I was drawn to read The Body Keeps the Score because of what I knew intuitively about how the body stores all our hurts and heartbreaks from my own journey to make peace with my body. Dr. Van der Kolk writes, “Trauma victims cannot recover until they become familiar with and befriend the sensations in their bodies.” I had experienced this on a personal level. When I was writing love notes to my body’s parts, often what I wrote about were past emotional hurts that were connected on a visceral level to my physical body.

I took a Women’s Studies course in college, where I experienced one of my first “awakening” moments. Yep, your math is right. I spent years, decades really, in the Awakening stage.

Ripples. That was the working title of the book I never actually wrote.
When life events, both global and personal, smell worse than a fish-market dumpster fire, it’s easy to feel hopeless. Paralyzed, even. When things are so bad, what’s the point of trying to make the world a better place? What can one person actually do?

Content Warning: This post is about sexual assault. It’s okay to skip this one if you need to.

2016 was a year that shook me relentlessly to wake up. The contentious political landscape assaulted my senses every day, and I couldn’t look away. Then one morning in October, an old video of presidential candidate Trump bragging about grabbing women surfaced. I experienced a seismic shift in my body. I knew exactly what it felt like to have a brazen stranger-danger man grab me in the most intimate place without permission.

There are times when the anger is too much to hold, though. Here are six ways you can move the anger through your body so you can process it and move on. Combine them for even greater effect.

This show is reality TV at its finest.
When Lizzo needed dancers for her 2022 tour, talent agencies weren’t sending her dancers in larger bodies. So she set out to find her own dancers. The show follows thirteen dancers who hope to dance onstage with Lizzo.
Watching each episode brought me so much joy, and I think Lizzo’s Watch Out for the Big Grrrls is worth watching for many reasons.