Somatics + Solidarity: Hospicing the Old Paradigm, Midwifing the New

The more we can learn to somatically hold the threshold of complexity, paradox & conflict, the more we will be able to land ourselves in a shape that does not succumb to the weight of the collapse.

Hello 2025. Hello Aquarius Season. Hello readers!

I am leaning more into my Mercurial Nature this year, and marking it with not only a haircut, but a Substack re-introductory piece…

Hi! You’ve tuned into the broadcast channel of me, somatic & embodiment guide, queer Dharma teacher and systems poet, Deanna Sophia Danger.

Somatics + Solidarity: Hospicing the Old Paradigm, Midwifing the New is shared with the intention of merging artful, creative and reflection-provoking narrative, with actionable and relevant concepts for your day-to-day experience.

I’ve been letting change steep through me this winter (not entirely cozily I might add), as 2024 brought enormous change in my worklife, finally and fully stepping out of a 20-year long career in art, media and entertainment, and into the field of social impact. For my entire adult life, I have known no other reality than that of building the bridge as I am standing on it. Meaning, nothing has been fucking easy. I am adept at navigating unknowing-ness, transitions, thresholds and precipices through nothing other than sheer grit, stubborn & childlike curiosity and a willful belief that the Universe wants to conspire with us. And as we step out onto this bridge of whatever 2025, this presidency, this moment in time will unfold to be, holding the unknown with great care is constantly at the forefront of my mind and work in social impact.

As a neuroexpansive queer person, I feel and sense everything (not that I always get it “right”), my actions & thoughts are on full manual not autopilot and it is often challenging to put into cohesive word the plurality of what I experience that is better described through nonverbal movement, artistic expression, sound and visual narrative and even free writing prose. Letting change steep through me this winter because I yet again needed to FUCKING REST (like, spiritually) and remind my soma that I am best serving myself AND my community, interdependently, when I (and I believe we) have enough space for abstraction.

I have noticed lately that the folks that are moving toward me, to learn, to collaborate, to grow, to build, to connect, have had the really hard complicated stuff at their threshold. And I think that is because they (you?) sense that I am a safe (enough) person to be messy with… and I sense the same in my capability to show up for that because I allow myself to be messy…not just intellectually, but relationally. Fuck perfectionism. I’m getting better at trusting our co-creations through the mess and this is why my soma (my body, my sensations, my emotions, my thoughts, my relationships with others, with my historical timeline, our historical timelines, social conditions) is asking me to lean into my Mercurial Nature.

Something is/has been shifting… Something is/has been being born… Something is/has been dying and decaying… And this is/will be continuing on for the rest of our generations (plural) foreseeable future.

This is the bridge I feel comfortable being on because this bridge is made of knocked down ladders. This is the bridge I feel I have resources now to continue building that I didn’t have those 20-years in that other industry, or the 20-years in my youth before, when I was simultaneously going through incredible trauma, pain, intergenerational wounding, unlearning and unbecoming.

I don’t fear the future. I don’t get caught up in fear mongering or catastrophizing. I also am not bypassing a gotdamn thing, or liberally wishfully thinking reform will “fix it.” Personally, I think the whole gotdamn thing needs to be dismantled and rebuilt, and moving into social impact work has proven to me that it can be done, there are MANY people already doing this, have been doing this, and social impact work is a place for ALL of us because it requires ALL of us… No captains on Starship Earth, only crew…

I wanted to share this writing today because I have been called to hone my lane, and really clarify it to you, to those I work with, collaborate with, and serve. I have been called to be unabashed in differentiating my “now” self (from previous versions of “self”) and letting myself evolve into the next iteration of “me.” So yes I do somatic, embodiment, system-changing and healing work, and YES I do it with DEEP fucking purpose and analysis of this sociopolitical moment our humanity is in. That is not quick, easy, surface-visible, transactional work.

What has gotten us to this point will not serve us in the future. I see this everyday when folks in social justice spaces double-down on their survival conditioned strategies, or folks outside those spaces double-down on their escapism & delusion, all of them, unconsciously replicating the same very systems that are harming them in the first place. And I, not on autopilot, not reactively joining in, not reactively swooping in with saviorism, deploy my own somatic practices in these moments (as praxis & strategy) and ground into a flexible shape that naturally extends tremendous grace, radical, inclusive compassion, and paced unfoldment in place of forceful change. Something I think everyone needs the skills & resources to practice, messily.

I am a threshold tender. That is my place, that is my lane.

I have named myself in the past as both weaver and catalyst - weaver speaks to the “how” of my practices & offerings, and catalyst speaks to the “why.” I can name that I resonate and feel comfortable sharing that I am an anarchist, a leftist, an anti-imperialist, but I also want to name that in doing so I sure as hell don’t mean what has become “the church of social justice.” There are a lot of things that can be identified through these labels that I don’t vibe with, and those things usually have to do with punching sideways, the requirement to conform, and gaping holes in access to the right kinds of resources. How strange, especially for queer leftist spaces… that unconscious somatic requirement to conform… to merge & fold under systems of harm rather than connect interdependently & unfold into our innate ability to heal and imagine. There’s so much pain out there in the World… We have such an ability to be different, to move different, to choose different…

“Think for yourself, question authority…”

…was a pretty huge thing in the communities of my youth, namely, working-class punk & hardcore and queer Appalachian rave communities (funny how I felt comfortable at the intersection of do-no-drugs / do-all-the-drugs). Being of the last generation to know what life was like without a phone in our hands 24/7 I can name this influencer-ification of social justice has really done a number on our ability to connect intimately, listen deeply without preconceived judgment and cycle-break these tendrils of the colonialist project paradigm wrapped around our very susceptible, fragile DNA…

This year I will be co-leading a one-of-a-kind, queer Systems Change Fellowship. Convening queer folks to move through a curriculum that embeds somatic healing, conflict support, and adaptive strategies to actually inject CHANGE into these systems to cycle-break the tendrils of that old paradigm. One major theme of this work and much of my thought processes over the last few years since the pandemic-portal opened, is leaning into my Mercurial Nature as a Time Witch engaging with the teaching of plurality. There is not ONE reality, ONE future, ONE way of being, ONE perfect time, ONE way to know you’re ready, ONE binary right/wrong, good/bad. The more we can learn to somatically hold the threshold of complexity, paradox and conflict, harm reductively, the more we will be able to land ourselves in a shape that does not succumb to the weight of the collapse and get swept away in the debris. I believe that queer somatics is the key we all need to unlock our power-with, because somatics dissolves the blocks in our pathways to agency and choice, without force, without bypass, without adding more harm and by naturally regenerating shapes and cycles of care.

No one can do somatics for you, and you can’t do somatics alone. Somatics is relational, both/and, plurality, bridges made by knocked down ladders and shapeshifting our actions & movements based in our values, not our fear, hate & pain.

As a guide, my lane is to open the aperture of this liminal, threshold space, where most folks don’t even notice the gap-skip in the first place. My lane is not to tell you what to see, but how to look, what questions to ask, and to serve as the accompaniment to you, to us, to our movements, in course-correction when we inevitably falter off course. Smooth seas do not make skilled sailors, for this I am grateful to my own resiliency to keep swimming (;).

I don’t come from academia, I don’t come from clinical or institutional therapy, I don’t come from corporate, extractive transactional capitalism or McMindfulness. Trauma therapy has its place, I am trauma-aware, but my lane is in the things that 1:1’s can’t do like:

• Reconnecting community

• Cultivating safe-enough spaces for vulnerability, messiness, and humility

• Cultivating spaces that transmute the poisons of shame & blame internally with ourselves and externally to our peers

• Cultivating spaces that skill-share regenerative conflict skills for relational growth

• Cultivating structures & systems that support our collective detangling from exploitative racial capitalism & the plurality of wounds of colonialism.

To my readers, I have a specific ask of you, and that is only to uplift this work.

Technofascist algorithms are seeking to destroy our networks, but they forget they are ephemeral and WE are eternal. ALL empires fall, that is the nature of empires. My hands are in the soil, my boots are on the ground, I am but one node on the mycelial network of survivor-led support, enacting change in local community through difficult conversation, patience, tenacity, grace and radical, fucking, inclusion. My only ask is that you uplift, connect, engage, support…here and all of the other places you find me. If your social location is anywhere within the realm of white/male/cis/hetero/able-bodied with non-survival based income, I invite you to contribute in the form of founding subscriber. If you’re anywhere else on that spectrum, your monthly subscribes, likes, comments, shares, re-stacks, recommends and engagement helps more than you can know… or maybe you do… because you do similar work… and reciprocity is how we can share this support together.

For now, I want to end with my newly minted Commitment Statement. I have been undergoing Stacy Haines’ Politics of Trauma course in the lineage of generative/politicized somatics, and we create commitment statements to support us in honing our lane. These statements are a way to hold ourselves and with community support to each other, accountable. Commitment Statements are like a north star, something we can navigate by when we don’t know the next set of winds, or the technology of our instruments zap out… a metaphor I hold in very distinct possibility with the rise in technofascism. Here goes…

I am a commitment to regenerating community healing spaces based in fierce interdependence and essential dignity.

I am committed to living in Right Relationship with Dharma and somatic technologies that integrate sociopolitical analysis at their core. I am committed to co-weaving healing spaces that center radical inclusion, joy, and the grounded audacity to know that a better world is possible because we create it together. I will know this has been achieved when my community has 3rd spaces to connect, play, dance, eat, laugh, cry, rage, grieve and grow together, untainted by capitalism & imperialism.

Tell me what you think in the comments. Tell me what you are a commitment to in the comments! If you’ve read this far, please give this post a like and a re-stack too.

In Solidarity
-Deanna-