Land & Legacy

We carry the land of our ancestors in our blood and bones because in every place we become the land. We exchange earth and water and air. This bodily exchange binds us into sacred belonging and invites us to be in right relationship with the land.

My ancestors are a river people. Our river, the Sindh, pays tribute to the Yamuna, which leads to the Ganga, which leads to the sea. My father taught me how to swim before I could walk and my mother showed me how to stay afloat in a desert. My people survived colonialism and were displaced by the forced migration of Partition. We have not stopped moving, which perhaps explains my devotion to stillness.

Today, as an uninvited guest on Lenapehoking I honour the past, present and future of this land, its waterways, its people and their teachings. This land is stolen land and the people of this land were forcibly removed from their home. I benefit from the ongoing violence of genocide and settler colonialism to work, live, learn and play here. I commit to engaging with this complexity, and to choices in the direction of re-indigeneity. This is central to my work of relational cartography and the somatics of developmental, cultural and intergenerational repair. 

Lineage & Kinship

We carry our ancestors in our body stories. Whether or not we have access to genealogical information, our ancestors are alive in us here and now. We shape and are shaped by our family and culture and the legacies we embody. When we come into relationship with these legacies, we can learn from inherited shapes, integrate these learnings and then choose which shapes to continue—or shift. 

We are a constellation of relationships. We can embody lineage and legacy gifts of our ancestors, and our lineages are beyond blood and bone. I honour the roots of craniosacral work in Shawnee medicine and join my biodynamic teachers in reverence for the embryological forces that instruct us on life and death. I honour the Nath lineage of Himalayan yogis through my teacher Yogrishi Vishvketu. I honour the lineage of healing justice, and the radical queers who raised me. I honour the guidance of bell hooks, James Baldwin, and Buddhism that remind me that the heart-seed of all things is love. I am guided by Eagle and held by Stone, and am a joyful student of Moss. There are more teachers and guides to name here, and I will add to this list. We shape and are shaped by each other through webs of kinship, and I orient to these relationships, human and more than human, that open us into wider and deeper possibilities.

Somatics & Belonging

Body-centered contemplative practices are not new. Our ancestral practices are embodied practices. Ritual is rooted in relationship with land through rhythm and reciprocity; in community song, dance and prayer. Many peoples have been disconnected from their indigenous cultural systems of wellbeing. Reconnecting with the wisdom and medicine of these integrated somatic practices allows reconnection to our bodies, to ourselves and each other. Reconnection supports relationship to our kin; human and more than human, exactly as we are.

Embodiment is a portal to right relationship and our wider belonging. May my work continue to unfold in service of this remembering of what is always, already here.

Welcome, welcome, welcome.