By Kandace Kyere, MSW/LSW
“And I said to my body, softly, ‘I want to be your friend.’ It took a long breath and replied, ‘I’ve been waiting my whole life for this.” — Nayyirah Waheed
A few years ago, a friend and I were talking about how, as people who live in Black bodies, we often struggle to accept that not everything has to be a fight. So much of what it has historically meant to be Black and female—both across generations and across the globe—has been to fight. Fight for our freedom. Fight to be seen, fight to be heard, fight to achieve, fight to be worthy, and fight to be equal.
This constant fight can be exhausting and can activate an ongoing stress response in our bodies. This is especially true when navigating predominantly white institutions, as explored in the research study White People Stress Me Out All the Time: Black Students define racial trauma.
What is your relationship to fighting, and how has it impacted your body, mind, and emotions?
Dr. Resmaa Menakem, therapist and author of My Grandmother’s Hands: Racialized Trauma and the Pathway to Mending Our Hearts and Bodies (2017), further confirms how perpetual fight-mode takes a toll on the Black body. In his book, he offers a robust selection of body-centered practices that can help you to recenter yourself. Menakem reminds readers:
“White-body supremacy doesn’t live just in our thinking brains. It lives and breathes in our bodies. Our deepest emotions involve the activation of a single bodily structure: our soul nerve (or vagus nerve). This nerve is connected to our lizard brain, which is concerned solely with survival and protection. Our lizard brain only has four basic commands: rest, fight, flee, or freeze.” (p. 25).
After the conversation with my friend, we both realized that many years of conditioning had caused us to overlook moments when we could have stepped back. Moments when we could have softened, trusted that something more Divine was at work, and allowed ourselves to rest.
