Workshop Replay: Coming Home to the Body
In which we experience the truth that all bodies are worthy of care.
Very often, when you begin a mindfulness or meditation practice, or try your first yoga class, you’ll be immediately invited to “drop into the body.” As if this were the most basic, fundamental place to begin.
But that’s not true for many of us.
Many of us need a place where it is possible for us to give consent, and to get the body’s consent, to come together. Because there might be good reasons why we’re not inside of our bodies currently. For example:
We may be recovering from trauma and/or grief
We may be postpartum and learning how to live in a new body
We may be experiencing changes to the body from illness and/or aging that are taking time to integrate
So, in this workshop, my friend Kate and I wanted to play around with the idea that we need an in-between place to rest, and to begin again with our bodies, that offers us more choices besides “go in” or “stay out.”
We also wanted to create a place of respite, away from the diet-culture-heavy narrative that every January, we need to suddenly begin:
Looking at our bodies more often
Evaluating our bodies more often
Setting goals to make our bodies “better” in one way or another—meaning, going beyond just baseline healthiness towards some level of optimization, towards moving them higher on the “body hierarchy.”
All of these pressures can create the conditions for re-traumatization when you’re having a hard time coming home to your own body, and this mentality can create trauma on a collective scale. Because if we’re on what Sonya Renee Taylor calls “the body ladder,” and we’re climbing to the top, then some people have to be beneath us. Otherwise, our place within this hierarchy would not matter at all.
Politically, ranking our bodies within an hierarchy of “good” and “bad” is a problem for all of us. Why?
Because when we decide that some bodies are good and some bodies are less-good, then it becomes easy to believe, in a system where care resources are not unlimited, that some bodies are more worthy of care and some bodies should then necessarily get less.
From there, it then becomes easy to justify aggression against those less-worthy bodies, apathy towards those bodies, or neglect of those bodies.
Unfortunately, sometimes we also internalize this moralizing narrative and we treat our own bodies with aggression and neglect. When we do so, it normalizes the notion that other bodies can be treated this way.
So, Kate and I wanted to create an opportunity for us to step into an entirely different framework, a different way of relating to our bodies, and to all bodies, that is less evaluative and more liberating, but that also does not rely on toxic positivity or affirmations to work on us.
Together, we explore the radical notion that our bodies, as well as the bodies of those currently being harmed or neglected by the state, are all worthy of care. We experiment with ways to experience this sense of worthiness directly, through moment-to-moment mindfulness and writing exercises. And we dedicate the merits to those in Minnesota, who are putting these beliefs into action as we speak.
Folks who signed up for this workshop, and/or who are participating in the Mentorship program here at In Tending, can scroll down now to access these workshop materials virtually below, which allow you to do the following:
Watch the video and follow along with the exercises.
Listen to the audio, akin to a podcast, and do the same.
Read the transcript at your own pace.
Don’t have a Mentorship subscription? You can click here to view your options, and upgrade to unlock the workshop materials below.
From now until January 31, you can name your own price for the Mentorship program, which also gives you:
A 1:1 personalized support session from me. We can use this time to co-create trauma-informed mindfulness and writing practices that are just for you, which can further support you in coming home to the body.
An all-access pass to all of our future workshops in 2026. This includes the next two meditation and writing workshops in this series, Re-Imagining Intimacy (Feb 25) and Re-Claiming Our Power (March 25).
May this workshop help you move closer to both personal and collective liberation. And we hope to see you at the next one!
Warmly,