Hope this letter lands softly.

It’s been hard to write these days. It feels there’s a lot I want to say, but somehow that transition between the terrain of my body and into the written word feels like a big leap. A big part of me is also hesitant as it feels much of what I want to write about these days is too tender.

My throat tightens and attention scatters in subtle protest warning me not to reveal too much of myself on here. Some of you here I know well, and somehow that layer of acquaintance makes vulnerability a little more difficult for me than with those I haven’t met.

I want to write about many things, about how much the last three years changed me, not at all in regard to my disillusionment with the West. I’m over that late realization. I want to talk about the personal, the relational, the irony of how those that were familiar all of a sudden feel the most unrelatable. The tension between the tenderness you feel towards people, and the loss of resonance in how you’ve come to meet this moment of our time.

I want to talk about how much I dislike how the internet romanticizes change. And how the body can’t be tricked with a good affirmation or positive psychology. That it will change at the rate of its capacity, not at the sharpness of a good Rumi quote.

I always have a lot to say about many things. My dad jokes that I was born debating my way through the birth canal. I probably was in some non-verbal way. But really, a lot is moving through me, and yet what feels the most honest to write about these days is how much I’ve been sitting with the longing for motherhood. Nothing feels as tender as my pulsing desire to have children, and the palpable grief of not having this be in my timeline yet.

I read something the other day that grief is when your internal world doesn’t or no longer matches the reality of the outer world. That really stuck with me, and all of a sudden that contrast became so palpable. One the inside I can feel the pulsing desire inside my own vessel to be a mother, and on the outside the world is saying: Not yet my dear.

There in that space came the unavoidable communion with fear. The fear of internalized narratives that leave you wrestling with the pre-destined timeline your bound to when it comes to children. A biological one. A cultural one. A logical one even.

Fear is the dance I’ve been dancing for over a decade now. One I’ve learnt to befriend in ways that feel more intimate that I can ever put into words. It often feels like it has been my life’s work to learn how to not fear fear. To honor it as a companion, never an inhibitor. Fear is the friend I sat with every time my body felt sick and I chose to practice caring for it instead of give in to the panic of painkillers and endless tests.

Fear was there every time I chose to expand my expression in ways that felt tolerable not overwhelming. It is there when I teach 60 people and opt to take my time to honor the pace of my body calibrating to being seen. It was there every time a relationship ended. Every time I confronted a friend with the desire to repair instead of retreat in avoidance. I met it at every corner when moving between different cities. When I chose to leave the comforts and accolades of my corporate job for the uncertain pull of what I actually mattered to me, not knowing how it will sustain me financially yet, but that integrity was what I was being asked to honor in how I work and live. I met fear when holding the hand of my ailing father or mother, refusing to obsess over solutions and instead be in the acceptance of the present moment.

The irony is that my commitment to befriending fear is the greatest offering I serve at the altar of motherhood. Those that know me know that a freebirth is something I have been in deep learning about for years now. I even know who I want at my birth (shoutout Dina & Afkar). And while I’m not attached to it should life have different plans, I know that a birth of many conventional interventions, one that strips me of agency and away from nature is at odds with my values. I quickly learnt all those years back that at the heart of a freebirth lived how much I was willing to practice leaning into fear. How much I’ve let fear be there and surrendered to it one bit at a time.

And so for years now every time fear showed up, it became an opportunity to practice in service of what I deeply long for. Motherhood. In the many encounters with fear, I have learnt that the way to be with fear is to walk with it, not despite of it. I have learnt in my devotion to the way of the body through somatics, that fear is only ever telling us that our desire and our capacity don’t yet match. We may have a desire to make a certain choice, but we find ourselves ‘stuck’ in our attempt to do so. Afraid to make said choice. This is where capacity comes into the picture.

Capacity being our ability to stay present and connected to the experience in our body without becoming overwhelmed by it. When our capacity isn’t there, despite our desire, we will return to the old and familiar ways we’ve learnt to keep ourselves safe and small. Until that is, we nurture our capacity with care to match our desire.

So I find myself here, feeling the depth of my desire to become a mother, and with it the confrontation with the fear: ‘Will that ever be for me?’. A terrifying place to be, knowing that the only way to meet it is no where else but in the practice field of my own body. That any attempt to understand it is a lost opportunity to be with the wisdom that comes from experiencing it. Slowly, gently, softly. Learning ever so intimately how to dance with fear once more.

Maybe that too is the lesson motherhood is already teaching me. How to mother the parts of me that ache without rushing their process. To hold them as gently as I would my own child, whispering:

I’m here with you.

May you find in these words the permission to be afraid, knowing that you too are not alone.

With love and presence,
Zeena

It was many things. The slowness of Fridays at home. The lashing rain. The anticipation of sisters visitings me. But mostly it was sitting in awe of the synchronicity about finding my apartment of dreams in Amman.

The story of choosing to move is a threshold story that feels too big to tell over a couple of lines here. I will share though that finding that apartment in the way that I have, in the way that it looks, in the coincidental Palestinian heritage it is infused in. In all the soft, painful, tenacious, and compassionate ways I went about working myself up to this decision. I couldn’t help but feel in every bone in my body this sense of connection to that which is larger than me. Guided. Held. Answered.

My atheist upbringing

I grew up in an atheist home. My parents revolutionary youth landed them in the communist party, and so our home was one of intellect, of debates, of devouring ideology, and rooting in the comprehension of geopolitics and culture. We also ran with the misunderstood marxist sentiment that religion was the opium of the masses. A sentiment that got mistranslate to mean a departure from all that is spiritual, when it was only referring to the religion of institution.

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To summarize it briefly: Pasteur discovered the germ. And with that single discovery, an entire global health paradigm took shape. One obsessed with fighting, sterilizing, killing, purging. The germ was framed as the enemy that contaminated an otherwise innocent body. And so the goal became to eliminate the invader rather than understand the internal conditions that allowed it to thrive.

But while we were pulled into the gravity of Pasteur’s breakthrough, almost nothing was said about his contemporary Antoine Béchamp, who argued something entirely different. While Pasteur pointed to the microbe, Béchamp pointed to the terrain, the internal environment that determines whether disease can take root.

A little background

My relationship to my body, long before I came to somatics, came through the door of food and nutrition. I didn’t know it then, but that chapter in my life was quietly ushering me into a path of decolonization before I ever used that word. Not because everything deserves to be labeled decolonial, but because that moment fundamentally shifted me from fear to curiosity. From controlling symptoms to tending to the conditions underneath them.

Then came somatics, where my life, personal and professional, became a practice of moving from power over to power with. Liberation revealed itself to me not as a concept but as relationality, and that relationality began with the inner landscape of my own body, with how I related to my internal experience and the sensations and symptoms I once tried to control.

Right there in the terrain of my body was where I discovered how systems embed themselves. In how much or how little I take up space. In the contraction around my voice. In my capacity to humanize, to stay open, to hold compassion without collapsing. In my body, I learned that reclaiming choice is not a mindset. It was found in relationship I built to my nervous system capacity.

We are not helpless. We are focusing on the wrong thing.

Today, as we navigate one of the most defining times of our history, rallying in beautiful murmuration around decolonization with clarity sharper than we have seen in decades, I fear we are making the same mistake we made with germ theory.

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The emergence of trauma into liberation discourse, perhaps for the first time is a profound step forward. I don’t believe decolonization divorced from trauma and relational repair can ever reproduce new or liberatory outcomes. Bold statement, I know. But I hold that liberation begins in the body. Because the state, and the systems adjacent to it, have found their way into our very somatic experience.

After two years (and 77 years) of unrelenting brutality met with impunity and complicity from governments near and far, it’s become clear that what we need is not merely policy reform. We need a revival of individual and collective sovereignty. A reclaiming of responsibility to usher in the freedom we long for. And that work doesn’t start “out there.” It begins inside. It requires unlearning the ways we’ve internalized our oppression. Recognizing how we mirror power-over dynamics in our own bodies and relationships. How we hand over our authority, again and again, to external forces.

This lens brings a necessary depth to our movements. But as with any discourse newly introduced into mainstream political conversations, like that of trauma, it risks dilution. We risk landing on simplistic conclusions that flatten its power.

In our case, we land on something like this: That the trauma of the Holocaust reincarnated itself into the trauma of Gaza. That the genocide of one people is now birthing the genocide of another. And so, we are told, we must “break the cycle.”

But worse than that, we double down: To fight back, they say, is to become the very thing you’re fighting. To resist is to be stuck in a trauma loop. Violence begets violence and so on.

And that, my friends, is where we lose the plot. Where trauma—a field of humanity and nuance—becomes stripped of its context and turned into moral relativism. Where colonization is no longer a structure, but a psychology. Where genocide becomes an unfortunate consequence to trauma, and resistance becomes a mental health issue.

Trauma Doesn’t Make You a Zionist

We must ask: When we attempt to understand the Zionist project through the lens of trauma, who does that serve?

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But here’s the fine line we have to be really be mindful of : The same spaces that liberate us can also confine us.

At first, gathering around pain is medicine. Finally, people who understand. But without embodiment, these spaces can morph into something else entirely. They become spaces that collapse the distance between our experience and our self. The wound is no longer just part of our story anymore, it’s now our entire identity and the only thing that brings us together.

• "I’m the cancer patient."

• "I’m the addict"

• "I’m the oppressed."

We need more than witnessing.

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We may collapse into self-blame, flagellating ourselves for our privilege, carrying the weight of the world as if we alone should have stopped the carnage. Or we swing the other way: surface-level patriotism. Empty slogans. Posturing without participation. A nationalism that deflects responsibility and numbs the ache of helplessness with performance.

But the problem isn’t the guilt or the shame. It’s the mechanisms we develop to avoid feeling them. Because beneath both extremes—self-blame and defensiveness—lives something deeper: helplessness. Nervous system overwhelm. The somatic tension of being both harmed and benefiting from governments complicit in genocide— everywhere and here, in the Arab world.

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Ever since I could fathom the gravity of the diasporic wound, it was hard to ignore the felt experience of emptiness that resided inside me despite how full life happened to be. In my early 20s, I didn’t quite have the language for it. I just roamed, looking for people, places, careers to plug what felt like a ruptured water hose. The aching was always that of a deep longing for belonging. Landing in arms, sometimes many arms simultaneously, searching for something I didn’t quite know what.

It wasn’t just people; it was also places. I would attempt to root myself somewhere only to remain hovering well above ground. Here and not quite here once more. All while continuing to resent the very place that was ever a home, if we can call it that. Jordan was the stepmother I received after I was forced away from my biological one. She was kind, nurturing, never imposing, and yet she wasn’t my mother. And so my search for belonging continued. Between laying in lovers’ arms with the unfair, and rather unconscious, responsibility I set on them to heal my wound of belonging. To foreign lands I lived in, attempting to make my own but never really knowing how to. Montreal, London, Dubai, Mexico City. Beautiful, generous, but always ephemeral.

Mexico City, in particular, held a special place. I found peace there I didn’t quite touch anywhere else. While I have much to recount on why that city is a chrysalis to one’s becoming—for whoever answers her call, she takes you in with a loving embrace, incubating your process as you take the next life turn that ushers you home, primarily to yourself. For me, it was both. Home to myself, and to the only one I had ever truly known materially, Jordan.

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One of the most foolish glasses I had of liberalism came through the rhetoric of empowerment sold to us in every discourse and mediocre ad campaign. Empowerment was heralded as a path forward, yet its narrow definitions demanded a specific kind of alignment. To be empowered and progressive, you had to uproot yourself from your family and find your own way, look down upon conservatives and people of faith—particularly Islam—because their values were seen as the antithesis of modernity. You also needed to subscribe to a cultural meritocracy that often required parting ways with many traditional norms, perhaps your language too. You could keep it so long as it’s colloquial. I bought into it all, particularly as a recovering atheist. I made tradition and faith the enemy of progress.

This piece isn’t about the contradictions innate to liberalism but about the hidden price you pay to enter its world.

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For our generation, the inheritance of this history is twofold. On one hand, we carry the legacy of steadfastness—sumud—the essence of the Palestinian spirit passed down from one generation to the next. On the other, we grapple with an internalized defeatism, absorbed over decades of thwarted liberation efforts. Our parents' generation stood on the cusp of transformative change, glimpsing light at the end of the tunnel, only to watch it collapse under the weight of Western imperialism and the complicity of obedient monarchs. When every effort of liberation is met with betrayal or suppression, the collective body succumbs to helplessness. Not out of weakness, but as a means of protecting itself from the unbearable pain of betrayal and oppression.

Still, the desire for liberation was never extinguished. It cracks through us like sunlight breaking through heavy clouds, illuminating what was thought lost and warming even the coldest, most guarded corners of our collective spirit. Yet the capacity to meet that desire has, until now, felt limited—that is, until October 7th.

From Helplessness to Mobilization

Our helplessness is not an inherent weakness but an adaptation to adversity.

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Fourteen months in, and now, with a genocide of unwavering barbarity and overwhelming impunity; a region more divided and royally complicit (pun intended), I am beginning to see the foolishness in how I boarded that train. Today, I contend with a few terms and conditions I failed to consider at the start of the Oct. 7th revolution: how vital despair is, and how long this road might be.

Falling In

I didn’t choose despair with intent at first. It gave me no choice after

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It’s as though awareness stops at the boundaries of our own skin. It teaches us to read ourselves well: to notice what’s happening in our bodies, to understand why we feel the way we do, to learn to respond rather than react. All of this is valuable, even life-changing, but only does so much in bringing about real change beyond ourselves.

The English language itself struggles to capture the breadth of true awareness. In Arabic, the word الوعي (al-wa’i) points to something far deeper:

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The news left me in much of a freeze akin to a foot on the gas, and a foot on the pedal. One part feeling the joy for prisoners freed from literal dungeons when the mere sight of light was a far fetched dream. Yet another part braced, froze, crushed by the weight of what actually happened. The replacement of one butcher with another. The way the Syrian psyche and pain was coopted to serve none other than the empire where Israel and the US emerge to benefit while the Palestinians continue to be slaughtered by the thousands and Syria looted for its national resources.

Going to that place within.

It is likely that if you are Palestinian that there is a place within yourself you hardly visit. That place that carries the debilitating weight of erasure, defeat, and power over. Of entertaining the possibility of what if we can’t actually make it. What if we will be reduced to mere archives, folklore, and our identity dissolves? What if they are in fact all too powerful?

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Opening lines are so intimidating….

The written word has been my oldest companion, a steadfast witness to my thoughts, feelings, and evolving inquiries. Time and again, I’ve turned to blank pages and screens to explore the landscapes of my body and the story of Palestine—two forces that have profoundly shaped who I am and how I see the world.

My traumas handed me the gift of renegotiating who I thought I have to be, and instead learn (still learning) to welcome the fullness of who I truly am. In trekking through my wounds I’ve come to discover a wholeness wholly imperfect. I’ve learned to love, hate, admire, pity, and celebrate many parts of me, peeling back the layers that hide the self that is longing to reveal itself.

Palestine, on the other hand, was less the confronting teacher, and more the mentor that taught through embodiment. Revealing the larger systems that reinforce our wounds. At every crossroad Palestine been a compass for truth and a litmus test of integrity asking: Where do I stand on matching my values with my way of life and choices?

The more I spiraled through, the more these two worlds overlapped in the most profound of ways. Today my path as a trauma therapist and somatic practitioner is inextricably linked with Palestine, the birthplace of liberation work. Particularly in the very ways I’ve internalized colonialism. How it shaped my capacity to imagine a different reality than the one I was living.

Today my dreams stand larger than I could ever imagine, both for myself and for Palestine, but more importantly I feel like I have the capacity to hold them. I am a firm believer that the quest to transform the world begins with the willingness to transform ourselves. One cannot happen without the other. I may have come into somatic work for personal reasons, to unshackle from my own inhibitions, to find safety in my body, and bring about personal liberation, but I found it held the way to liberation for the collective body too.

True somatic work is de-colonial work from the inside out. It nurtures the quality of ‘being with’ rather than ‘control over’ the body as a vehicle for healing. It teaches you how to de-armor from the narrow view of ‘I’, into I in relation to body, others, and environment. It cultivates humility in knowing the body, nature, land, people, don’t need to be taught how to heal; they only require that we better relate, act, and honor. At its core somatics asks, with compassion and curiosity, what do you need to feel safe and fully alive? And as you cultivate the ways to answer that for your own body, you bring that to the world from a place that has embodies the very thing you long to see outside of you.

This substack is one of the ways I am committing to liberating my own self-expression in service of truth. To give space for my voice and affirm my worth. I will bring together the worlds of somatic and trauma healing with the worlds of collective liberation, health freedom, and sovereignty. Provocations, practices, and articles that serve as seedlings in the growing discourse on freedom, both personal and collective.

Welcome to this space—mine and yours. May it stand to remind you of the power, joy, and freedom already within you.

Happy reading!

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