Monday Meditation: Listening for the Meditation of the Soma

How Somatics is paving the way for me to heal

Oct 06, 2025

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“The body is smart. It remembers, it speaks, it is a faithful record of our lives.
We must listen to its messages, honor its wisdom, and let it guide us home.”
— Gloria Anzaldúa
“You can’t heal what you can’t feel.
You can’t transform what you refuse to touch in your body.”
— Resmaa Menakem
“Not everything that is faced can be changed,
but nothing can be changed until it is faced.”
— James Baldwin

This morning I begin a Somatics Intensive in Experiential Narrative Practice with my teacher and guide, Michael McRay. As I step into this season of learning, I am holding close my commitment to live a life of intention—a life where mind, body, and spirit are not separate stories, but one integrated narrative of becoming.

Since Charlottesville, it has been difficult to live fully into my values. Six and a half years of targeted harassment and systemic violence have left their marks on my nervous system. Trauma fragments us—it splits the story of self across time and space. I know this rupture intimately. I have lived it. And now, I am learning how to return. I am learning how to reinhabit my own body as sacred ground.

To live an intentional life is not merely to think good thoughts or speak true words—it is to embody what we believe. To align value with breath, spirit with muscle memory, truth with heartbeat. Embodiment is the practice of integrity made flesh.

Today, I am committing to this work: to listen to the stories my body still carries, the ones I have not yet learned to interpret. Some stories speak in faint whispers—the ache in the shoulder, the tremor in the gut. Others cry out like thunder—the panic, the tightening, the sudden freeze. Each sensation is a fragment of autobiography, a truth longing to be tended, not exiled.

So today, could you imagine joining me in this practice?

Could you commit to a mindfulness of your own body?

Take a moment to listen.

Listen for the meditation of the soma—the prayer that rises not from words, but from within your skin.

Our bodies are not barriers to the sacred; they are the sacred.

Our breath is not incidental; it is the language of life itself.

The work of healing is not a goal. It is a practice, a rhythm, a way of being with what is unfinished in us. As Resmaa Menakem reminds us through Somatic Abolitionism, this is the work we all need to be doing in this moment: to heal the traumas that live in our flesh, to metabolize the inherited pain of supremacy, to build embodied resilience for a world that needs repair.

Healing, then, is not self-centered—it is communal, even cosmic.

When we become embodied, we become more available to life, to love, to justice, to joy.

✨ Ritual Exhale:

Place one hand over your heart, one over your abdomen.

Inhale deeply through your nose and whisper: “I am here.”

Exhale slowly through your mouth and whisper: “My body is a prayer.”

Repeat this three times.

Feel the pulse of your life beneath your hands.

Let it remind you: you belong here, in this body, in this breath, in this moment.

🌀 Reflection Prompts:

What is your body trying to tell you today?
Where do you feel the tension of old stories still living in you?
How might you honor your body as both archive and altar?
What would it mean to move through this week with embodied intention?

📚 Resources for the Journey:

Resmaa Menakem, My Grandmother’s Hands — on embodied trauma and somatic abolitionism.
Thomas Hübl, Healing Collective Trauma — on attuning to the body’s wisdom in community.
Bessel van der Kolk, The Body Keeps the Score — on the neuroscience of trauma and recovery.
Michael McRay, Becoming Restoried — on narrative practice and listening to the stories beneath the stories.
Gloria Anzaldúa, Borderlands / La Frontera — on the body as a site of transformation and border-crossing.