We explored the individual, ancestral and collective imprints of colonization on the mind, body, heart and nervous system. One aspect of this was supporting each participant to research and learn about their own “trauma mountain,” the trauma history related to colonization from their own culture. This opened up a space to feel and sense more deeply how colonization lives and moves in us, from moment to moment. We also opened up different spaces to discover what decolonization might look or feel like, through movement, dialogue, reflection and art. Decolonization is a vast and complex topic; each participant was free to follow the aspects and themes that were alive and relevant for them. Colonization and decolonization of the body was one aspect that was very powerful and quite challenging for many participants.
We invited people who felt called to be in this exploration, and who also had sufficient resources to support them in what we were aware would be an intense experiential process. <br />
There were some profound challenges that we all encountered due to the breadth and depth and intensity of this topic. <br /> We started out with a group of 44 participants and completed with 37 participants. We met for 11 group sessions from February - November 2024. <br />
Meeting the collective trauma landscape was a gradual process.The initial two sessions were dedicated to create safety, build group coherence and connect to resources, including the 3 sync practice. We had one powerful session focused on exploring how colonization and decolonization (whatever they chose to focus on) felt in their bodies through guided movement and through exploration in triads. The group began going deeper into the Collective Trauma Integration Process by session three when a participant left the Lab. This catalyzed an activated energy in the field that felt more collective, and much more in touch with fear, pain, outrage, and disempowerment connected with the past. Different voices arose, some making claims for justice, some wondering about the safety of the co-facilitators team racial composition, others mentioning the extractive and brutalizing nature of colonization. The ancestral field became more tangible as one of participants’ fathers, who had been a colonizer, was on his deathbed. We kept guiding participants toward the core practices of staying present, including feelings and emotions, and speaking directly from their own embodied experience. From that session on, we put our toes in the dark lake of collective trauma and entered the chaos and the complex messiness together.
Meeting the collective trauma landscape was a gradual process.The initial two sessions were dedicated to create safety, build group coherence and connect to resources, including the 3 sync practice. We had one powerful session focused on exploring how colonization and decolonization (whatever they chose to focus on) felt in their bodies through guided movement and through exploration in triads. The group began going deeper into the Collective Trauma Integration Process by session three when a participant left the Lab. This catalyzed an activated energy in the field that felt more collective, and much more in touch with fear, pain, outrage, and disempowerment connected with the past. Different voices arose, some making claims for justice, some wondering about the safety of the co-facilitators team racial composition, others mentioning the extractive and brutalizing nature of colonization. The ancestral field became more tangible as one of participants’ fathers, who had been a colonizer, was on his deathbed. We kept guiding participants toward the core practices of staying present, including feelings and emotions, and speaking directly from their own embodied experience. From that session on, we put our toes in the dark lake of collective trauma and entered the chaos and the complex messiness together.
We invited reflection and the felt sense of the “trauma mountain” in their specific lineages. Racialized trauma and the victim and perpetrator dynamic came up. We explored, through movement practice, how colonization and decolonization felt in our bodies. We watched a short clip of Bayo Akomolafe defining whiteness, not as an identity or people, but a “social economic arrangement of bodies” serving modernity. This definition created a larger space to inhabit, in which we are all immersed in colonization. Whiteness is performance, says Bayo, and even the global majority performs whiteness.
Participants in the global majority, white bodied and mixed groups reflected and acknowledged the muted and marginalized voices (without any pressure to speak), places that were crying for space, to be witnessed, felt, and included. We also inquired about the physical sensations, emotions and images connected to their trauma mountains.
The Social Location map allowed us to explore identities that feel victimized, and others that commit conscious and unconscious transgressions. They recognized areas of privilege and areas of discrimination living in the same body, and began to sense into complexity. One participant perceived education to be a source of power and pride while feeling defeated regarding race and ethnicity.
Participants researched their 'trauma mountains' (the weight of ancestral and collective trauma each carries). Listening to the stories during Lab sessions and posted on Sutra gave us a good sense of what was moving in the field. They touched trauma fields in specific ways through their relationships with their ancestors. It was clear, for example, that some participants were making very different conscious choices than those of their ancestors. We presenced ancestral energy in the room connected to the perpetration of those who held slaves, the ones who committed transgressions related to the female body, and more. Specifically, one of the voices that came up was related to the ancestral, and ongoing, traumatic imprints of patriarchal systems: "The female body is born in trauma and subjugated." Some of them explored the capacity of women to stand in their personal power and agency. As well as the lack of empowerment due to patriarchal dominance, and how women participate in propagating this very same imbalance. A participant from a British lineage shared the experience of what it takes to feel the trauma legacy and the restoration with one’s own ancestral ground. The presence of these participants in the Lab journey was already an indicator of the liberation and growth happening in their lineages.
For most of our participants, the integration process involved working with different kinds of intense emotions: grief, anger, outrage, helplessness, guilt, shame, and fear. This kind of integration can be challenging and destabilizing when the emotions carry the weight of a collective experience. Our Lab process supported this journey of integration in different ways: Through the large group space where we listened to different voices, through the triads, the movement sessions, the grief ritual, the art, and the research. The restoration seemed to be about the emergence of a felt sense of a deeper connection: to themselves, to each other, to their ancestors, and eventually to the larger field of the group. This began with small gestures and soft voices, which were deeply significant: “I believe we can create a healing container together. It takes time and patience and learning to trust each other and this process.” Further along in our Lab it showed up as an increased capacity to honour and listen to different perspectives, to hold each other in deep and painful experiences, and an embodied sense of participating in something greater than ourselves, which was voiced in different ways such as “Now I feel that your collective trauma is mine too, they are not really separate.”
In the Lab decolonizing process, participants are being invited to transform some of their most fundamental orientations when it comes to learning and evolving:
To value not knowing more than being right, and in control, to appreciate discomfort, and soften the ways in which they have overvalued being safe and comfortable. And to value non action, as they learn to enter a deeper state of stillness and presence. Without accessing this stillness, much of our action becomes a reaction, instead of an attuned response. We are learning to support people with different levels of development and very different backgrounds in relating more skillfully to ambiguity, chaos and complexity.
For many of the white bodied participants, the Lab process requires a transcendence of their attachment to a sense of being innocent, and a pathway towards accepting responsibility for the harm they have been a part of, even through their lineages, without getting stuck in guilt and shame. This requires both mental and emotional maturity. And there is the question of how to co-create a field in which long muted voices, often collective voices, can finally feel safe enough to speak. These all feel like ‘walking questions’ that will reveal themselves as we become more skillful and mature.
My attitude toward this work is shifting away from "activism” and into awareness of myself within the circles of relational fields. I am becoming more self-compassionate, and more compassionate toward people I have tended to label as "colonizers" (or patriarchal, or racist, or abusive).
As a white, European, privileged woman I became aware of a willing to "fix" things. This "fixing" was revealed to be the exact expression of what whiteness and oppression was about. This was a shock. But also so humbling and transformative. (...) I learned to witness the participants who suffer the consequences of colonization with the depth of the grief, pain and rage that I initially feared so much.
I learned to allow myself to be vulnerable, intensely uncomfortable (even unbearably sometimes). To include ugliness, pain, loss, brokenness and fear... I discovered many fragments and layers of conditioned filters colouring my experience.
There were moments when participants were able to unmute a voice in themselves, whether personal, ancestral or collective, and feel that they were deeply received by the field. And moments when participants developed enough maturity and stability to listen to something they would not have been able to receive and take in before. And times when a participant's point of view became much more fluid, and less rigid, less locked into binaries.
The grieving ritual set me on a path to a deep place of awakening into presencing in my body. It took me to the brink, letting go of everything, total surrender.
The embodied movement exercises... helped me...to come closer to both the very difficult and the very positive experiences, with the sense of holding both in my body.
Crisis Trauma Relief
Trauma-Informed Practice
Collective Trauma Integration
Community of Practice
Raising Awareness
Overview
What we do
Who we are
Підпишіться на наші інформаційні листи. Допоможіть нам зцілювати колективну травму та зменшувати негативні ефекти для нашої глобальної культури.
Shayla Wright 
English