I have been taking the workshop offered by ritual as justice after hearing Tada on a podcast. Today I was reviewing some of the videos and Tada kept mentioning the body and cultural trauma as well as colonial imperialism. I am going to try and write down some takeaways that I really find helpful and I apologize if I get these incorrect. These are not my ideas, but study, to parapharse Paulo Fieri , is a political act. So this is study and dialogue with the practices and ideas of the ritual as justice school.

One example I remember is the movement from the traditional robes of Asia allows energy to circulate from the Hara (belly) and the heart, and the brain. In the west however we have pants and a shirt and heart is prioritized where as the lower body is cut off. There is no grounding. The colonial project and the attire of pants and shirts spreads this embodied trauma.

The western loss of access to the Hara, to the lower part of the body is a form of trauma, it is an expression of trauma and in the western imperialist imposition of this attire to further traumatize the body of the oppressed. Tada refers to both the individual body (now in a suit perhaps), and the cultural body (the supply chain that makes the suit, the coffee and grain supply line that overcompensate for a body deprived of Hara).

We are learning all the different ways that imperialism might be overcome, through active resistance, through community and networks of care, through study, through witnessing, and through body practices (somatics).