Alive Against Being Tamed

Taking Off the Armor of the World

First, we become brave. 

At a young age, the horrors and injustices of the world were too much for me: environmental destruction, racialized capitalism, the mark of brutality my own father left on our home. I was a scared, insecure kid, constantly worried about Mom, who raised me with little help from anyone. 

At age 11, I became an activist, connecting my problems to the world’s problems. I stopped eating meat, swore off driving and started reading radical zines. After high school, I moved to the Bay Area and quickly learned that a good strategy for a small woman with a soft voice was not to back down. l developed an ego relationship with being “strong” and “fearless”—punching men who assaulted me in punk clubs, choosing to live in neighborhoods where I was harassed and even attacked while riding my bike home. 

On one hand, I was putting my beliefs into action by getting arrested for anti war actions and traveling to support revolutionary indigenous movements in Mexico, but on the other hand I was suffering in an abusive relationship.

When I got hurt, I sent my pain into a secret place—if you will protect me, I will become hard—consolidating my alliance with an armored world. I continued to project a badass image, while burying emotions such as fear, helplessness and shame. 

In my mid-20s I fell in love with another badass activist and moved to Syria to teach Iraqi refugees. I was just beginning to thaw out and learn to receive care when the most known chapter of my life began. I was captured and taken hostage while on a hike near an unmarked border and held by the Iranian government for 410 days in solitary confinement. In prison, I couldn’t spend all day every day weeping and pleading; by necessity, I had to control and bypass my emotions. I did what was familiar and hardened to protect myself, but on the inside something new was happening—I was learning the slow work of tending to and loving myself with incredible determination. 

When I got back to the US, now in my 30s, I chose a career path—anti prison advocacy, investigative journalism, producing and touring large-scale creative projects—that required I draw on that well-trained strategy of badassery. When it comes to doing what I deem important in the world I can be pushy, impatient and driven by urgency. I can also be judgmental of weakness and even justify the misuse of my personal power for the sake of my goals—because being in a position of leadership can lead to one’s dominant parts, well, dominating. 

Then, we must soften. 

In my 40s, the shape of badassery began to feel like a shield I no longer wanted to wear but I struggled to take off. Though I’ve accomplished a great deal from applying pressure or force—because systems of oppression don’t yield easily—I’ve also done a fair amount of harm to myself and others. Often when I wanted to show up with tenderness and authenticity, I instead felt trapped in anger and/or performative compassion. When I wanted to rest, I was wracked by guilt and fear. The survival structures that were adaptive in my childhood, solidified in prison and satisfactory for my social-justice ambitions in my 30s were no longer serving my longing for personal, political and social transformation. 

During the pandemic I found myself with the time and necessity to sit with my difficult emotions and observe my reactions for the first time in my life. The first breakthrough was experiencing safety in my body, which required me to identify and tolerate fear, an emotion I’d been suppressing my entire life. While constriction of muscles and tissue literally block grief from moving through the body, a soft physical and energetic body can bend without breaking, allowing sadness but also joy, tenderness and pleasure to move through. 

I’ve now realize that hardening is in fact internalizing the value system of capitalism, white supremacy, patriarchy and ableism—all the systems of hierarchy and control I’ve committed my life to subverting.

I also realize that my armor wasn’t what had allowed me to get through traumatic and difficult experiences in the past, it was keeping my heart open enough to soften and show up for myself, again and again.

Over time, softening towards myself has created a foundation of safety, dignity and belonging which allows for my power to come through without constriction or fear.

Softening becomes a prism through which a rainbow of energy can emerge with discernment: rage, lust, disappointment, hilarity, impatience, longing, joy and grief all become authentically expressible. We create an opening for what is true, what is emergent, what is our gift to the world.

Becoming brave, again. 

The most radical tool I’ve found to unravel these internal systems of oppression and integrate the wisdom and strength of our experiences is somatic therapy and practice in its many forms. Politicized somatics then helps us to build capacity to be with difficult realities we face, such as the climate crisis and the prison system, without contracting or succumbing to overwhelm. 

Somatics is a very old language, one that started forming 500 million years ago when nervous systems began to develop in life on Earth. This natural language of sensation has been forced underground by the myth of mind-body separation that Western, colonial cultures of domination thrive on.

The United States is not heading in the direction of more freedom. Instead, we are facing the real danger of fascism. I now realize that the type of badassery required to resist oppressive structures, though necessary, does not serve in building sustainable feminist, antiracist, liberatory movements.

I want to join my voice with other healers, activists and spiritual practitioners to declare that the most important thing we can do is to heal and to bring that transformation to our social justice work. 

Our task is to cultivate an integrity that is neither soft or hard, but dynamic and resilient—expanding us into ever-greater levels of capacity to show up again and again to the aliveness of the moment, the tenderness of the moment, the nakedness, beauty and complexity of the moment—as human beings and communities who don’t break but expand into more and more powerful versions of ourselves. 

Because powerful movements require powerful bodies, bodies that know how to be soft with themselves, bodies that are impossible to dominate, bodies alive against being tamed. 

A call for conversations. If you’re a social justice activist, world shaper, artist or tender dreamer who resonates with what I’ve written, please consider signing up for a free, 30-minute Zoom call. I’d love to learn from about the barriers you’re facing on your path toward individual and collective healing and liberation. My goal is to have many conversations in the next month. 

Sarah Shourd is a somatic practitioner, bodyworker and embodiment, liberation coach. For well over a decade, she has used trauma-informed journalism, somatic healing and legislative theater to elevate and empower communities in resistance to the carceral state, exposing the impact of mass incarceration and exploring alternative approaches to preventing harm in our society. She trained with Somatic Experiencing, Strozzi Institute and The Embody Lab. The ideas in this post were influenced by those of Staci Haines (The Politics of Trauma) and Ruby Gibson (My Body, My Earth). For more information visit Shourdsomatics.com.