Written by Taylor Lopez Boodooram, SSW

As women of color, our bodies have carried things we were never meant to carry alone. We inherited silence, strength, resilience, and sometimes pain that didn’t begin with us. We were taught to hold it all in with grace, with grit, and without complaint.

But what if healing wasn’t about being strong?
What if healing looked like softening, remembering, and listening to the wisdom that already lives inside you?

At Manaaki Mental Health, we practice somatic therapy that doesn’t ask you to leave your culture at the door. We believe healing happens not in spite of who you are, but because of it. When we blend body-based practices with cultural attunement, we make space for healing that feels familiar, ancestral, and deeply yours.

What Is Culturally Grounded Somatic Therapy?

Somatic therapy is a therapeutic approach that honors the body as a site of memory, emotion, and healing. It helps us reconnect to the places in ourselves that have gone quiet or numb. Through gentle movement, breathwork, body awareness, and stillness, we begin to listen to what our nervous system has been trying to say.

When a memory can’t be verbalized, it still lives in the tension in your jaw. When grief hasn’t been named, it can show up in sleepless nights, clenched fists, or the way you feel your stomach twist in certain spaces.

Culturally grounded somatic therapy goes further. It invites us to consider how identity, culture, family, spirituality, and colonization have shaped how we inhabit our bodies. It’s not about explaining your culture. It’s about using it as a compass for your healing.

This kind of therapy is not clinical disconnection. It is deep return.
It’s honoring your grandmother’s prayers, your mother’s sacrifices, your inner child’s silence, your own body’s wisdom. It’s weaving healing into your lineage instead of separating from it.

For so many of us, the nervous system isn’t just dysregulated because of personal trauma. It’s been shaped by systems, by racism, migration, religious oppression, intergenerational silence. Somatic work gives us permission to lay those things down, not all at once, but moment by moment, breath by breath.

Why This Matters for Women of Color

Many of us grew up with models of therapy that didn’t reflect our lived experience. We sat across from professionals who didn’t understand our grief, our silence, or the weight of having to explain ourselves before we could even begin to be helped.

We were told to “speak up” when we were still learning how to feel safe.
We were told to “trust the process” when that process didn’t see our full humanity.
We were told to “heal” without honoring what harmed us in the first place.

At Manaaki, we are creating a different kind of space, one where:

• You don’t need to translate your pain for it to be valid
• You don’t have to choose between your culture and your healing
• You can release what was never yours to hold
• You’re allowed to feel without apology, to grieve without explanation, and to rest without guilt

This work is especially powerful for women of color because our pain is often buried under survival. Somatic therapy helps us feel again, not all at once, but slowly, intentionally, with safety and care.

Healing doesn’t have to mean digging up every past wound. Sometimes it means learning how to stay present in your body without fear. Sometimes it means feeling safe enough to cry. Other times it means giving yourself permission to dance, to rest, or to say no without guilt.

What This Might Look Like in Session

We begin where you are, not where someone else thinks you should be.
In a culturally attuned somatic session, you might:

• Breathe with intention while holding your heart or womb space
• Speak the name of an ancestor and feel what rises in your body
• Notice the tightness in your chest when you mention your family
• Shake out stored tension from your shoulders without having to explain why
• Use silence as ceremony, not something to fill

You’re never rushed. You’re never pushed. We build safety first. Then we begin to explore the body not as a place of pain, but as a place of possibility.

This process is relational. You are not doing it alone. Your therapist becomes a gentle witness, someone who reminds you that what your body is holding is valid, and that you don’t need to carry it forever.

Healing Through Lineage

Long before therapy rooms existed, our people knew how to heal. We prayed, chanted, gathered, bathed, danced, wept, and reconnected with the land. These weren’t treatments. They were traditions.

Our ancestors didn’t just survive. They cultivated joy. They knew how to honor transitions, how to move grief through the body, how to find spirit in community and rhythm. They knew healing was communal and sacred.

Somatic work is not new. It’s a remembering.
It is our bodies saying: I still know the way home.

At Manaaki, we honor this knowing. We don’t separate your healing from your culture. Instead, we ask:

• How did your ancestors grieve?
• What rituals did they turn to when life felt too heavy?
• What does your body already know how to do when given safety?

These questions don’t require perfect answers. They are invitations, like soft doors opening to the parts of you that have been waiting to be included in your healing.

Is This Type of Therapy Right for You?

This approach might feel especially resonant if:

• You feel emotionally or physically disconnected from yourself
• You’re holding cultural or intergenerational trauma that hasn’t been named
• You’ve been in therapy before but didn’t feel fully seen or safe
• You want to integrate spirituality, ancestry, and embodied awareness
• You’re craving a way to soften without unraveling, to be whole without explaining

You don’t need to be “ready.” You just need to be curious.
Your body will guide the rest.

Your Healing Doesn’t Need to Be Loud to Be Powerful

Your body doesn’t need to be fixed. It needs to be felt.
Your culture doesn’t need to be silenced. It needs to be held.
Your healing doesn’t have to look like anyone else’s. It just needs to feel like yours.

If this kind of healing speaks to you, if your body exhaled while reading this, if your spirit whispered “yes” even quietly…we’re here.

Manaaki Mental Health offers in-person and telehealth sessions in Taylorsville, Utah. Our therapy honors your identity, your ancestry, and your body’s capacity to heal.

Let’s Begin, Together

You don’t need to carry it alone anymore.
You can come as you are.
You can take your time.
You can be held.

Book your first session today. Let your body finally exhale.

Manaaki Mental Health – Taylorsville, UT | In-Person & Telehealth Appointments Available