body rites: a holistic healing and embodiment workbook for Black survivors of sexual trauma

by shena j young, Aishah Shahidah Simmons (Foreword by), Shyma El Sayed (Illustrator)

Overview

A written companion and workbook for readers seeking to reclaim their bodies as home in healing from sexual trauma.

Body rites as a holistic healing journey, anchored in the practice of decolonizing healing and reclaiming body sovereignty, reaches back into indigenous roots and land-based healing. It centers remembering as a means of survival.

This workbook is the first of its kind: a resource of rituals divided into four healing journeys for Black women, femmes, and nonbinary survivors of sexual assault. The experiential workbook moves beyond prescriptive self-help models by providing a gentle guide and liaison to explore the impact of sexual trauma on the mind, body, heart, and spirit. It is an invitation to heal holistically, drawing upon psychophysiology, lived body wisdom, trauma-informed embodiment practices, kinship and ancestral connections, and African spiritual practices. Most urgently, this book is a series of intimate conversations with your “self”; and remembrance that healing lives at the core of your intuition.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781324019831
Publisher:	Norton, W. W. & Company, Inc.
Publication date:	11/14/2023
Pages:	224
Sales rank:	1,022,655
Product dimensions:	6.90(w) x 9.90(h) x 0.70(d)

About the Author

shena j, young, PsyD, is a licensed body centered psychologist-healer, artist, and Iyalorisa. She owns a private practice, embodied truth healing & psychological services, rooted in Los Angeles, California, where she offers mind-body-heart-spirit care in healing from sexual, racial, intergenerational, and ancestral traumas.

Dr. shena's work has been featured in Bustle, Huffington Post, Lily by The Washington Post, Therapy for Black Girls, and she has consulted for The Body: A Home for Love, Black Girl in OM, Loveland Foundation, and Me Too movement communities.

Editorial Reviews

09/04/2023

In this intimate debut, psychologist and yogi Young gently guides Black “women, femmes, and nonbinary survivors of sexual assault” through a “practice of decolonizing our medicine and reclaiming our body sovereignty.” She explains that as Black people have historically been forced to care for others “as a means of survival,” self-care is crucial to healing from sexual trauma and can be undertaken through four different “journeys”: “Settling IN,” or pursuing physical embodiment through nervous system regulation; “the work,” using yoga and meditation to “foster an internal sense of safety, agency, and choice”; “the medicine,” drawing on herbal healing practices and “chakra energies”; and “spirit & the ancestors,” or communing with ancestral spirits “as a source of support in healing yourself and intergenerational trauma.” Young centers her advice in a robust journaling practice that seamlessly marries somatic and emotional self-investigation (“How do you know in your body when you are being your most true self? What does it feel like?”), and her methodology is grounded in African spirituality practice as well as an in-depth understanding of physiology and psychology, making for a wise and broad-minded approach. This is an essential resource for sexual abuse survivors. (Oct.)

Publishers Weekly

"Dr. shena is a poet and a healer, and in body rites she offers the gift of her breathtaking wisdom that is filled with magic, light, and soothing balm...The illustrations are ethereal, and they beautifully affirm the holistic medicine she shares. Profoundly healing and infused with the utmost love, care, intention from tender and deep lived experience, you will not be the same person after this journey unfolds."

Zahabiyah Yamasaki

"Body rites is an incredibly grounding, sensitive, and informative guide to helping those who’ve experienced sexual assault feel reconnected to their bodies. dr young does a masterful job of fostering a sense of safety and warmth as she walks beside readers on the journey of healing. The book breaks down scientific and psychological terms in accessible and relevant ways, and is a radical and needed departure from other texts in this space. Many will be able to see themselves and be helped by her offering."

Joy Harden Bradford

"Body rites is a loving invitation to return to the old technologies of ancient global cultures to heal and bring forth new strength. By tapping into the epic memory of the body, survivors can rewrite their stories, not only the moments of harm but also what they have been socialized to believe about themselves. body rites meets survivors where they are, skillfully blending science-backed, trauma-informed best practices, spirituality, and tradition. shena writes with patience, warmth, expertise, and courage; it is clear that each of the words and chosen images are glimpses of shena’s embodied practice offered as a gift to other survivors. Many survivors will immediately see themselves in these pages of body rites, while others will find themselves."

Shesheena A. Bray

"body rites is an excellent resource for Black women. Ditto for their allies in the struggle to end sexual violence."

Herizons Magazine - Evelyn C. White