Jun 7, 2021Climate Repair: Healing Through TraumaPart 3 in the series: Toward a Somatic Understanding of Climate Change, Trauma, and Transformative Healing — Note: This is the final piece in a series. Catch up with Part 1 and Part 2. What do you yearn for? What’s getting in the way? These two simple questions have opened pathways within me to move, inch, acrobat closer toward whole-self healing. They’ve helped me access more aliveness…Trauma20 min readTrauma20 min read
Mar 3, 2021Climate Stress Lives in the BodyPart 2 in the Series: Toward a Somatic Understanding of Climate Change, Trauma, and Transformative Healing — If you didn’t read Part 1, click here to catch up. Part 2: Climate Stress and Trauma in the Body In his seminal text The Body Keeps the Score, Dr. Bessel Van der Kolk tells the story of Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) as a new diagnosis within the mental health field. He describes how this new category revolutionized treatment…Climate Change14 min readClimate Change14 min read
Jan 19, 2021Embodying the Climate CrisisPart 1 of a Series: Toward a Somatic Understanding of Climate Change, Trauma, and Transformative Healing — A Series — Part 1: Climate Trauma In 2019, well before we knew what the next year would bring us, I got in my car to head north from my neighborhood in South Seattle to an appointment in the north part of the city. I merged onto I-5 and immediately hit traffic. This surprised me, since it…Climate Crisis14 min readClimate Crisis14 min read
Sep 23, 2020When Wildfires Move UsFeeling the impact of wildfire enables us to move toward action — As the wildfires rage in the Western U.S., I’ve watched from my parents’ home in Wisconsin while my community in Seattle, Washington struggled with the twofold setback of social and environmental isolation and health hazard from the pandemic and wildfire smoke. I’ve watched, alongside the rest of the world, as…Wildfires4 min readWildfires4 min read
May 10, 2020Rest is key to productivity: A defining lesson of the COVID-19 eraWe are learning how to support individual and collective wellbeing at work, and finding that it builds our capacity to thrive. — In this peculiar situation which we find ourselves in, there are notable shifts in how people are working, specifically among those of us who are privileged to continue working while being confined at home (for we are certainly not “working from home” like we used to with ease and comfort)…Covid 198 min readCovid 198 min read
Sep 3, 2019Climate Resilience Requires Dismantling Internalized White SupremacyNote to readers: In this article, I am specifically writing to speak to white people who are working in the climate resilience sector. As a white climate resilience designer myself, I center my own experience, including some of my own internal struggle with white silence, with the intention of resonating…White Supremacy7 min readWhite Supremacy7 min read
May 8, 2019My positionality: place, privilege, and principlesAnthropology trains students to become aware of and express their biases as an essential part of the scientific method because, after all, the anthropologist’s primary instrument for collecting ethnographic data is themself. By identifying and articulating their own story, the ethnographer makes the implicit more visible so they are better…White Privilege4 min readWhite Privilege4 min read
