Embodied Explorations by glitterchowder in Burnaby

Last summer my residency continued the work that the poem “My Mother’s Daughter” started and noticing how it felt to create from a place of safety, feeling seen by other 3rd culture kids and having frank (and a bit tipsy) conversations about belonging and both the parts we play and the parts we’ve lost along the way. It brought up a lot of grief I didn’t realize I hid from myself. It led me down a rabbit hole of looking at different ways of knowing like somatic therapy. Through this journey of unraveling I found work like @hillaryliannamcbride ’s book “the Wisdom of the Body” where she writes about the myth of “Body Hierarchy” and how many of us live within a culture that frames the body as something with limits that must be overcome. Often we are unconsciously measured and ranked by things like youth, the colour of our skin, gender, disabilities. I saw myself in the way she explained the kind of dissociation we must do to tolerate oppression, unjust policies, and bend into shapes that can work long hours without eating to survive. But in the same way we disconnect from pain we also disconnect from joy. This fear-based paradigm that helps us to create a wall around trauma to survive but in order to flourish I think we can take take a lot of cues from somatic wisdom traditions from around the world that emphasize the value of each of us finding and sharing insights from our unique perspectives to yield innovations from a full array of customs, neurodiversity and bodies. I think when we are able to practice this for ourselves, we are also more able to notice and help lift each other up in situations that aren’t always built for or accommodating for the changing needs of our community.