Emotions and sensations drive and shape human existence and experience. Key neurobiological aspects of these interpretive and communicative processes are somatic, automatic, non-verbal, and un- or pre-conscious: beginning bottom-up in the ‘body’, then translated by the ‘mind’…and back and out again. There is no divide: we are integrated sensing-feeling-thinking self-systems (re)made through our intraconnection with each other and the world. We fight, we flee, we freeze, we fold, we fawn; we soothe, we stay, we melt, we flow, we bond.

Trauma, toxic stress, and psychosocial hurt — in all their devastating relational and structural permutations — lodge as emotion and sensation in our bodyminds, fragmenting our whole selves, disintegrating our capacity to know what we more than know. If we could transform our pain and conflict just by thinking differently, if we could meaningfully and sustainably change our selves, our relationships, and our realities through top-down processes of talk, insight, commitment, and behaviour alone, we’d already have done it. We are often desperate to already have done it — have lied and toiled and fought and numbed and (nearly) died to have done it — and it’s heart- and gut-wrenchingly oppressive to suggest otherwise.

But we re-cognise and sense and feel — through embodied wisdom that refuses to be suppressed and silenced, in visceral truths that we can’t and shouldn’t deny through over-regulation and counter-rationalisation, through emotional meaning that demands hearing and deserves understanding — that transformative change requires far more than intellectualised awareness and individualised action. Our struggles are explicit and implicit, flesh and blood and intrasystemic. Our wounds are sensible, response-able, purpose-full, uncontainable. Our trauma is psychic, emotional, physical, and spiritual — corporeal, cultural, (trans)generational, and political.

So our work will be about (more than) deep talking, (more than) close listening, (more than) empathic validating, (more than) necessary coping. We’ll re-turn to more-​than-​knowing — engaging a reciprocal flow of noticing and shifting that (re)integrates thinking, feeling, re-membering, and sensing; bottom-up and top-down bodymind processes; language, imagery, movement, and breath; explicit and implicit communication; neuroception and interoception; co-regulation and collective liberation; critical consciousness sharing and revolutionary caring; resourced reprocessing and neural reshaping: self-in-relationship world-remaking.

Emotion-, sensation-, and trauma-focused work begins with safeness: grounded trust, courage, and consent enabled through relentless attunement and responsiveness. Experiential work emerges and resonates within and between us — right here and right now — through a radically present dance at the edges, enactments, and dialectics of living: synchrony and discord, security and vulnerability, comfort and risk, practice and creativity, past and future, acceptance and commitment, rupture and repair, forgiveness and accountability, solidarity and fluidity, intraconnection and differentiation, unity and multiplicity, movement and stillness, tension and release, holding and letting go, contact and spaciousness, contraction and expansion, deaths and rebirths with and through the fractal, spiral, undulating flux of self, relationship, and change. Existential work honours our unyielding growth towards meaning, value(s), belonging, justice, wholeness, and impermanence — with hope that is soaring and grounded, through a wild imagining of how things could and should and will be otherwise. And all of it re-members: our bodyminds — wounded and wise, aware and insistent, (inter)subjective and collective, fragile and unbroken — hold and heal our suffering, our pleasures, our yearnings, and our bond.