Eco-Somatic Educational Journey: Physical, Emotional and Planetary Lives of My Body

This study offers itself as an educational journey oriented by ecosomatics and earth democracy. It deepens these ways of knowing by locating them in ways of sensing, feeling, relating, being and living in a brown woman’s somatic body, experiencing her physical, emotional, and earthly entanglements, participating in the alive-ness of her earth family. Through the educational journey, this study carves possibilities and openings of a somatically textured environmental education by revolving around the question of what it means to do this work with the body in relationship with the planet, in this time and place. Bodywork in this study takes the form of exploring the researcher’s three bodily processes of digesting, breathing and menstrual bleeding framed through the physical, emotional, and planetary lives of the gut, breath, and menstrual blood. These explorations shed light on the various physiological and ancestral somatic entanglements, the enmeshed medicines of various emotions and the intertwined planetary kin relationships held within the gut, breath and menstrual blood. This study finds that all of these corporeal entanglements make and shape the living ways of digestion, breathing and bleeding which throb, simmer, swirl and flow in a somatic web of relationships.