Your body knows.

Your skin hums with ancestral quickening, carrying the weight of predator-kings crowned by broken systems.

For those of us who inhabit historically brutalized bodies—especially women, transgender folks, and femmes—this reality isn't just an intellectual understanding. It's a somatic truth etched into our nervous systems, challenging our fundamental right to safety and dignity.

But listen closely: Your body isn't an archive of wounds—it's a living manifesto of liberation.

Understanding Your Body's Wisdom: The Science of Survival

When white men who grab pussies grab power, your cells don’t debate policy – they scream. These aren't just random sensations—they're your nervous system's sophisticated response to perceived threats. Dr. Porges’ Polyvagal Theory names what your hips already know. These visceral responses aren't random sensations; they're your nervous system's sophisticated defense system, developed through generations of survival wisdom. To understand this dance between threat and safety, let's explore what is revealed through groundbreaking Polyvagal Theory.

The Ventral Vagal State: Your Birthright of Safety

When truly safe, your ventral vagal system awakens like a garden in spring:

Breath flows like rivers through delta veins
Fingers find other fingers without flinching
Laughter erupts from belly-caverns
Connection weaves through your being like roots through soil

Think of this state as your body's natural home—where movement happens, where joy takes root, where connection blooms without effort.

The Sympathetic State: Your Ancient Guardian

When danger appears, your sympathetic nervous system rises like an internal warrior:

Thoughts race like scouts through neural forests
Heart drums ancient warning rhythms
Muscles become armor
Eyes scan horizons for escape routes

This isn't anxiety—it's your body's brilliant protection system, inherited from every ancestor who survived to give you life.

The Dorsal Vagal State: The Deep Freeze

When threats overwhelm your defenses, the dorsal vagal system emerges as your last-resort sanctuary:

Lungs fill with concrete
Vision tunnels to pinhole light
Time becomes taffy
Exhaustion wraps you in cotton wool

Understanding this state helps us honor it—not as breakdown, but as sophisticated survival.

The Living Archive of Your Flesh

For bodies carrying histories of systemic oppression, these responses run deeper than personal experience. They're cellular memories, passed down through generations:

Women's Bodies: A Legacy of Resistance

Your muscles hold the memory of every woman who walked dark streets with keys between fingers, who smiled through gritted teeth in boardrooms, who survived. When predators grasp power, your body remembers—not just your own stories, but the collective history of women navigating hostile worlds.

Transgender Bodies: Revolutionary Existence

For our transgender folks, each breath in a binary world is an act of revolution. Your nervous system manages layers of threat: from casual erasure to outright violence. Seeing predators in power may feel like validation of that threat—but your very existence proves the possibility of transformation.

The Alchemy of Somatic Liberation

Here's where we begin to transmute survival into sovereignty. This isn't about "fixing" your responses—they've kept you alive. Instead, we're creating islands of safety within the storm that can connect to one another, teaching flesh to remember its inherent dignity and feel our birthright of belonging.

Your Somatic Liberation Ritual

Time needed: 15-20 minutes Materials: Your body, your breath, and the courage to reclaim what's yours

1. Create Your Sanctuary

Turn your phone-off and make it into sacrament. Wrap shoulders in ancestral warmth—a quilt, a shawl, a prayer. Let air become velvet against your skin.

2. Initiate Sacred Touch

Press palms to sternum like opening a secret door. Feel the morse code beneath breastbone: B-R-E-A-T-H-E. Let warmth seep through callouses into the places that forgot they could feel safe.

3. Rewrite Your Nervous System's Story

Rotate neck slowly—left to right, a metronome scanning horizons. Each turn says: "Their power isn't the sun. My pupils needn't shrink."

4. Breathe Like Defecting

Inhale 4 beats (smell jasmine through tear gas)
Suspend 4 (lips pressed to ancestors' palms)
Exhale 6 (release state control from bronchioles)

5. Move What's Stored

Let your body shake like autumn leaves, releasing trapped lightning from your joints. This isn't chaos—it's liberation in motion.

6. Speak Your Sovereignty

Return hands to heart-home and declare:

"This body is:

A border even fascists cannot cross
An archive of every ancestor who refused to bend
A hypothesis of liberation written in goosebumps"

Your Ongoing Practice: Beyond Ritual

Remember: This isn't about perfecting a technique. It's about reclaiming your right to inhabit your body fully, one breath at a time. Start with five minutes daily. Let your body's wisdom guide modifications.

The science is clear: Each time you practice this kind of embodied awareness, you're literally rewiring your nervous system for resilience. You're not just healing yourself—you're contributing to a collective liberation that ripples through generations.

A Truth in Your Cells

Living within systems of oppression is brutal,, but your body carries wisdom older than these broken structures. Through somatic self-love, you're not just caring for yourself—you're participating in an ancient tradition of resistance and renewal.

Every time you choose to listen to your body, to honor its needs, to create safety within your own skin, you're contributing to a world where embodied dignity becomes not just possible, but inevitable.

You are worthy of that world. You are worthy of that love. And it begins, always, with coming home to yourself.

Ready to deepen your practice of somatic liberation? Join our community of bodies remembering their power. Weekly guidance delivered straight to your sanctuary.

Coming Home to Your Body: A Guide to Somatic Liberation in Times of Oppression