body rites
a holistic healing and embodiment workbook for Black survivors of sexual trauma
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- $20.99
Publisher Description
A written companion and workbook for readers seeking to reclaim their bodies as home in healing from sexual trauma.
Body rites as a holistic healing journey, anchored in the practice of decolonizing healing and reclaiming body sovereignty, reaches back into indigenous roots and land-based healing. It centers remembering as a means of survival.
This workbook is the first of its kind: a resource of rituals divided into four healing journeys for Black women, femmes, and nonbinary survivors of sexual assault. The experiential workbook moves beyond prescriptive self-help models by providing a gentle guide and liaison to explore the impact of sexual trauma on the mind, body, heart, and spirit. It is an invitation to heal holistically, drawing upon psychophysiology, lived body wisdom, trauma-informed embodiment practices, kinship and ancestral connections, and African spiritual practices. Most urgently, this book is a series of intimate conversations with your “self”; and remembrance that healing lives at the core of your intuition.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
In this intimate debut, psychologist and yogi Young gently guides Black "women, femmes, and nonbinary survivors of sexual assault" through a "practice of decolonizing our medicine and reclaiming our body sovereignty." She explains that as Black people have historically been forced to care for others "as a means of survival," self-care is crucial to healing from sexual trauma and can be undertaken through four different "journeys": "Settling IN," or pursuing physical embodiment through nervous system regulation; "the work," using yoga and meditation to "foster an internal sense of safety, agency, and choice"; "the medicine," drawing on herbal healing practices and "chakra energies"; and "spirit & the ancestors," or communing with ancestral spirits "as a source of support in healing yourself and intergenerational trauma." Young centers her advice in a robust journaling practice that seamlessly marries somatic and emotional self-investigation ("How do you know in your body when you are being your most true self? What does it feel like?"), and her methodology is grounded in African spirituality practice as well as an in-depth understanding of physiology and psychology, making for a wise and broad-minded approach. This is an essential resource for sexual abuse survivors.
