Unraveling Purity
Unraveling Purity: A Different Way to Meet Trauma
There’s a whisper that lives in the bones of our culture—soft but insistent.
"Be pure. Be healed. Be rid of the wound."
It wraps itself in self-help books, glows behind filtered selfies after yoga, hides in the quiet shame of still feeling broken after all that therapy. It turns healing into a task list. Trauma into an intruder. The body into something to conquer.
But I want to offer another thread. A different rhythm.
What if trauma isn’t something to release?
What if it’s something to relate to?
Something to learn the language of, not to evict from the body, but to make a home for. One with windows cracked open to the wind, where old ghosts can breathe and soften, too.
Because trauma—our grief, our survival, our ruptures—is not a flaw in our system. It is the system, adapting. Trauma is not impurity. It’s wisdom in a wild costume. It’s our body saying “I loved too much to forget.”
And yet—so many of us have inherited a healing model that says:
Be lighter. Be freer. Be unburdened.
As if freedom means not feeling.
But what if the truest freedom is the capacity to feel more?
To stay with what trembles.
To hold sensation with curiosity, not control.
To become vast enough to house contradiction, confusion, and joy, all at once.
I’ve been unlearning the religion of purity for a long time. The idea that there’s a clean, high place we’ll reach once we’ve purged all the pain. It’s an exhausting myth. And it leaves so many of us more dissociated, not less.
So I practice instead becoming a compost pile—hot, fertile, full of rot and resurrection.
Because everything I’ve tried to cut out of me has only gone deeper underground.
But what I’ve welcomed? It’s softened. It’s sung. It’s even laughed.
This is what somatics has given me—not a way to perfect myself, but a way to belong to myself again.
To sense. To spiral. To stretch toward capacity.
To remember: I am not a problem to fix. I am a living, breathing, ever-shifting process.
So maybe this is your reminder too—
You don’t need to purify.
You don’t need to be “over it.”
You don’t need to exile any part of you to be worthy of wholeness.
Let the wound be sacred. Let the ache have a voice.
Let the body be a wilderness you get to walk with, not tame.
We were never meant to be pure.
We were meant to be whole.
Want to dive deeper?
Integration Invitation:
What if your body held a story that didn’t need fixing—only listening?
Journal Prompt:
If I stopped trying to get rid of this pain, what might it want me to know?
Write from the voice of the feeling, the tension, or the ache. Let it speak in its own words—messy, poetic, tender, or strange.
Somatic Practice: “The Listening Nest”
Find a quiet space and curl into a position that feels instinctually protective—on your side, in a chair, curled like a seed.
Place your hands somewhere comforting: belly, heart, jaw, wherever there’s sensation.
Breathe slowly, letting your exhale be longer than your inhale.
Whisper to yourself: “You don’t have to go anywhere. I’m staying with you.”
Notice what shifts. Not to change it, just to be in relationship.
Stay here for 3–5 minutes. Then gently uncurl, stretch, or shake out—letting your body complete anything it needs to.