I used to enter high-stakes meetings with fire in my belly, carrying what communities had entrusted to me. And then, as negotiations began, something else would take over: I nodded along as officials insisted that too little was “the best we could do”; I felt the pit in my stomach spread across my body until it swallowed me whole. Sometimes, the tears came—grief, yes, but mostly the humiliation of how quickly I folded.

Afterwards, I turned the shame inward. I pushed myself to develop sharper arguments and stronger delivery. It took a long time to see that this wasn’t the issue; it was the repertoire my body reached for under pressure.

And I wasn’t alone. Over years of stewarding movement gatherings and institutional negotiations, I began to notice how certain patterns repeat across bodies like mine—patterns shaped by how our communities learned to survive.

In many spaces, I saw people softening themselves to stay safe: smiling to diffuse tension, narrowing what they said before it could be dismissed. In others, I saw collapse: energy draining out of the body at the very moment it was needed. Or the opposite: fire surging forward too quickly, before there was ground to hold it. Over time, I came to understand these as intelligent responses that had once kept our ancestors alive. Yet when they move through our work unchecked, they begin to constrain what becomes possible beyond survival.

This work grows out of that recognition.

Across the spaces I hold, I work primarily with women and non-binary folks, and with activists of the global majority. We begin with what is already happening in the body. We sit. We notice. We track what shifts when pressure rises: when conflict sharpens, when “power” enters the room, when the people and places we love are at stake.

From there, we begin to practice interruption. We expand what is available: breath, attention, and movement. This work is not about “self care” or “wellness” or correcting the body, but about restoring agency and choice. So that a moment that would’ve closed begins to open, even slightly, and a different response becomes possible.

Because if our bodies keep reenacting collapse, appeasement, or disconnection under threat, our politics and our organizing will reflect the same patterns.

This work does not remove the conditions that make some bodies more structurally precarious and fragile. But it changes how we meet these conditions so that we can begin to transform them.