Our vision

we are a collective of practitioners with various backgrounds in both somatic healing practices and community change-work. our vision is to create accessible trainings, skill shares and facilitation to empower resilience within individuals and communities that have historically been forgotten or harmed by mainstream healing practices. we are working within a politicized understanding of somatic practices

the Sonoran Desert Somatic Collective recognizes that we live & work within the ancestral homelands of the Tohono O’odham and the multi-millennial presence of the Pascua Yaqui and are offering a retreat on sacred Apache lands. we honor these tribal nations, and commit to engaging in reparative relationship with the peoples and other beings of these lands as we work to share our learned skillset with broader community within the Sonoran Desert region. we are committed to working towards decolonizing our healing lineages and practices as well as our own nervous systems.

Politicized Somatics

Somatic Psychology is a term that came about in the 70's and 80's within the Western paradigm of mental health. Researchers began to understand that not only does the mind experience thoughts and feelings, but rather the entire physiological (and one might argue spiritual) body experiences and expresses emotion. All of our experiences are stored in our tissues. Trauma, and those parts of our experience that were not able to be metabolized and processed, in particular becomes held by our physiology. If experiences aren’t processed, they get compartmentalized by some part of the system. Somatic lineages have created protocols to release and move through these stored traumas as well as expand the capacity and resiliency of the body to move through difficult situations with more ease and less tendency to store new trauma. The nervous system is the gateway to understanding how somatic psychology works.

Politicized somatics is the understanding that moving beyond and through our own personal traumas must be aligned with community and cultural healing in order to be liberatory. This is a break from the mainstream western paradigm of pathologizing mental health as a personal issue. Historically in the western iteration of empire, when an individual does not adapt to oppressive conditions they will be viewed as a threat often to be medicated, institutionalized, imprisoned or killed. Rather, politicized somatics recognizes that our bodies and communities tell the story of harm all around us and that in order for us to heal as individuals, the environments and systems we live and operate in must be transformed. The individuals “pathology" of trauma is not the problem, rather it's empire, white supremacy, colonization, ecocide, etc that make us sick. Our body's innate condition in a healed and resilient state is actually one of systemic healing; we heal the world around us as our bodies and our communities heal. Politicized somatics calls us to remember we heal together, because collective trauma requires collective healing.

Our goal of offering somatic skills in the politicized context is to offer tools for community resiliency and empowerment to fight against oppressive systems rather than adapt to them. We hope to offer these skills to individuals in order for them to integrate them as needed for their community building; to support resilience, resistance and decolonizing work.