Hello dear reader,
How have you been since we last touched base?
In the Northern hemisphere, we have officially crossed the threshold from summer to autumn, marked by the autumn equinox.
For the majority of our ancestors, autumn has been a season of profound material, spiritual, and social importance. And for most of our shared history, the arrival of this season meant something very important for our survival and continuity: the harvest.
In Lebanon, this association with land and survival persists.
Autumn is the time for olive harvest, and the months to come are reserved for creating olive oil and other types of "mouneh". These are preserved pantry goods created from the summer harvest to sustain households through the winter. This can look like turning tomatoes to tomato paste, pomegranates to molasses, and drying herbs like thyme and sumac. In fact, many of the ingredients our cuisine has become associated with and famous for depend on this season.
This is also why autumn is the month of returning to our villages. Which, for the last three years, has been fraught with forced displacement, colonial intimidation, destruction, and violence.
What used to be a season of connection to land and community has turned into a season of resistance. Where people risk their lives to harvest whatever remains accessible, or reminisce on what they had lost in the hopes of rebuilding it.
When we created Reimagining Safety in Somatics, we didn't start from the therapist's or coach's office. We started from these realities on the ground.
We started from our lands. From the realities of those who care and fight for them, and the realities of those who support them. And then we asked ourselves:
- What is the role of the body-focused practitioner half across the globe?
- How are healing spaces everywhere interconnected with those standing face-to-face with colonial and systemic violence?
- And what changes when practitioners no longer position themselves within "wellness" but within liberation movements?
These might sound like big and theoretical questions. They might even elicit some feelings of resistance. But they are not nonsensical, nor are they impossible to answer.
And if we start to break them down while containing what somatically surfaces as we challenge ourselves to think beyond borders, imagination and possibility start to take over.
We begin to regenerate whatever has been stagnating in us. Whatever empire has made us believe is impossible, and therefore not worthy of our care, attention, or investment.
If you can feel that possibility in your bones, then consider this your own personal last call to return to the land to start the harvest. The land here is the space we are going to create together, our own version of "mouneh", as we prepare for the dark winter ahead.
There is a reason why safety has been placed at the center of somatic work. There is a reason why we were made so preoccupied with it as stewards of the individual and collective body. Call me paranoid, but my feeling is that we were oriented towards something that barely makes a dent in systems of oppression.
My people haven't been safe, somatically or materially, for a very long time. I, too, grew up without any safety. And yet we persist and resist.Not in spite of this lack, but precisely because of it.
Because we have long accepted that no one is safe, and so individual safety no longer becomes a prerequisite for showing up, building, and regenerating. But rather a collective goal, and a fight for dignity and belonging.
While many Southern Lebanese people are returning to pick olives under the hum of surveillance drones, we gather to pick hope and possibility from the corners of our practices and the knooks of our bodies.
May we have a blessed and abundant harvest in service of our collective liberation.
Registration closes on September 30th, at 12 am CEST
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Thank you for being part of the TDK 💙
With care,
Tania
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