Without the Body, There Is No Evolution
Why Embodiment Is Not a Luxury but a Prerequisite for Real Change
There is a growing tension within movements for justice, healing, and liberation: the concern that somatic practices — meditation, breathwork, trauma healing, nervous system regulation — may distract from or even replace political action. Some trauma theorists and organizers worry that embodiment work has become a refuge for the privileged, an aesthetic of healing that soothes guilt but avoids responsibility.
These concerns are not without merit. Commodified wellness practices often depoliticize real pain. Somatic work marketed as "healing" can become a form of escapism — soothing the nervous system without interrogating the systems that produce the harm.
But this critique, if left unexamined, risks reinforcing another illusion: that we can think, legislate, organize, or strategize our way to collective liberation without involving our bodies.
We cannot.
In fact, we never have.
Embodiment Alone Is Not the Answer
No single practice, no matter how sacred, will dismantle harm. Embodiment is not a magic key, nor should it become a new purity test or silo. But to pursue change without it — without the breath, the blood, the trembling, the grief, the rage, the capacity to feel and stay and relate — is to build the future on the same disembodied foundations that brought us here.
Disembodiment is not neutral. It is the scaffolding of oppression.
It is how domination survives, even in the mouths of those speaking of justice.
As the Tewa scholar Gregory Cajete writes,
“You cannot think yourself into right relationship with the world. You must feel your way in.”
This has always been the ethic of Indigenous cosmologies: that knowing is not abstract, but embodied, ecological, and relational. We learn not only from books or arguments, but from soil, from sensation, from ceremony.
The Cart and the Horse
If political strategy is the cart, embodiment is the horse.
We’ve seen what happens when we reverse that — when movements driven by intellect and urgency break under the weight of burnout, interpersonal harm, and trauma reenactment. When analysis outpaces awareness. When "right" ideas are carried in bodies still governed by fear, dominance, or disconnection.
Without embodiment, our politics are brittle.
Without politics, our embodiment is incomplete.
We need both: integrated, resourced, rooted.
Leanne Betasamosake Simpson, Michi Saagiig Nishnaabeg scholar and writer, reminds us:
“We need to create movements that feel like home.”
Home is not just an idea — it is a felt sense of safety, resonance, and belonging in the body, in community, and on the land.
As Francis Weller says,
“The work of the mature person is to carry grief in one hand and gratitude in the other.”
This is the gesture of the nervous system in balance. Not clinging to the ideal of a healed world, nor collapsing under its sorrow — but staying, tending, enduring. We cannot learn that posture in theory. We learn it in the muscles, in the breath, in the practice of staying human in the face of inhumanity.
Embodiment Is Political
To reclaim the body is to reclaim agency — especially in a world that has legislated, enslaved, pathologized, and punished bodies for centuries.
For Black, Indigenous, and queer communities, embodiment is resistance.
For white-bodied people, somatic work can interrupt internalized supremacy and cultivate capacity for repair.
For all of us, it is a way of coming home to what systems of extraction have tried to sever: the truth of interdependence.
As Resmaa Menakem writes in My Grandmother’s Hands:
“The body—your body and my body—is where changing the status quo must begin.”
When our embodiment is shaped in a culture of disconnection, domination, and fear, reclaiming it is not individualistic — it is insurgent.
Tyson Yunkaporta, in Sand Talk, reminds us that “thinking” in many Indigenous traditions is not a heady or abstract activity. It happens in land, in movement, in the body —
“In Aboriginal worldviews, knowledge is a set of relationships.”
To know something, then, is to embody it in relationship — with people, place, and story. To act politically without the body is to act ungrounded, uprooted, and easily misled.
There Is No Evolution Without Relationship
And there is no relationship without a body to feel with.
When we train our nervous systems to stay present in conflict, in uncertainty, in rupture and repair — we become capable of holding the complexity this moment demands.
We stop reaching for purity or perfection.
We stop building movements out of ideology and start building them out of resonance — real, flawed, fleshy, vulnerable connection.
Robin Wall Kimmerer, in Braiding Sweetgrass, teaches:
“All flourishing is mutual.”
This is a truth the nervous system understands long before the intellect does. The body knows reciprocity. It knows how to give and receive. It knows what it is to belong — and what it is to grieve the loss of belonging.
adrienne maree brown, whose work synthesizes somatics, liberation, and emergent strategy, writes:
“Our radical imagination is a muscle that must be exercised.”
And she teaches us that change, like life, is fractal. The way we are in our bodies, in our homes, in our small circles shapes the large-scale structures we are trying to transform.
Embodiment, in this view, is not supplemental.
It is strategic — a tool of transformation that aligns scale, relationship, and direction.
The Future Doesn’t Need More Theories
It needs more people who are willing to feel.
To stay with grief.
To metabolize rage.
To show up not just with answers, but with capacity.
Because when the body is present, we don’t just imagine different futures —
we practice them.
I feel called to return to a culture of practice. Shared practice. Practice with training partners committed to their own growth, as well as the growth of those they train with, built upon the recognition that the land is our training ground and we must tend to the spaces where we train.
If you are called into practice and are looking for others to practice with, please reach out.