feeling
We understand a doula to be someone who holds space for others during times of transition. In our rage and resourcefulness, our hope and our hurting, our conviction and our care, we hold space for the transition that an uprising might be. We can also safeguard and shepherd seeds, helping to cultivate conditions for change. A doula minds demands and dangers, needs and the nascent. A doula asks. A doula listens. A doula can be quiet. A doula can scream…..A doula dances with uncertainty, admits to not knowing. A doula is a formulation, a formation, a praxis, an action, an opportunity to give and to grow. Solidarity and love are doulas.
What does an uprising doula do? One Institute
I am a commitment to sensation (even where there is numbness) and to softness (where it is not necessary to be hard).
I search for practices which might hold us through change, transition, difficulty and doubt. I learn and practice with others who want to find new shapes and ways together.
In service of these commitments I find practices and communities who offer tools, solidarity and acknowledgement to support the physical, emotional and spiritual dimension of personal and social change.
In the last years my work has been to process my experiences of indifferent systems, and the knowledge generated from them. At the core of this reflection, has been an attempt to understand the social, psychological and physical effects of relational defeat, and connect them to their political significance. On this journey, I have sought practices against the numbing and alienation wrought by disconnection from embodied knowledges, and for a more life affirming world generated from an anchored, grounded sensorial knowing
Questions I carry in this search are:
How do we hold the warmth of political desire when faced with the coldness of intransigence?
What spaces, places, people and tools might help tend to the wounds of being thwarted in the pursuit of connection, reciprocity and transmutation?
How do we stay soft when the world demands our resistance?
I am a Level I certified facilitator of The Resilience Toolkit and I have achieved Level II Politics of Trauma course with Staci K Haines
I am a level one practitioner in Narrative Therapy and have completed an advanced training in the Tree of Life with PHOLA. I am currently completing an immersion with the Center for Collective Wisdom.
I am on my journey to becoming a birth worker with Abuela Doulas.
Further Reading
The Politics of Trauma Somatics, Healing, and Social Justice Read
Embodied Social Justice Rae Johnson
Routledge Book, 2nd Edition
Read
Building Resilient OrganizationsThe Forge
Read
Our bodies are incredible sources of informationNkem Ndefo on stress and The Resilience Toolkit
Read