Black Folks, Your Lives Matter

Hey y’all.

Phew! What a week. Like many of you I feel overwhelmed, enraged, saddened, helpless, emotionally exhausted – and it just grows with every new story of Black folks being targeted, harassed, assaulted, and murdered. My feelings are only a fraction of what Black folks and other people of color feel and what they go through each day in our country, from countless microagressions to big, ugly acts of institutionalized and individual racism.

I stand in solidarity with peaceful protestors, angry rioters, crying and fearful parents, every heartbroken community. Black folks, your lives matter. You matter. Your families matter. Your rights matter. Black Lives Matter, Black Lives Matter, Black Lives Matter.

How do we care for ourselves and others when we’re going through something like this as a country? Having your voice heard is self-care. Holding space together as a community is self-care. Expressing rage, anger, and grief is self-care.

One of my  colleagues from the Denver birth community, Elizabeth Diaz Ordaz of Que Venga La Luz Doula Services, posted this to her Instagram account this weekend and I love it so much:

“One of the books I read during quarantine was The Body Keeps the Score, a book about how trauma literally reshapes the physical body on a molecular level. When trauma goes unaddressed, trauma manifests both in mental and physical illness that builds upon the suffering that person has already gone through, creating an unforgiving cycle of pain.

Watching the riots unfold, my first thoughts were to the lessons of this book. All the destruction is a natural and obvious manifestation of a nation who has refused to address the trauma and pain of those that have been systematically oppressed since its founding.

But then I thought about the end of the book, the resolutions that the author finds while administering trauma therapy. Bessel Van Der Kolk found that integrating practices that bring a traumatized person in touch with their physical body (yoga, meditation, art, dance, etc) counteracts the process of dissociation that the experience of trauma creates. By literally moving the pain through and out of your body, we can re-route the neural networks of our brains that have been affected by fear and suffering. Protests and riots have always driven social change but they have also served a fundamental cathartic purpose for those housing the trauma of colonization, racism, and prejudice in their bodies. May the we allow ourselves to march, rage, dance, sing, scream our way to a better and thriving future.”

I’m holding all of us in so much love, hoping we can move through this rage, grief and trauma together.