Pride!

Right around the same tie that I launched this new website and was starting to preparing the materials for “Get Free” an opportunity presented itself that I couldn’t ignore. I was working with clients and developing materials for adults who were trying to find their whole truth in their embodied experiences, and a common root of folks’ shame and self judgement was coming from experiences of being institutionalized. When I say that, you may think about the dark shadow of our communities’ past, where queerness would end people up in a mental institution. But I am talking about the more ubiquitous institution of public school education. Especially for those of us who came through those systems as un-diagnosed neurodivergent people, the ways that the system was failing us got taken on as personal failures. The ways that we learned to mask, people please and peace keep all had hundreds of hours of practice and reinforcement within the daily routines of school.

I could rant for much longer about educational structures, pedagogy and structures of political control, but that’s not what I am here for today.

I have a daughter who was in public school. As I was working on developing and refining tools to help adults shake the legacies of these systems in their body, my little girl was going to class and acquiring them. I have obviously been trying to give her the tools and personal pride to not be broken by these things, so when she expressed to me the ways that she didn’t feel like the school took her safety or well being into consideration, I needed to listen. And the hard thing I heard was that in person public school wasn’t going to keep working. My spouse and I developed a new schedule, found an alternative program for her to be enrolled in and began the process of becoming home school parents. The first months were really a crash course in detoxing from the institutional structures.

Many of the things that we had been preparing for our work with adult clients were able to be pivoted and applied, others needed to just get put on hold.

Today is pride here in Victoria and maybe you found your way here since seeing me or finding my card there. I want to take this opportunity to thank you for following the card to the website and giving this a little read to see what it’s all about.

I do have space in my schedule now to be working with local clients who are looking for gender affirming, trauma informed, covid realistic, body work and somatic coaching- you can send an email to start setting that up.

If you are interested in Pleasure (your) Chest, the post-op embodiment support series that I teach with my spouse, you can get on the wait list here, we don’t have another date set, but will do so when we have a class worth of interested folks.

If you want to support my work and follow along with what I am up to consider joining my Patreon.

I have largely been pulling out of social media but you can find me on BlueSky @softtouchbodies.