I had the privilege to offer bodywork to my father today. As you can see, he is a black man.
And as I worked with him, I witnessed something I’ve already seen before that I’m intuitively beginning to recognize as a pattern in the bodies of some of the black and brown clients I’ve touched.
A deep drop into sleep.
And this happens for quite a long chunk of the session. Even in the moments when the pressure of touch is high.
As if they collapse into a very deep state of parasympathetic rest.
Ancestral rest, if I might.
As I held him, I sensed a sort of “truth” for these kinds of bodies (our bodies):
The truth that simply existing in a world that racializes you creates a background hum of uninterrupted hypervigilance.
It starts from the mother’s womb, and it continues to live in the tissues.
It is inherited, rehearsed and passed down generationally. Not always visible, rarely named, but always there…
I thing about the microaggressions, the discrimination all the inhereted survival strategies. The need to prove, to be alert, to scan just to move through public spaces, workplaces and medical systems.
Black and Brown bodies have so far been—and still are—often touched in clinical, impersonal, even violent ways. I think of all the medical racism, sexual objectification. Societal beauty standards.
There is rarely touch for these kinds of people that informs them:
“you are safe, you are whole… this body is perfect as it is, you can let go now”.
So when these bodies finally land in a sacred space, that rather than pathologize them, actually honors them… they do what they were never allowed to do:
They rest.
Physically… ancestrally.
They drop into a healing trance, a deep nervous system unwinding.
And today I felt my lineage from Panama, Costa Rica, Jamaica, Nigeria…finally exhaling.
Sacred sleep as an initiation into rest and into being held.
What a true blessing to hold this space.
To offer sanctuary not only for the person on the table—my father, flesh of my flesh, the body who created mine… but also for the entire line that carried too much, for too long.
I love you papa🩸
@miriamjave_photography 📸
