About | Lineage
First things first, words are my jam!
If they're not yours, click here for the less wordy Easy Read version of the whole website :)
My Why
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 a queer Black person of English~ Sudanese~ Syrian~ Scottish heritage. I’m committed to how we co-create a world where each of us can experience embodied collective care that feels both simple & abundant.
These times are asking us to be something else. There's a different vision within us for our future earth, for the way we relate to each other in all our gorgeous weirdness... a vision that diverges away from inevitability & extraction & individualism & scarcity & mistrust & cultures of exhaustion. Something that reflects the qualities of aliveness I hold close: courage, rest, play and queering.
The more space we share to feel into that vision within our individual and collective body, the more action we can take towards bringing it to life. Our bodies have so much to tell us. With courage and curiosity, we can learn to notice all that is here, to offer and receive, and meet this moment together.
And that’s what intentional somatic practice is all about: feeling and action. Being with the truth of what is here now, allowing ourselves to feel it, and acting from there.
I love holding space for us to return to our bodies as trustworthy landscapes... where the mystical, the poetic, the cosmic, the ancestral live & breathe.
What I Offer
I combine group gatherings, close partnership, expressive arts, and creative collaboration, to offer you different portals into embodiment, so we can be in feeling & healing together.
My approach centers kin who identify as queer or Black or BIPOC. I love being in practice with community-tenders, practitioners, facilitators and change-makers who want to be held & celebrated as you hold space for others, and want to welcome in deep rest & play as you embody your vision for our collective healing.
Mostly online, and sometimes in person, I offer:
One-to-One Embodiment Companionship
A Garden of Recorded Offerings
Collaborations with fellow practitioners & facilitators
Partnership with artists & poets to fundraise for my loved ones in Sudan
When we practice what is not always easeful within the systems we live in...
invitation without expectation
belonging without contortion
s p a c i o u s n e s s
... we generate more choice, so we can be with what's present, act in alignment, and root into the collective soil.
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, with and within 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.
Living from a place of integrity & alignment within my body is something I had to learn as an adult. 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.
In this process, 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 and hold space for.
And the answers, the embodied changes, slow and non-linear in their own sweet time, come through being held and witnessed within an ecosystem of relationship.
Together, we can hold the realities of our living experiences of marginalisation and stay with the truth of all that is here - the harm, the systemic oppression, the grief of it all - while also aligning with people and places and practices that feel like freedom and beauty.
We can connect to the depth and richness of our own unique heritages.
And we can bring deep care to the bodies we’re in.
My lineage
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.
This work is a continuation of the labour, energy, care, knowledge, commitment, fight, courage & generosity of those who came before us.
I share some of these roots to celebrate and honour the ways lineage 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 own learning lineage that includes: my English~Sudanese~Syrian~Scottish heritage with its ancestral guidance & practices, Coniston Water, Wastwater, stories of the Nile, sandalwood, navigating growing up Black in a town in Cumbria, my mum's singing, my dad's allotment, my grandad's piano, my grandparents' involvement with the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament, my community's & family's craftsmanship in building nuclear submarines and warships, 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, 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, Lama Rod Owens, Mia Mingus, Staci Haines, Mia Birdsong, Kai Cheng Thom, Mary Bond, adrienne maree brown, Bayo Akomolafe, Rowen White, Camille Sapara Barton.
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, dance, and more.
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, indigenous collective grief rituals, martial arts traditions especially Aikido, Family Constellations, Internal Family Systems, Hakomi, and more.
Context & Commitment
I hold space and write at the shoreline of somatic remembering, queerness, diaspora, fugitivity, disability & music on repeat. I am always learning here.
Context has shaped my learning. As someone living in England and Scotland, my relationships with embodiment practice have been shaped by the culture of ownership, dominance and extraction that I've grown up within. As a mixed-heritage kid growing up in an isolated town without Black community and before the internet, I was shaped by observing my environment and experiencing its tensions, seeking tendrils of BIPOC and queer connection through books and music.
As a young adult without the capacity to travel, I rooted into the cities I lived in, joining the flow of established community projects. I spent a long time trying to understand things intellectually, outside of my body at a safe distance.
And now, I try to learn by being in the felt experiment of growing deep sustainable bonds within relationship, and questioning what I think I know.
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.
It feels integral to our healing... to be in creative practice and enquiry around lineage, to explore how to better tell the stories of the ways our bodies of water meet.
I'll support you to remember and nurture ritual & practice that emerges from your own ancestral wisdom & heritage. And if displacement or estrangement is part of your inheritance, as it is mine, we'll move with tenderness.
Experience
I'm trained as a somatic coach, having initially trained as a transformational life coach. I bring skills in both embodied self-awareness and conceptual self-awareness.
My work will always be deeply rooted in and enriched by:
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my formative experiences in loving community with people seeking asylum & refuge
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my relationships with loved ones in Sudan who have been displaced by ongoing conflict
- my experiences as a co-parent, of unlearning, repair, experiments, queering & play
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my experiences as a queer disabled Black person with English~ Sudanese~ Syrian~ Scottish heritage, including my living understanding of the ways different systems of oppression reinforce each other and enact harm, and my experiences of the beauty, wisdom & possibilities that breathe outside of those systems
- twenty years as a freelance writer helping people to tell their stories in support of social change
- lifelong involvement in grassroots community projects built around refugees' quality of life, advocacy for neurodivergent, BIPOC and disabled people, and LGBTQIA+ wellbeing
My ongoing commitment flows in the meeting points of embodied approaches to collective wellbeing, somatic alignment, ancestral remembering, simple living, decolonising, and custodianship of our earth.
There's space here, in our time together,
for whatever you want to welcome in.
Professional Qualifications
ICF-Accredited Diploma in Body-oriented Coaching, The Somatic School
Body-Oriented Group Coaching, The Somatic School
Transformational Coach, Dr Sarah Madigan's 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
Currently training towards
ICF Level 2 (Professional Certified Coach) accreditation
NADA Protocol Practitioner - five-point ear acupuncture
Current Community Commitments
The Practice Ground by The Embodiment Institute
generative somatics daily practice space
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 rituals
Doorstep cuppa, altar practice, phone-free early morning, never-the-same-twice smoothie, strength-training for my hypermobile body, gratitude, intentional somatic practice, the same (perfect) song 15x over.
Practices that support me
Loud music, writing, forests, water, visioning with others, grief rituals, Tarot, speaking to 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 & 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.
