, Ethiopians and Yemenis drank coffee2 in communal rituals, and opium3 across Asia was used primarily in medicinal or spiritual contexts. They were made addictive, or used to create something addictive, through industrial processing. They were then mass-marketed with full awareness of their addictive nature, or continued to be marketed after the addictive nature became clear, just to line pockets by filling humanity’s spiritual, emotional, and relational void.

Every day, 1.9 billion Coca-Cola drinks are served around the world4. Caffeine is the most used psychoactive drug around the world; over 90% of American adults consume it daily5. Over 80,000 users reportedly visit Pornhub every minute6. According to some reports, internet users in the United States access Pornhub more frequently than Twitter, Wikipedia, or Netflix. Speaking of Netflix, US consumers reported spending 1.4 hours on video streaming platforms on average per day7. That’s roughly 21 days per year.

Under capitalism, this is considered normal consumer behavior. The relational, health, and psychological costs of these behaviours are considered a fair trade-off. And because capitalism relies on exponential growth, all of these companies and product makers are currently working on making their products more addictive and more available.

In the cold boardroom of capital, humans, their lives, health, and dignity cease to be human and become cold, harsh numbers.

Subscribe now

Addiction and the nervous system

From a somatic perspective, addiction is a shortcut to regulating overwhelming states, whether that’s stress, fear, emptiness, shame, or pain. Addiction has the ability to shift our autonomic states; it calms hyperarousal (fight/flight) or activates hypoarousal (freeze/fawn).

If you’re not familiar with the terminology or aren’t sure how these states manifest in the body, here’s an overview, including the most common addictive behaviors and substances that help with regulating them.

Hyperarousal (fight/flight) can feel and look like: Over functioning, intrusive thoughts, rumination, Irritability, being quick to anger and rage, perfectionism, feeling unsafe without a trigger, muscle tension, and impulsivity.

Substances and behaviors that can help us manage hyperarousal: Excessive screen time (binge-watching, doomscrolling, and gaming escapism), isolation and avoidance, perfectionism and control, comfort and binge eating, and abusing downers (alcohol, cannabis, sleeping pills, opioid painkillers).

Essentially, the body is looking for ways to numb and calm itself down, as it doesn’t have the ability or tools to regulate itself out of hyperarousal (fight/flight) and back into rest and digest—a more resourced nervous system state that keeps us socially engaged and curious.

Hypoarousal (freeze/fawn) is different because the body is already in a numb state; it needs to yank itself out of it to feel “productive”, energetic, and switched on.

Hypoarousal (freeze/fawn) can feel and look like: Helplessness, hopelessness, shame, exhaustion, numbness, pleasing, disconnection, inability to think clearly (feeling foggy), dissociation.

Subscribe now

Substances and behaviors that can help us manage hyperarousal: Abusing uppers (caffeine, nicotine, sugar, hard substances like cocaine, workaholism, and hustle culture), productivity addiction, chasing social media engagement, compulsive exercise, compulsive shopping, conflict and drama, fomo-driven socializing.

Hyperarousal and hypoarousal are survival nervous system adaptations. Hyperarousal mobilizes energy to face threats, and hypoarousal conserves energy and reduces suffering when escape from threat seems impossible. They’re not inherently good or bad, and are incredibly useful and carry a lot of wisdom somatically.

But for a nervous system that has a small window of tolerance (e.g., due to trauma), or doesn’t have the tools or ability to exit these states (e.g., due to ongoing or continuous stress), these states can feel like a permanent reality.

This means inhabiting a body that prioritizes survival over connection, routinely makes self-centered choices, and feels disconnected from the world.

Capitalism feeds off this disconnection. It keeps us permanently hyper- or hypo-aroused by locking us outside our window of tolerance and locking us into endless stress cycles where we hustle to survive and make ends meet. It also permanently disempowers and injures us by creating collective trauma through institutionalized poverty, colonialism, militarism, and state violence.

It then offers us the illusion of regulation by giving us a lever to switch between hypo and hyper arousal using addictive substances, products, and services.

Addiction is a pacifier for a world on fire; it’s a controlled state of numbness, apathy, and indifference. An addicted population is too sedated, busy, dissociated, or self-absorbed to think about the collective or to change the status quo.

From addiction to connection

In an ideal world, we should all be able to reharmonize and exit hyper or hypo arousal and return to our window of tolerance after completing a stress cycle. But capitalism severs us from the very things that help us regulate and re-center: nature, community (human connection and intimacy), play, awe, joy, pleasure, movement, and restorative rest.

Capitalism will never be interested in long-lasting and collective solutions. It is not interested in reducing the amount of sugar, fat, or caffeine in products to make them less addictive. It’s not interested in removing infinite scrolling from social media—a mechanism borrowed from slot machines—to decrease screen time. It’s not interested in solving addiction because that would compromise the system.

A soma that is able to harmonize itself—to choose connection and presence over ego and escapism—is also a soma that is able to organize and resist. And so it does whatever it can to prevent that soma from existing.

Unless you have sustained an injury or have a disability, if your soma constantly depends on substances and compulsive behaviors to feel stable, it’s no longer a choice but a somatic necessity—an addiction.

Subscribe now

This is why somatic resilience is a vital ingredient for collective liberation: it provides our somas with the necessary tools to regulate ourselves from state to state, so we can work through the emotional and physical challenges that come with systems change and collective liberation work.

Somatic resilience is the work of building the capacity to notice and feel difficult emotions in your body, and the ability to hold space for the difficult emotions of others. This means gently moving away from unconscious relationships with behaviors and substances to conscious ones, ones where you don’t have to rely on the substance or behavior to work through the difficult emotions, or to override your somatic reality.

You can start by noticing your body and emotions as you engage with a behavior or substance you suspect to have an addiction to: keeping an eye on your posture, breathing, and the tension in your muscles. The thoughts that come to your head, the trigger that led you to reach out to it. Just watching and noticing.

This also means nourishing your soma with real regulation, instead of taking shortcuts that harm your nervous systems and benefit our collective oppression. This can look like joining a twelve-step meeting or a similar group, slowing down if you’re in hyperarousal, or doing something creative and engaging if you’re in hypoarousal.

I host a monthly community-supported gathering on the second Sunday of every month, where we dive into nervous system regulation methods. You can follow me on Instagram, or join my Substack chat where I’ll announce the next one.

Your body will always tell you when you’ve had enough of something. It also has the intelligence to tell you what you actually want and need instead of your addictive pattern. But are you ready and able to listen to it?

But before this fragility began to metastasize into political fascism, many of us felt it bubbling up and becoming normalized behind closed doors.

In meeting rooms that excluded and tone-policed. In personal relationships that were minimized and dismissed. In frameworks and models that are centered on Western knowledge and experiences. In pop culture and media that dehumanize and tokenize people of color. And in the mass indifference and dissociation of white bodies from the world’s woes and its continuous cries for liberation.

For some, the rise of fascism is news; for others, it was long coming or always there.

If I had a penny for every time a white person told me that collective liberation is not their fight, that they don’t have enough information about the topic, or that the matter at hand is too complex for them to have an opinion, I wouldn’t be asking you to consider a paid subscription.

Subscribe now

There is a race and privilege-based schism in how somas (minds and bodies) experience reality—in how they perceive and experience safety, power, and responsibility—a schism that bears great consequences for all of humanity.

As a white-appearing Arab, I’m well aware that I’ve been invited into rooms that would’ve stayed closed to me had I been a shade darker, or had I used my Arab name to try and open them. And because I’m often perceived and welcomed in as white, I’ve been in multiple confrontations, which showed me that white people are not used to being challenged by other white people. My speaking up was often met with confusion and cognitive dissonance as my voice didn’t align with how I was perceived. The rupture of confrontation was never followed by repair; the ultimate punishment for betraying whiteness is cold-blooded exile.

White people of the Global North bear the most responsibility when it comes to collective liberation, not only due to their ever-mounting historical debt to humanity, but because they can continue to exist without any real-world tension while the rest of the world breaks. Every other group has exhausted itself, every other nervous system has depleted its resources trying to dismantle a system that is as political as it is somatic.

The tension white bodies must work through does not live in the outside world; it exists in their bodies. When a soma has internalized systemic threat as personal—in this case, the abolition of white supremacy as status quo—any threat to the system is perceived as a direct threat; a matter of life and death.

This is by design; keeping white bodies emotionally fragile allows white supremacy to nest in them; fear contracts, shrinks, and constricts. Fear not only attacks, but it also disconnects and numbs. Fear has a very narrow vision; it can follow anyone or anything to perceived safety as long as it looks or sounds familiar.

Most white people don’t even understand how they’re bound to a system that somatically exploits them. A system that keeps them disconnected from the rest of humanity and the larger web of life. This is because fear also inflates and expands, creating a temporary feeling of greatness that, when it deflates and spirals into shame and insignificance. This cycle of inflation and deflation is how the system continues to live and breathe.

Here is my viral Instagram essay, slightly edited to better fit an article format, on why white nervous systems exaggerate harm and escalate that exaggeration into violence against people of color. It’s the first viral piece I wrote as a somatic coach, as having the language and knowledge finally helped me connect all the dots that have been scattered and plaguing me my entire life.

Disclaimer: This short essay doesn’t dive into class, gender, gender identity, or disability, which add many layers of important nuance. This is a deliberate choice; I would rather address those layers separately, as race is the first lens through which many of us are taught to interpret safety, danger, and belonging. It’s the layer I needed to untangle before exploring how other forms of marginalization intersect and inform that conditioning. Historically speaking, white people have not been subjected to systemic oppression because of their race. Exceptions exist, such as the British oppression of the Irish, but whiteness itself has mostly functioned as protection.

White groups have not been sold into slavery at the same scale as people of color (Transatlantic Slave Trade), starved through political famines (Bengal Famine of 1943 under British rule), or repetitively ethnically cleansed and policed (The Genocide of Native Americans, Apartheid of South Africa, The Illegal Occupation of Palestine).

At this moment, no white groups face systemic racial discrimination.1

So why do white people live in a state of exaggerated threat and harm, using their emotional states to justify violence against people of color?

The answer might just lie in understanding the difference between material safety and somatic safety, and the role resilience plays in cultivating somatic safety.

Subscribe now

Somatic safety vs. Material safety

Somatic safety2 is the felt sense of being safe in our body; trusting sensations, staying centered under stress, working through triggers, and feeling at home in our skin even when we’re being challenged emotionally.

Material safety is tangible protection of life, livelihood, and rights. Like equal access to housing and jobs, protection from displacement due to gentrification or ethnic cleansing, protection from police brutality, and the right to self-determination.

For most white people, “unsafe” means loss of somatic safety. For people of color, “unsafe” usually means threats to material safety.

Somatic safety can be cultivated through practice and inner work (unless it overlaps with material safety). Material safety requires dismantling oppressive systems and cannot be cultivated through practice.

They are deeply interwoven, and material harm can cause somatic harm. But one is rooted in external reality while the other is experienced internally.

This is where resilience is key; it determines how we navigate uncertain and “unsafe” situations. And answer the following question:

Why is it that for some, something as simple as a heated conversation or a difference in worldviews may trigger feelings of being unsafe?

Subscribe now

Resilience and somatic safety

Resilience is our somatic ability to re-center; to shift from hyper-alertness and reactivity to more resourced states. We are inherently resilient, but we also lose what we don’t use. And resilience is honed and practiced in groups:

Through collective care, cultural traditions, storytelling, music, rhythm, dance, spirituality, ritual—community practices where fiction arises, and which help regulate nervous systems together and develop trust in others, the self, and the unknown.

For generations, when material safety was stripped away, people of color have turned to resilience practices rooted in their existing cultures and beliefs. Think: Capoeira in Brazil, Work Songs or Spirituals in Turtle Island, and the Haka in Aotearoa. These traditions regulate nervous systems, restore belonging, and build emotional strength.

White culture, shaped by colonialism and capitalism, offers little space for uncertainty, ritual, or collective regulation. For a body that has no to little embodied experience of resilience, somatic safety becomes a matter of regaining a sense of control through borders, property, surveillance, policing, and emotional avoidance.

When somatically challenged, white nervous systems often equate emotional overwhelm with danger: I am emotionally overwhelmed, I must be unsafe. I feel unsafe; I must regain control.

A body that believes it’s experiencing existential danger cannot tell the difference between its internal and external reality, and will still act accordingly. It will mobilize survival strategies (fight, flight, freeze, appease, dissociate) to regain a sense of safety.

On somatic responsibility

At this moment, and for a very long time, people of color carry the triple burden of surviving material harm, self-regulating, while also managing how they’re being perceived to avoid getting labeled “unsafe”. A label that can lead to material harm, like loss of opportunity, and emotional and physical violence.

This needs to stop.

The emotions and nervous systems of people of color are not another resource for white people to plunder. White bodies must cultivate their own resilience and learn how to hold uncertainty and discomfort, so their safety doesn’t depend on making others unsafe.

It is the duty of historically oppressive groups to initiate repair and restore material safety for the oppressed. And there is no real and lasting repair and restoration without including the mind AND body.

Reclaiming somatic safety is directly related to liberating ourselves and others from systems of harm; it is how we begin to understand where our personal responsibility ends, and our collective responsibility begins.

A world where the safety of some relies on the unsafety of others is not safe at all. It’s a world that uses the currency of safety to gamble with people’s personhood, determining who’s more worthy of dignity and humanity. And if you exist in a white body, particularly a body-abled white body, you have been dealt one of the most highly prized chips on that bargaining table—race. So use it wisely, the dignity of many has been compromised so that you can hold it in your hands.

Looking back, I realize that this has been my own process of decolonization—of freeing my mind from old beliefs, and deconditioning myself from patriarchy and capitalism.

But my work isn’t nearly done. As I embark on this more recent part of my journey—becoming an expert in a new domain—I notice an old tendency creeping up. An obsession with “professionalism” and expertise, of not wanting to stray too far from the rules, and a desire to be taken seriously.

But seriously, by whom?

I spent my entire professional life in white, patriarchal, corporate spaces, where no amount of certifications, training, or years of experience could redeem me from my gender, neurodiversity, and cultural background. I was always surrounded by guards and gatekeepers—cis men—who got to decide if I’m professional enough to get the job, or have gained enough expertise to deserve a promotion. And of course, if I was ushered in, I was either held to unrealistic standards or was never fully deserving. But those guards are gone; I haven’t had to deal with them for over two years. In this chapter of my career, I get to decide what is what and how much is enough.

Ever since I’ve realized this, that the guards are now in my head, I’ve been sitting with this thought: What makes someone an expert on something? Is it the institution that granted them passage through its pearly gates? Is it all the hours they’ve spent on practice and presence? Is it the ancestral gifts that were passed down to them? Is it a deep knowing and calling, and the commitment to answer it?

Subscribe now

On one hand, I genuinely believe that some professions should be “regulated”. This doesn’t have to be some authoritarian governing body. It could be egalitarian, peer-based, and conversational. Some careers, due to the sheer amount of power they wield over others, need accountability to prevent harm. On the other hand, just because they are regulated, it doesn’t mean the people performing them are not capable of harm. Even worse, the highest-paid and most powerful individuals on the planet are not held accountable by any governing or regulating body.

The most harmful thing about Western “professional” ideals is that they assume a certain level of detachment from the subjects or objects of someone’s specialization. You are invited to be empathetic in some cases, but then only to a certain extent. If you submerge yourself too much into something or someone, if you allow them to touch your heart, your intentions might be summoned for questioning.

Western colonialism has turned expertise into a sterile, soulless word. Disembodiment and disconnect warrant respect, but passion and care warrant suspicion. The Embodied Expert, someone who can’t disconnect feeling from doing, is not someone to be taken seriously, but someone to be ridiculed and viewed with suspicion.

But has it always been this way? And do we have to continue to spend our lives appealing to Western views and sensibilities on professionalism, i.e., patriarchal and white, to be considered experts?

I think it’s about time we reopen this conversation and ask ourselves: What happened to the Embodied Expert? To our village elder? The herbalist? The healer? The expert who cares, feels with, and learns by dirtying their hands.

Welcome to The Deep Knowing, where I will be answering similar questions to get to deeper and more embodied truths, starting with my viral instagram essay on the Embodied Expert, slightly edited to better fit a newsletter format.

Chapter 1: Knowledge is power

Colonialism was never just about land and resources. It has also always been about knowledge, because knowledge is power.

Western colonial powers have historically maintained their dominance by determining which forms of knowledge are “valuable” and which are expendable, using the narrow metrics of European understanding.

From active destruction (e.g. The destruction of libraries in the Americas1), and deliberate erasure (e.g., Macaulay’s educational policy in India2). To suppression (e.g., Witchcraft Suppression Act of 1895 in Southern Africa3), and policing (e.g., The Obeah Act of 1760 in Jamaica4). History is full of deliberate acts of destruction, theft, and erasure, all in the name of Western “civility”.

For centuries, Western colonial powers have been positioning their scientific, written, and quantifiable systems of knowledge as universal. Labeling Eastern, Southern, Indigenous, and embodied forms of knowing as “primitive,”“superstitious,” or “irrational”, while stealing or “borrowing” knowledge from these very sources without crediting their origin.

Subscribe now

There’s a reason, for example, why few people know that smallpox inoculation was practiced in Asia centuries before Edward Jenner was credited with “inventing” vaccination in England5. This would shatter the common perception that Europe is the center of scientific research and discovery. Knowledge informs narrative.

To control this narrative, oral traditions of the colonized were replaced by written documentation, and community-based apprenticeships were replaced by formal schooling. And children were sent to boarding schools or schools where the colonizer’s language and customs were prioritized.

Knowledge held in bodies, through rhythm, taste, movement, ritual, or intuition, was replaced by knowledge held in Western textbooks and institutions, and guarded by European, mostly male, “experts”. Expertise was locked behind elitist academic institutions and kept out of reach for women, Indigenous, and bipoc folk.

Under colonial rule, embodied experts like dancers, healers, midwives, farmers, artisans, spiritual practitioners… people who have spent decades developing their craft and often inherited their knowledge from their ancestors and community members, lost their legitimacy and position in society, or were forced to adopt Western ways and methods. Their expertise was not legible within colonial frameworks of “science” or “rationality.” Their knowledge could not be recorded, captured, replicated, reproduced, capitalized on, or “made sense of”. Often, it also directly challenged colonial legitimacy and epistemologies.

And because colonialism is inherently patriarchal and racist, embodied expertise wasn’t just dismissed; it was also feminized and racialized.

Colonialism replaced the midwife with the male doctor, the herbalist with the pharmacist, the village elder with the missionary, the craftsperson with the factory. It recast care, intuition, and embodied experience as inferior traits associated with women, colonized people, and the “uncivilized.”

Chapter 2: Colonialism needs disembodiment

The erasure of the embodied expert, who had an important, long-standing, and respected position in their community, meant the erasure of entire knowledge systems connected to the Earth, the senses, and the cyclical.

Seeding fear and doubt around their legitimacy, they discontinued lines of experts who were living, breathing encyclopedias. This also fractured the experts and their descendants from within, making them doubt their lineage, gifts, intuition, and calling, and abandoning them in favor of more “socially” and “culturally” acceptable paths.

This severance from inner knowing and embodied knowledge is deliberate. Colonialism thrives on disembodiment: to maintain a culture of dominance and extraction, it separates the mind from the body, and the body from nature and community.

Subscribe now

Embodied expertise requires participation, presence, sensory knowing, co-regulation with the environment, and mutual respect. An embodied expert is less likely to exploit, dominate, or extract from its subjects and objects of learning and collaboration.

By contrast, a colonial “expert” is someone who can objectively observe and measure, detached from what or who they’re studying or engaging with. This detachment makes extraction and exploitation inevitable.

This can be seen through historical Western atrocities committed in the name of science and economic growth. Example:

J. Marion Sims, a 19th-century gynecologist—often referred to as the father of gynecology— experimented on enslaved Black women. Hiroshima and Nagasaki as part of the American nuclear program (aka The Manhattan Project)6. The testing of weapons and defense technology on Palestinian civilians7.

Colonial expertise makes anything permissible in the name of scientific “objectivity”.

You can’t extract or exploit a planet you honor and feel connected to. You can’t easily control people who trust their inner authority and bodily wisdom. You can’t sustain colonial hierarchies if everyone’s lived experience is respected and seen as valid knowledge.

Erasing embodied expertise and experts was a way of sterilizing learning and knowledge, and breaking our trust with ourselves and our environment—a symbiosis that was developed and perfected for thousands of years.

Chapter 3: The Embodied Expert as a threat

We continue to witness this erasure and unequal exchange. “Professionalism” still means suppressing emotion and being “objective” and impartial. “Expertise” still privileges degrees over lived experience and intuition. “Health and Wellness” still loots indigenous embodied knowledge, stripping it of its cultural roots and political meaning, and re-introducing it as tools for personal and economic growth via Western channels (ikaugi, yoga, tantra, mindfulness).

To this day, when colonial powers set their eyes on a land and its resources, in addition to erasing its general population and their centers and hubs of knowledge (90% of school and university buildings in Gaza were destroyed by Israel8), they also systemically target the experts.

Land-workers, farmers, poets, researchers, archivists, healers (incl. doctors), story-letters (incl. journalists), builders (incl. engineers).

By threatening, erasing, and destroying embodied experts—people who are deeply rooted in their community, land, and inner knowing—colonial powers are sending a strong implicit message:

It is dangerous to be an embodied expert, to use knowledge as a conduit for connection, community, and care, instead of a conduit for capital, control, and destruction.

At the same time, we are also witnessing a re-emergence of the embodied expert. Through decolonial theory, crowd-sourced knowledge hubs and platforms, community farming, storytelling… Many of us are seeking to restore the body as a site of knowledge and resistance. To realign our expertise with collective needs and struggles.

We all come from lineages of embodied experts: cooks, healers, musicians, land-workers, herbalists…Our bodies are full of untapped wisdom, knowledge, and gifts, passed down through generations—through trial and error, natural selection, and epigenetics.

The return to embodied expertise—not just expertise labeled and ordained by official institutions—is also a return to care and connection. It’s replacing disembodied work, labor in favor of capital and its masters, with embodied work, work in favor of community and planet.

Stepping into embodied expertise is part of our collective healing journey. But it also requires resources: somatic (regulation, presence, nervous system capacity), communal, and material. Are you interested in joining a circle of experts working towards their embodied expertise? I’m currently setting up a workgroup for professionals who are looking for a more embodied and community-based way of approaching work, using somatics and decolonial theory. Pre-register here, and I’ll let you know when it’s ready.

Subscribe now