Yes to all of this! I'm a 68 year old woman who, for the last 7+ years has been doing 'the work' on/with myself after what I now call positive disintegration. As I come to understand my inherited family trauma, I do all I can to model to my adult children, my grandchildren and my baby great grandson ways of expressing their feelings and of being true to themselves. I've made countless mistakes in every aspect of my life, but I can affect both my life and theirs in positive ways going forward. This is such tough work and at times, I've felt despair, but I do know this had to happen and I like to feel that healing myself may ripple outwards in some small ways.
You are not alone in asking these important questions and going down into the root of it all—the systems we are immersed in that are perpetuating the collective pain body, and for feeling the exhaustion of trying to help and reach people who need and are ready help, but then feeling the weight of the ones who will also bear this burden who are not yet even born. Thank you for articulating what so many of us feel in our work on a daily basis. How do we treat the roots? The soil? Our collective soul? ....
So so mind blowing, inspirational and truely motivational❤️ Would love to form a whole movement dedicated to research and teach trauma work at this depth to everyday people around the world since we the people are the collective. The more hearts and minds you heal, the more you change the future culture. Upstream is the now!
This is the tension I sit in every day. I'm downstream. I know I'm downstream. I pull women out of the river one at a time and teach them how to breathe again - and while I'm doing that, more are falling in.
The body-level work is real. I've watched women feel their own pulse for the first time in decades and weep because they forgot they were alive. That matters.
But we can't regulate our way out of systems designed to dysregulate us. We can't somatic-breathwork our way past poverty, isolation, and a world that tells you to get over it.
Where I try to intervene is small. The kitchen table. 7am. A 12-year-old says shut up and his mother catches herself mid-reaction for the first time. That's soil work. It's slow. But what she does differently right there changes what her kid's nervous system forms inside of.
What are your thoughts on T’ai Chi Ch’uan as a healing modality? I’m a 20-year practitioner and instructor in the Yang family lineage, and have observed many miracles of somatic release through the gentle, sustained movements of the Form. I appreciate your comments.
In my T’ai Chi practice, one day I experimented with deep relaxation exercises before we started the Form. This was a major departure from traditional warmup exercises which involve stretching. Without exception, my students experienced a profound opening of all the senses, very different from the “energized relaxation” benefit after 20 minutes of T’ai Chi Form. Their peripheral vision expanded to a full 45 degrees, which is often the change felt after a long
session of deep transcendental meditation. All ten students stated they felt whole and serene in body, mind, and spirit.
With this in mind, I’d like your opinion on using your method of stretching the psoas muscle before a TC practice session. I’m fascinated to learn that traumatic memories are stored in this particular muscle, as I’m expanding my practice to work with PTSD and abuse victims. This could be a wonderful, innovative way to help release chronic traumatic blocks which cause so much suffering.
Please give me your ideas on the above, and if you would be so kind, send to my personal email: es.silverfox@yahoo.
Internal sovereignty changes everything.When people grow up internally sovereign, systems become choices, not lifelines or cages. And I think the roots of that sovereignty are deeply relational. Mothers and primary caregivers are some of the greatest creators we have shaping not just behaviour, but a child’s sense of self, agency, and responsibility. When nurture teaches inner authority rather than dependence, self-sustainability becomes possible, and systems can support life rather than replace what was never formed.
Thank you for saying what I have been feeling for a very long time. I am a mental health therapist, and have been having some amazing success stories, but feel the metaphor of the futility of continuing to pull individual bodies out of this relentless river. I am also asking these questions, and seeking a path forward. Parenting is definately key, I tell my clients that if we can interrupt the intergenerational transmission of trauma that is the important work of a lifetime. I also feel that it extends beyond human communities to relationships with the land, where we get our food, the web of life that supports our lives, who and what we depend on for survival. Regenerative community work is promising. I live in a small rural community, and we desperately need a community center where people in crisis can drop in, can find someone to care, and listen, to get a hot shower, someone to watch a baby for mom and dad to get a break. This is a lot of random thoughts, but ultimately the crisis of our times is that our culture is no longer working for most people, and though people often resist changing for themselves, they often get motivated for children, and seeing a path forward with hope may support this turning you are envisioning.
I appreciate what you shared here. One of the reasons I believe this will take a few generations is because we have to inspire enough people and cultures to attend to this.
It has to be large: it's global in scope at this point. What would likely be impossible is doing it at a smaller scale (like at the national level).
My book will present the solution and the map--enough to make clear the path forward from the decision point.
Not everything would change, primarily most of the dysfunctional aspects would, replaced by functional ones. Not just 'less bad' mitigations, but a comprehensive solution. Not generations to achieve, a matter of years for most of the changes, a generation or more to fully break the trauma cycle, and immediate reduction of much stress and many harms.
It will likely be a year or so before publication. In the meantime, there's of course so much education about and processing of trauma to be done. Without that we might not choose the solution, due to our trauma responses.
Individual healing matters, and I see its impact every day, yet it often feels like we are working downstream while the conditions that shape bodies remain unchanged.
Bodies do not form in isolation. They adapt intelligently to family systems, cultural norms, economic pressure and collective history.
When those conditions are dysregulating, the body’s adaptations become both survival and burden.
Holding the question of how to tend the soil, not only the trees feels essential. Thank you for articulating this so clearly.
What stays with me is how this question lives not only in theory, but in daily practice.
Working within existing systems, with real people and limited space, I notice how much *soil work* happens in small, consistent moments of safety, rhythm and being seen.
Not upstream instead of downstream, but upstream awareness inside downstream presence.
We can all keep this in mind, and may be after a few generations, a child can grow up in all glory without getting traumatised and live entire life without clenched jaws and round back!
You are a wise person doing what humans should do, which is: care and act.
Evil has always been in the world. Pain has always been in the world. Shakespeare wrote about these things. Ancient man drew on walls about these things.
Taking the world to the smallest possible level of pain seems to be the way to go. Unfortunately, as we can see with the anti-vax mania, when humans are removed from pain, something really bad happens. When removed from pain, they cease to be able to extrapolate and act appropriately. The anti-vaxxers are removed from the experience of thousands of children becoming paralyzed every year in August. That seems too abstract for them to understand. But minimal side effects from a vaccination they can see. The lack of straining cripples humans.
The lack of stress cripples humans.
Think of it like the butterfly story, where if you help a butterfly out of the chrysalis and they don't have to struggle, they don't remove the water from their wings, and they cannot fly and they die.
A perfect analogy for humans.
So when the terrible amount of pain helping people seems like too much, remember this story, and it will make you feel better. It is important for us to try. To enter the stream and pull bodies out of the water. And to fix the bridge.
How do you do that? You maintain democracy, and you participate. That is how you fix the bridge.
We old gray-haired women have been crying out for 30 years for the younger generations to participate. The entire future of Earth depends on you all participating. Right now is a good time.
Because the damage about to be inflicted if everyone doesn't help is going to be unimaginable.
Yes to all of this! I'm a 68 year old woman who, for the last 7+ years has been doing 'the work' on/with myself after what I now call positive disintegration. As I come to understand my inherited family trauma, I do all I can to model to my adult children, my grandchildren and my baby great grandson ways of expressing their feelings and of being true to themselves. I've made countless mistakes in every aspect of my life, but I can affect both my life and theirs in positive ways going forward. This is such tough work and at times, I've felt despair, but I do know this had to happen and I like to feel that healing myself may ripple outwards in some small ways.
Karen ✨️
Beautifully stated, Karen
You’re definitely breaking those chains! :) Your example is good for me to hear about. Thanks
Thanks JB 🤍
You are not alone in asking these important questions and going down into the root of it all—the systems we are immersed in that are perpetuating the collective pain body, and for feeling the exhaustion of trying to help and reach people who need and are ready help, but then feeling the weight of the ones who will also bear this burden who are not yet even born. Thank you for articulating what so many of us feel in our work on a daily basis. How do we treat the roots? The soil? Our collective soul? ....
We are definitely asking those important questions.
So so mind blowing, inspirational and truely motivational❤️ Would love to form a whole movement dedicated to research and teach trauma work at this depth to everyday people around the world since we the people are the collective. The more hearts and minds you heal, the more you change the future culture. Upstream is the now!
Yes!!! We’re building that movement. We’d love to have you join us in this mission.
This is the tension I sit in every day. I'm downstream. I know I'm downstream. I pull women out of the river one at a time and teach them how to breathe again - and while I'm doing that, more are falling in.
The body-level work is real. I've watched women feel their own pulse for the first time in decades and weep because they forgot they were alive. That matters.
But we can't regulate our way out of systems designed to dysregulate us. We can't somatic-breathwork our way past poverty, isolation, and a world that tells you to get over it.
Where I try to intervene is small. The kitchen table. 7am. A 12-year-old says shut up and his mother catches herself mid-reaction for the first time. That's soil work. It's slow. But what she does differently right there changes what her kid's nervous system forms inside of.
Framing trauma as ecological rather than individual shifts the entire conversation.
With every system failing and so many beings drowning in hardship and trauma, it feels so big that it must be God’s work to reset us.
I believe there is a way. Even if we can’t yet see it.
What are your thoughts on T’ai Chi Ch’uan as a healing modality? I’m a 20-year practitioner and instructor in the Yang family lineage, and have observed many miracles of somatic release through the gentle, sustained movements of the Form. I appreciate your comments.
Emily B. Smith
T’ai Chi Instructor
Yes. Absolutely. I’ve been heavily influenced by that world and approach.
Will:
In my T’ai Chi practice, one day I experimented with deep relaxation exercises before we started the Form. This was a major departure from traditional warmup exercises which involve stretching. Without exception, my students experienced a profound opening of all the senses, very different from the “energized relaxation” benefit after 20 minutes of T’ai Chi Form. Their peripheral vision expanded to a full 45 degrees, which is often the change felt after a long
session of deep transcendental meditation. All ten students stated they felt whole and serene in body, mind, and spirit.
With this in mind, I’d like your opinion on using your method of stretching the psoas muscle before a TC practice session. I’m fascinated to learn that traumatic memories are stored in this particular muscle, as I’m expanding my practice to work with PTSD and abuse victims. This could be a wonderful, innovative way to help release chronic traumatic blocks which cause so much suffering.
Please give me your ideas on the above, and if you would be so kind, send to my personal email: es.silverfox@yahoo.
com
Namaste.
Emily Smith, MS
T’ai Chi Instructor
Grasshopper Healing Arts
Largo, FL 33770
Beautiful piece. Thank you
Internal sovereignty changes everything.When people grow up internally sovereign, systems become choices, not lifelines or cages. And I think the roots of that sovereignty are deeply relational. Mothers and primary caregivers are some of the greatest creators we have shaping not just behaviour, but a child’s sense of self, agency, and responsibility. When nurture teaches inner authority rather than dependence, self-sustainability becomes possible, and systems can support life rather than replace what was never formed.
Your are speaking my language. Thank you for your work to create change!
Thank you for saying what I have been feeling for a very long time. I am a mental health therapist, and have been having some amazing success stories, but feel the metaphor of the futility of continuing to pull individual bodies out of this relentless river. I am also asking these questions, and seeking a path forward. Parenting is definately key, I tell my clients that if we can interrupt the intergenerational transmission of trauma that is the important work of a lifetime. I also feel that it extends beyond human communities to relationships with the land, where we get our food, the web of life that supports our lives, who and what we depend on for survival. Regenerative community work is promising. I live in a small rural community, and we desperately need a community center where people in crisis can drop in, can find someone to care, and listen, to get a hot shower, someone to watch a baby for mom and dad to get a break. This is a lot of random thoughts, but ultimately the crisis of our times is that our culture is no longer working for most people, and though people often resist changing for themselves, they often get motivated for children, and seeing a path forward with hope may support this turning you are envisioning.
I appreciate what you shared here. One of the reasons I believe this will take a few generations is because we have to inspire enough people and cultures to attend to this.
It has to be large: it's global in scope at this point. What would likely be impossible is doing it at a smaller scale (like at the national level).
My book will present the solution and the map--enough to make clear the path forward from the decision point.
Not everything would change, primarily most of the dysfunctional aspects would, replaced by functional ones. Not just 'less bad' mitigations, but a comprehensive solution. Not generations to achieve, a matter of years for most of the changes, a generation or more to fully break the trauma cycle, and immediate reduction of much stress and many harms.
It will likely be a year or so before publication. In the meantime, there's of course so much education about and processing of trauma to be done. Without that we might not choose the solution, due to our trauma responses.
Every person that heals from trauma touches many others, and together, we heal the world one person at a time.
This resonates deeply.
Individual healing matters, and I see its impact every day, yet it often feels like we are working downstream while the conditions that shape bodies remain unchanged.
Bodies do not form in isolation. They adapt intelligently to family systems, cultural norms, economic pressure and collective history.
When those conditions are dysregulating, the body’s adaptations become both survival and burden.
Holding the question of how to tend the soil, not only the trees feels essential. Thank you for articulating this so clearly.
What stays with me is how this question lives not only in theory, but in daily practice.
Working within existing systems, with real people and limited space, I notice how much *soil work* happens in small, consistent moments of safety, rhythm and being seen.
Not upstream instead of downstream, but upstream awareness inside downstream presence.
So well said. Thanks for supporting in the ways you do.
Thank u putting my thoughts into words!!
🥺🥺🥺
We can all keep this in mind, and may be after a few generations, a child can grow up in all glory without getting traumatised and live entire life without clenched jaws and round back!
- from a proud generational trauma breaker!
You are a wise person doing what humans should do, which is: care and act.
Evil has always been in the world. Pain has always been in the world. Shakespeare wrote about these things. Ancient man drew on walls about these things.
Taking the world to the smallest possible level of pain seems to be the way to go. Unfortunately, as we can see with the anti-vax mania, when humans are removed from pain, something really bad happens. When removed from pain, they cease to be able to extrapolate and act appropriately. The anti-vaxxers are removed from the experience of thousands of children becoming paralyzed every year in August. That seems too abstract for them to understand. But minimal side effects from a vaccination they can see. The lack of straining cripples humans.
The lack of stress cripples humans.
Think of it like the butterfly story, where if you help a butterfly out of the chrysalis and they don't have to struggle, they don't remove the water from their wings, and they cannot fly and they die.
A perfect analogy for humans.
So when the terrible amount of pain helping people seems like too much, remember this story, and it will make you feel better. It is important for us to try. To enter the stream and pull bodies out of the water. And to fix the bridge.
How do you do that? You maintain democracy, and you participate. That is how you fix the bridge.
We old gray-haired women have been crying out for 30 years for the younger generations to participate. The entire future of Earth depends on you all participating. Right now is a good time.
Because the damage about to be inflicted if everyone doesn't help is going to be unimaginable.