The Word Longing Is Nestled Inside Belonging:
The Need for a Political and Somatic Strategy Rooted in Love
It’s the 4th of July and I’m sitting in an In-N-Out Burger across from an older white man wearing a MAGA hat, noticing a powerful combination of heat and constriction rising in my body.
Something I know about myself is that I am wired to do something when I feel an uncomfortable emotion or sensation. I could move to a different table, but that feels cowardly. I could say something to him, but everything I can think of to say comes from my core survival shaping: to confront, shame, or intimidate.
I want to be brave and mean — which at this point in my life feels like a lonely way to be.
Instead, I close my eyes and subtly put my hand over my heart. I get curious about my body’s sensations. Underneath the survival shaping, I can feel my fear. If Trump wins this upcoming election, every one of us will be deeply harmed by that scenario. I search deeper. As I do this, I notice a flood of more subtle sensations: the tug of sorrow, the tight mouth of despair, the weight of resignation, and something new … a bubbling effervescence that could only be described as tenderness.
If somehow these sensations could be transmuted and emerge in one, unified, voice — here’s what I might have said:
“I want you to know that I recognize your humanity.”
“A moment ago, I sensed you could feel me looking at you. Is that true? We both did the easy thing and pretended not to notice, but if we lived in a world where we could talk without the fear of being shamed— or worse — I would tell you that I can understand your need for something to believe in. I imagine that your MAGA hat gives you that — your vote will count, will make things right — and with that comes some relief.
“I take a lot of actions aligned with my beliefs. Yet, in all honesty, I have no idea what to do to effectively stop the problems we face in this country. And that doesn’t mean I don’t have ideas. I have loads of ideas, pretty amazing ones actually, and many of them I’ve brought to fruition — but deep down I often feel tired and defeated. I don’t believe that anything I do will ever get through ... to people like you.
“And that doesn't stop me from strategically fighting you. No, not fighting you — ‘building against your ideas.’ After a lifetime of internalizing the energy of fighting — deep down, fighting you feels like fighting myself. Because all the blame and judgment I feel toward you, I also weaponize against myself.”
A Strategy Rooted in Love
My collaborator
(also a producer of my upcoming film, The End of Isolation) and I have both focused a great deal of our professional lives and activism on reimagining justice outside prisons and jails — otherwise known as prison abolition.“If we start sentencing people to less prison time,” Suotonye says in the film, “that means for all these years we’ve been over sentencing people. We've been harming people. And who the fuck wants to live with that? That's why our strategy has to be rooted in love — so people can change and not be castigated for it.”
If we’re going to change just about anything in this country — from our approach to climate crisis mitigation, to creating safety in our communities outside prisons and jails, to ending the ongoing slaughter and starvation of Palestinians — we’re going to have to get more Americans on board with those changes.
Shaming, superiority, and divisiveness haven’t gotten us any closer to these goals — it’s gotten us more lies and vitriol that algorithms and headlines thrive on; more unspeakable violence, often against the most innocent; and more white men who feel attacked, scared, and determined to lash out.
Practiced on a larger scale, somatic practice teaches us how to consistently get out of the reactive, survival strategies that reproduce domination culture. It took our nervous systems about 500 million years to develop the capacity to feel safe enough to get physically close to one another, and as humans, we’ve been able to develop incredibly complex methods of cooperation.
With embodied liberation, we cultivate the safe, secure attachment and emotional regulation that are the basis for how we exist in the world. We learn to embody the inclusive, welcoming communities we’re trying to build.
I can’t guarantee that somatics will make you feel better in the short term. In order to complete these survival strategies you will have to feel everything you have been trying not to feel — but numbing and avoiding will cause you more suffering in the long term; and collectively, it keeps us in a reactive mode, disallowing the wise action we so badly need in this world.
What does this have to do with the Radical Project of Embodied Liberation?
What I was doing sitting in that In-N-Out Burger is the practice of embodied liberation. When you have been in a body that’s experienced chronic stress, scarcity, trauma, and the intersections of oppression repeatedly over time, slipping into survival strategies every time you’re under pressure is as easy as slipping into a pair of old shoes. The shoes suck, the sole is worn thin, and the heel is too tight, but they are familiar. And so we choose a familiar hell.
That’s what our social justice movement strategy does — slip into the same well-worn shoes every time a new crisis slams us in the gut. Our warrior stance, our sense of superiority, and our us/them mentality might motivate some people to join us, but it also deeply alienates and entrenches many more against us. We may win this election and dodge that huge bullet, or we may not. But what about subsequent elections?
The millions upon millions of Americans who vote for Trump are going to continue being the guards working in our prisons, the pickers at Amazon, and the CEOs of the world’s largest corporations.
Now, I want you to know that I’m just as annoyed and triggered by white-male fragility as anyone else. I had a dangerous and abusive white man as a father, and I went through a painful divorce with another white man that ripped my heart to shreds. Yet practically speaking, the only way to overcome what we’re up against — both nationally and globally — is to find some way to bridge with and include angry white men. Just because this is uncomfortable to say doesn't make it any less true.
In many ways, Trump supporters, and white men in general, have become the ultimate “other” on the left. The way we respond to them is directly correlated with our collective shadow. In that sense, how we treat white men says more about our humanity in this moment than almost anything else.
Our only real enemies are ideas, the policies and institutions that enforce them, and the interests beyond them — not the people manipulated by them.
When I talk about a strategy of love, I’m not talking about a Hallmark kind of love — where we pretend our differences don’t exist and placate each other in ways that keep us small. I’m talking about a love rooted in accountability, collectivity, and real conversations. At this point, those conversations — much like the one I had in my head with the man at In-N-Out Burger — will never take place. Because most of us haven't built enough capacity for safety in our bodies to constructively engage with people and ideas we don’t agree with.
The Word “Longing” Is Nestled inside “Belonging”
Belonging is not a place where we arrive; it is a state we risk our hearts for again and again.
Sitting at the table with me at the In-N-Out Burger are my two nephews and my 75-year-old mom — perhaps the three people in the world I would most like to protect. They’ve all been through a lot in their lives, as have I, and I would really like things to get easier for them. We belong to each other, no matter what happens, but our belonging does not exist in isolation — it exists in an ecosystem of strategies to survive.
Cultivating belonging on the Left is a struggle, even for a social justice warrior like myself with all kinds of credentials. One of the defining spiritual crises of my life was when I was held as a political hostage by the Iranian government for 410 days in solitary confinement. I went to the Middle East to start out as a journalist and teach Iraqi refugees, but I also went because I was honestly fed up with my country — its foreign policy and its culture of dominance — yet I returned, after the best and worst years of my life, ready to love it.
It’s my wish that everyone who has been dehumanized in this life emerges with a commitment to never dehumanize anyone else — but this doesn't become possible without deep healing and somatic practice. Instead, many will stay small and scared forever.
The Left can be a harsh, divided, and unwelcoming place. Many mainstream Americans welcomed me like a hero upon my return from the Iranian prison, while the Left I had served my entire life largely didn’t know what to do with me. Years later, my identity and beliefs don’t conform to Leftist ideology, and I still fear being castigated for that — imagine what people on the Right must feel about us?
I glance once again at the man in the MAGA hat. May I always remember that it sucks to be an old, white, helpless man in this country — who, like me, has no real way to “fix” the problems we’re facing. Call me foolish, but within me exists a longing to forge a bridge across the immense chasm separating him from us, us from him.
“Perhaps once the limitations of this dimension drop away — and we’re freed from these ingenious meat suits we call bodies — I will meet you, MAGA-man, as an ancestor. I Imagine our open faces — our open hearts — as we laugh, rage, and embrace one another. Yes, perhaps we will meet in love.
Until then, I commit to regulating my body in your presence, doing my best to listen to you in the form you’re currently in — and to never losing sight of your humanity.”
So I commit to a strategy rooted in love — the idealistic, the unrealistic, the only practical way.
HOW TO WORK WITH ME:
I am a Liberation Coach trained in somatic trauma transformation. This therapeutic healing method is client-centered, collaborative and effective at removing the obstacles blocking the change you want to see in your lives. I currently have space open for 3 clients in my practice and would love to work with you. Visit my website to learn more and sign up for a free, 30-min discovery call. I offer coaching packages and ongoing sessions online—and in-person for people in Oakland and San Rafael, CA. “Sarah Shourd’s intuitive direction, infused with radical empathy, has unlocked shifts of awareness in my mind-body connection, igniting deeper personal growth and freedom. I highly recommend Sarah to anyone seeking a supportive and conscious guide on their healing journey.” –Client
Looking ahead, in the Fall I’ll be offering a very special LIVE 12-session GROUP ONLINE COACHING PROGRAM called Breaking-Open and Breaking-Through. This course is for women and gender-queer people that have experienced devastation on their personal journeys — whether it’s losing a company, processing a divorce, or grieving a death. How do we reclaim our power and piece ourselves back together after our lives have been shattered? How do we rebuild after the almost inevitable “dark night of the soul”? In this course we will creatively express our grief and rage, cultivate our innate resilience, integrate our fierceness and our gentleness, and unleash our potential for rest, relaxation, and a life of greater influence and connection. If you or anyone you know is interested in being on my mailing list for this course let me know at shourdsomatics@gmail.com.
As always, thank you for being such a special part of my community.
The power and poetry of this piece moved me Sarah. I have seen the word BELONGING at an increasing cadence over the last few years as DEIA (or IDEA as some prefer) but will never see it the same.
I read this with much awe and respect. Funny but it made me remember in the 60s when all my comrades called cops 'pigs.' Of course, I understood why. Put someone in a uniform, give them a gun, and they're omnipotent. They believe they can behave with impunity, and they do horrible, murderous things. I don't like it. But I also didn't like the name calling. I didn't like the act of dehumanizing. Or the insult to pigs, our very smart cousins. There's a lot to think about here. But the direction is clear. To quote the great poet W.H. Auden: 'You shall love your crooked neighbour. With your crooked heart.'