Day 4: B+W Photo Challenge

Day 4 B&W Photo Challenge

Another scene from my workspace. I’m reading this book again. I used to joke when people asked me what I do, “I teach sewing lessons and help unravel the damage our 7th grade home-etc teachers did to us, so basically, I’m a therapist.” .

I know I’m not a therapist. Not only am I not licensed, I didn’t even finish college, after 15 years of going off-again, on-again. I do know trauma, though. I was fascinated by the work Heather Ordover did with her high school students who lived through 9-11 attacks up close. She taught them to knit which served as a form of cognitive anchoring. And when I heard Episode 554 of the podcast On Being, an interview on epigenetics with Rachel Yehuda about how trauma and resilience cross generations, I knew I found the next thing I needed to learn. Ancestral wounds are real, and they coexist with our own lived experience.

I am reading a research paper on knitting and the healing of trauma, and it brought me back to this book. It takes me more than once to digest the information. It’s a book about how all manner of handcrafting can help us heal our trauma. Written from years of experience and research with different populations, it’s been so helpful to me in my own process and in my teaching.

In order to make friends with my body, I went through yin yoga teacher training. I took a workshop on trauma-informed yoga. I learned about how we store our wounds deep inside and that physical processing of emotions is as important as verbal processing.

None of this just fades away. It has to be acknowledged that we are living in a time of collective trauma. We can get through it together, though. With open hearts and open hands.

10 days, 10 photos from your daily life. June 2020