Checking Our Internal Narratives Before Visiting Family

With holidays coming, anxiety is mounting for many, particularly for QTPOC folks, stepping into the spaces where our trauma originates- and often still lives. Here’s a tip that you can incorporate (like now) to set yourself up for a (teensy bit) more easeful holiday time. ⁣
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Self-Care Tip: noticing and shifting long-held narratives about ourselves.⁣
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Step 1: Notice

Notice the narrative, that inner voice, those old messages you’ve held for a long time⁣
What is the brain saying about who you are/were? ⁣
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Step 2: Check In⁣
What parts are still true (this can be nuanced, be open and accepting)?⁣
What IS true right now? ⁣
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Step 3: Manifestation Meditation⁣
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-Take three grounding breaths.⁣
-Ask the question, “who am I in this moment?” Let thoughts, images, events, energies gather. Let the energy of who you are NOW (empowered, healing, autonomous) fill you with each inhale. Let the energy spread through your being to your outer edges.⁣
-Take three grounding breaths.⁣
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Repeat this manifestation meditation at least once a day until (and while) you are visiting fam/home/place of origin.⁣
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For more tips and tools, see:

Self-Care Tool Kit for Family Visits

Visiting Family Without Getting Completely Devastated
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How I Create Safe QTPOC Space Using Trauma-Informed Practices

As a queer, disabled, immigrant woman living with chronic illness, my commitment to trauma-informed healing and self-compassion is the foundation of my work.

Here’s what trauma-informed means to me.

Trauma-informed means I meet you where you are, not where I want you to be. I don’t come over and maneuver your body into a yoga pose because that’s the way I want it to look. Rather I trust your body’s wisdom to guide you to do what you see fit.

Trauma-informed means offering many different ways of doing things and seeing what you find supportive, versus forcing you to use just one technique and making you feel bad if you "fail".

Trauma-informed work is rooted in safe space. Space where you don't have to do the labor of explaining your identities. They may be shared with others, or there are others who have their own multiple identities and therein lies the understanding. I don't jolt your nervous system with assumptions that I share your exact journey either because that can feel just as violating, and it’s just not true- no two people are the same.

Being a trauma-informed practitioner means I am in dialogue with you about everything and how it feels, how you receive it, how we must change it so it works for you. I remind you each time we meet to check in with yourself and your needs in this moment. To articulate them honestly so that this practice is truly about you and your healing

Being truly trauma-informed means teaching a public yoga class and not just saying casually, “Use the wall for tree pose if you need help with balance,” but going to the wall myself, doing tree pose with support for at least one round, because it’s not about how good I, as the teacher, can look doing the pose but to really demonstrate the notion that modifications aren’t less than, just different. 

Being trauma-informed means that when I show up for my client, whether in a public yoga class or an individual healing session, I’m doing extra work. The extra work of checking my biases, of using appropriate language, of always, always offering alternatives. And then of accepting the choices folks make as what they truly need, checking my ego that they should do it some other way, my way. 

It is a lot of work to always be in the noticing. To strive to provide as safe a space as I can for folks. Which is often an experience that many folks have never experienced before. 

And that makes it all worth it.

See also:

Why Sliding Scale Matters