About | Lineage

My Why

 

How do we become places of sanctuary for each other?

Not always steady, not always calm, not always regulated. But able to respond from the wisdom of lineage at our backs, able to root into quaking earth, able to sense ourselves as resonant beings, able to extend out into connection. Feeling the pulse of our precious life force, and offering it as love.

These times need our embodied alchemy.

 

I'm a queer Black person of English~ Sudanese~ Syrian~ Scottish heritage. The kind of healing I’m interested in takes it beyond the edges of our own bodies, into our relationships with beings, land, systems, ancestors, descendants, time, cosmos and and and.

I’m committed to how we bring forth a world where each of us can experience an aliveness that feels both simple & abundant.

My faith in this vision ebbs and flows with the tide on this coastline I call home. Mostly, I believe we'll get there by keeping each other company as we live into these questions together:

 

How do we love fiercely and resist isolation through immense loss?

How do we reinstate and re-trust the beauty, depth & richness of our own heritages and let wisdom emerge from there, through ritual, so we can really meet each other?

How do we hold open creative portals into other worlds while living in this one?

How do we offer water & sustenance & thanks to our ancestors ~ plants, beings, art, places ~ when they arrive in our awareness to support us?

How do we go slow and soft with time and in relationships, when everything feels urgent?

 

And, how do we explore all this not just as something theoretical that would be nice someday, but as ways of being that we help each other embody in this moment.

What I Offer

I'm based in Scotland. Online and in person, I offer somatics & healing arts spaces for individuals, groups & social justice organisations.

Somatic practice is a non-linear process of returning to an embodied way of being. Attuned to, welcoming & honouring all that is here: our felt sense, energetic awareness, physical sensations, emotions, thoughts, ancestral wisdom, and everything else that's present... so that we can respond choicefully from our whole knowing.

My approach is intuitive and multi-modal. I especially love offering creative portals into somatic practice & ritual to people who do not have easeful access to rest & play, because of the systems we live within: global majority, disabled, queer, trans, and diasporic kin; migrant & refugee communities; unhoused people; those impacted by systemic injustice; and people living within poverty. My work celebrates and is rooted in the wisdom & alchemy of these experiences.

I used to look at people who were laying relaxed in the park on a sunny day, their bodies settled, soft, open and unguarded, and wonder, “How do they do that?”

When I talk about remembering ways of being, I mean deep time remembering: the ways that we inherently know, as human beings part of nature, how to be in right relationship with each other, alongside and as part of our earth.

We may not have had much experience of this felt sense of inherent safety, belonging, dignity and connection within our bodies within our lifetime. We may not have been born into conditions that make it easeful for us to inhabit this way of being. 

I come from fire-tenders and care-givers and many unknowns, via the Nile and the English Lakes. I grew up on land where my belonging felt conditional, living in a body that learned early how to hold contradiction and nuance. It took me much longer to feel safe enough to rest.

As a mixed-heritage kid growing up in an isolated town without Black or SWANA community and before the internet, I was shaped by observing my environment and experiencing its tensions. How violence and care could co-exist. Craftmanship poured into nuclear submarines and warships. Alchemy expressed through a garden. Resistance through song. I sought tendrils of BIPOC and queer connection through pen pals and books and music. My siblings and I can still recite the film Labyrinth verbatim.

As a young adult without the capacity to travel far, I rooted into the cities I lived in, joining the flow of established community projects supporting refugees. I spent a long time trying to understand things intellectually, outside of my body at a safe distance. I'm a deep-sensing sometimes-hermit who also loves people. For twenty years, I danced with this Scorpio/Gemini energy as a freelance writer, helping people to tell their stories in support of social change.

In my thirties, physical pain and joint instability brought me into contact with myself in ways I could no longer ignore. And within the pain, surprising the hell out of me, came some kind of poetry, a long-awaited turning towards, relief. Pain returned me to music as a felt experience. It led me to create a simple altar, to begin learning Arabic, to recognise myself in places I'd abandoned.

I began to understand that ancestors could mean something beyond blood kin: expansive and always here.

Living from a place of integrity & alignment within my body is something I've been learning since. Structurally, physiologically, relationally, spiritually. It's felt like a whole new language, an entirely different way of being. It's required my geekiness, my curiosity, but mostly my courage to go there, my courage to feel. It's felt transformational to realise that this magical body and nervous system that holds me in my forties is the same bodymind I’ve inhabited all my life, through the trauma and the joys… and to commit to taking care of it, thanking it, going easy on it, paying attention, listening to its needs.

 

We can begin by asking, “What’s here now?” in each moment, and bring loving presence to the answers that emerge.

This is the practice I offer.

 

How somatics & ritual can hold us in everyday life

For me, learning is always a symbiosis of professional training with personal exploration. I'm interested in how somatic awareness & ritual can be integrated into your everyday life. It's a living, relational practice. Textbooks and theory and podcasts, yes. And, late night calls with a friend when scary shit happens. Rituals crafted without needing to buy anything. Spending time with the elements. Reminding each other to breathe.

Many experiences that I thought would bring complete collapse and isolation have become paths into deeper intimacy and connection. I thank my somatic practices & rituals for this. 

My practice holds me with the war in Sudan and my relationships with loved ones still there and those I'm grieving. It supports me through my experiences of being a co-parent supporting our child who has additional needs. It holds my real-time intersectional experiences of how systems of oppression reinforce each other and my experiences of the love, unlearning & possibilities that breathe outside of those systems. It's unfolded through facilitating hundreds of gatherings online and in-person over the past 6 years, feeling into community beyond the buzz words.

Since 2024, some of my most transformative somatic experiences have happened through The Practice Ground, the embodiment community planted by Prentis Hemphill and Kasha Ho. There, I've been able to waltz my decades of diligent studying off the page and into experience: returning to regular live practices, slowly growing connections and friendships within the community, and letting myself be witnessed in this tender work of change. Mostly, I've been learning to not run away after sharing something vulnerable but, instead, to trust and return. A place to be in real-time experimentation around what happens in our bodies as we try to live into those questions I named at the top of the page.

My teachers there ~ Óscar Trujillo, Prentis Hemphill, Alta Starr, Kasha Ho, alongside other beautiful beings ~ offer a quality of somatic care where lineage is felt, and politics entwines with art. My time in that community has made me a more precise practitioner.

I understand the impact of this work because I feel part of something bigger.

Friendship as light. Rest as water. Community as earth. Ancestors as air. Practice as moss.

My lineage

 

This work is a continuation of the labour, energy, care, knowledge, commitment, fight, courage & generosity of those who came before us.

 

I’m inspired by planting seeds and seeing what grows, by people who bring playfulness into their serious work, by people who join the dots across the constellations of individual lives, social justice and our climate reality, by people who stay creative and courageous. In untangling from individualism, naming lineage reminds us that we are not solo beings. 

I share some of these roots to celebrate and honour the ways history shapes us. Not only what we’ve learned but why we offer it in the way we do, what motivates us, what questions we’re with, whose work we’re continuing, what we’re choosing to interrupt or divest from, and how we locate ourselves in long-time perspectives of before and beyond this moment.

Because, if you choose to practice embodiment alongside me, you might be interested in exploring this, too.

 

 

Lineage doesn't feel like lists. It feels like stories swirling, tides meeting. But here goes:

 

My way of being and holding of space is sustained by my formative learning lineage that includes: my English~Sudanese~Syrian~Scottish heritage, Coniston Water, Wastwater, stories of the Nile, sandalwood, my mum's singing, my dad's allotment, my grandad's piano, a visit to the Martin Luther King Center at the age of 11, embodied care felt within refuge spaces for refugees, hibiscus flowers blooming into Karkadeh tea, a launderette with a shelf of books, libraries.

Later: generative somatics, Disability Justice, intersectional and Black feminisms, ACT UP, the real Blancas and Pray Tells whose names I don't know.

Ideas about different ways of being reached me through: Prentis Hemphill and The Embodiment Institute, Resmaa Menakem, Lama Rod Owens, Mia Mingus, Staci Haines, Mia Birdsong, Kai Cheng Thom, Hugh Milne, Mary Bond, adrienne maree brown, Bayo Akomolafe, Rowen White, Camille Sapara Barton, Bonnie Bainbridge Cohen, Francis Weller.

On my shelves and in my ears: James Baldwin, George Michael, Beverly Glenn-Copeland, Tracy Chapman, Arundhati Roy, Rebecca Solnit, Derek Jarman, and more music and books than I can name. 

My personal somatics practices that support this bodymind through experiences of physical disability are rooted in Clinical Somatic Movement, intuitive energy, Feldenkrais, dance.

The somatic practices I offer are informed by the knowledge and lineages of: generative somatics & politicised somatics, Healing Justice, Transformative Justice, Buddhist traditions of non-dualism, movements for civil rights and social justice especially the Movement for Black Lives, Strozzi Institute, humanistic psychology, West African collective grief rituals, martial arts traditions especially Aikido, Internal Family Systems, Focusing, Hakomi, and more. 

The lineage of somatic coaching I'm qualified in holds complex relationships with appropriation and commodification of indigenous practices and wisdom traditions, that are being taught outside of their original cultural and place-based contexts. Staci Haines has co-created a Living Lineage deck, that seeks to explore the complex collective story of the lineage of what we call "somatics". You can find it here.

Current Community Commitments

The Practice Ground by The Embodiment Institute

generative somatics daily practice space

 

Professional Qualifications

ICF-Accredited Diploma in Body-oriented Coaching (Levels 1 & 2), The Somatic School

Body-Oriented Group Coaching, The Somatic School

Transformational Coach, Spectacular School

Trauma-Informed Coaching, Susana Rinderle 

Self-Guided Embodiment Basics, The Embodiment Institute

SAND (Supporting Autism and Neurodiversity) Training, Differabled Scotland

MSc Creative Writing

BSc International Development

Things I love

Voicenotes from friends, kimchi on everything, NPR Tiny Desk concerts, the buzzy energy of a playful idea, the lyrics to ‘Whole of the Moon’ and 'Under Pressure', looking closely at things, any performance that creates a liminal world with its own rules, lists.

 

Daily practices

Doorstep cuppa, altar practice, phone-free early morning, Arabic on Duolingo, never-the-same-twice smoothie, strength-training for my hypermobile body, gratitude, intentional somatic practice, the same (perfect) song 15x over.

 

Rituals that support me

Loud music, writing, being with the trees, embodying water, visioning with others, grief rituals, Tarot, speaking with the birds, dancing.

 

Things I no longer do

Hate on my body and mind, compare my current capacity to how I used to be able to do things, consume so much media that I can’t be present in the world, push through moments and days where I need to rest, stay in spaces that are committed to staying the same, think that being playful is unprofessional, judge myself for all the ways I need help.

 

You can usually find me

Holding space & facilitating workshops & parenting & listening to George Michael & writing & queering my life & practicing not knowing in community, always with a sense of wonder at the amazingness of beings and our earth, and imagining the texture of a world where everyone gets to thrive.

These times need our embodied alchemy. 

Let's skip the small talk.