This is the work that fuels transformation.
We tend to our healing together because a world without interpersonal or systemic violence has to be practiced, not just imagined — and that practice begins in the body, in community.
Somatic Support Circles are 90-minute, survivor-led spaces weaving somatic practices, guided discussions, creative arts, and collective care. They are rooted in healing justice, an abolitionist praxis that understands our bodies, our spirits, and our relationship to the land as inextricable from organizing for a world without violence.
Our Circles are always free for survivors at the intersection of gender based violence and state violence, and for sex workers. Please complete our membership inquiry form below and we will follow up with more info on upcoming Circles.
We also occasionally offer donation-based circles and other wellbeing workshops for our wider community. All proceeds support At The Center’s work. Sign up for our newsletter to hear more about our offerings!
What are we practicing?
Somatics recognizes that we are always practicing something. The survival strategies our bodies learned to keep us safe — how we move, how we relate, how we respond under pressure — become patterns living in our muscles, our nervous systems, our ways of relating with each other.
Those patterns are rooted in a deep wisdom, and they made sense once. Many still do. And some are the very thing holding us back from the people we want to become and the world we are trying to build.
In order to create change that makes a sustained impact, intellectualizing our way through it is not enough. We must work at the level of the body, and in community, to unlearn the narratives and behaviors that have kept us safe, and to practice, together, the ways of being we need.
Most spaces were not built for survivors whose lives have been shaped by criminalization, the sex trade, or survival strategies that others call crimes. Abolitionist spaces that hold the full truth of our lives, without pathologizing, without controlling, without defaulting to harmful narratives, without requiring us to perform victimhood in acceptable ways, are critical to building our collective power. And to building a more liberated future.