Trauma Healing: Becoming Embodied Soldiers of Love
NYC Dance Project ft. dancers Sean Aaron Carmon and Michael Jackson Jr, Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater
“I am love’s soldier, I wait for the sound, I know that love will come, turn it all around.”
Trauma Healing: Becoming Embodied Soldiers of Love
In my Divorced blog, I explored the importance of shedding light on our collective and historical trauma to heal individual and communal wounds — to build a culture of harmonious and loving relationships. While there are many paths to collective liberation, I believe somatics is a cornerstone of social transformation.
Why Somatics?
Somatic therapy is rooted in the science of the Autonomic Nervous System (ANS) — the system that activates our “Fight-Flight-Freeze-Fawn” responses to threats. The ANS has evolved to keep us safe, but in the name of survival, we’ve lost much: safety, dignity, liberties, minds, and lives. We carry the stories and survival patterns of our ancestors. Somatic therapy uses talk therapy alongside body-based techniques to help release the traumatic energy trapped in our bodies and psyches after life-threatening events or chronic stress.
Trauma keeps the body stuck in survival mode, but the body also holds the wisdom to heal. Our bodies are wired for resilience, connection, and restoration. Somatic therapy teaches us to recognize when our bodies feel unsafe and out of balance, providing tools to bring us back to a state of grounded presence.
My healing journey has led me to question the nature of love and belonging, and the barriers that keep us from them. Mother Teresa once said, “If we have no peace, it is because we have forgotten that we belong to each other.” How can we remember this truth?
Like many of us, I turn to music to make sense of my experiences. One song that holds me through heartache and hope is Sade’s “Soldier of Love.” Her voice reaches into the depths of the weary soul as she sings, “I’ve lost the use of my heart.” She captures the agony of not belonging: “I’ve been torn up inside, I’ve been left behind.” These words speak to my deepest wounds.
But Sade doesn’t stay in despair. She resists: “But I’m still alive.” In this defiance, I imagine her taking my hand, leading us to that “endless pool on the other side.” That pool — a wellspring of hope, love, and restoration — brings to mind Louis Cozolino’s words: “We are not the survival of the fittest. We are the survival of the nurtured.” We thrive when we are nurtured with love, grace, and understanding. We belong.
How do we reach this life-giving pool? By becoming embodied Soldiers of Love.
Somatics is the embodiment of Sade’s lyrics: “I’m at the borderline of my faith / I’m at the hinterland of my devotion / I’m in the front line of this battle of mine.” It’s a courageous exploration of heartbreak, grief, and the defenses we’ve built to survive. Through somatics, we learn to attune to our bodies — to sense what is happening within us — and develop self-regulation tools to transform reactivity into conscious choice, voice, and presence.
Somatics helps us access repressed emotions, build a sense of embodied safety, and increase our capacity for connection. It draws on ancient practices of self-healing: breathwork, movement, visualization, touch, grounding, boundary work, and more.
Sade reminds us, “It’s a wild, wild west — I am doing my best.” We’ve inherited survival patterns shaped by violence and conflict. War is political, psychological, physical, relational, and spiritual. Our minds, bodies, and spirits carry the wounds of this conditioning. We are not the war in our bodies. We are not the grief, terror, and shame stored within us. We’ve all been drafted into wars we didn’t choose.
But we can choose to be Soldiers of Love instead of soldiers of war.
What does it mean to be a soldier? Dedication. Bravery. Commitment. Discipline. Protection. Assata Shakur reminds us:
“It is our duty to fight for our freedom.
It is our duty to win.
We must love each other and support each other.
We have nothing to lose but our chains.”
For a Soldier of Love, the most powerful weapon is the practice of somatics. It teaches us that our bodies are instruments of love, vessels of joy. It helps us distinguish between real threats and old trauma patterns, allowing us to respond to the present rather than relive the past.
The Soldier of Love knows that healing takes effort, discipline, and devotion. They walk into the conflict zones of the heart, picking up the shattered pieces and mending them, over and over. They embody what they long to be, singing:
“I am a soldier of love
I’m a soldier
Still waiting for love to come
Turn it all around.”
Ready to join the Embodied Soldier of Love movement?
Take a breath.
Notice the sensations, the posture, the shape of your body.
Does your body reflect love — fluid, expansive, open, receptive?
Or does it reflect trauma — hunched, rigid, constricted, reactive?
You are not the pain you carry. You are a Soldier of Love, waiting to turn it all around.