The Season of Gathering

There are seasons when the body finally tells the truth.

When the adrenaline softens, when the push fades, when the quiet arrives, and suddenly, what’s been held together by effort starts to come apart.

This is the threshold between grind and grief, between function and feeling. It’s the moment you realize that surviving is not the same thing as returning.

Writer and theorist Gloria E. Anzaldúa once wrote about this sacred and painful process through what she called The Coyolxauhqui Imperative, the act of re-membering the self after dismemberment, of piecing back together the fragments that trauma and oppression scatter. Her work is spiritual, political, and embodied, an offering for anyone who has been broken by systems, histories, or inner ruptures and still chooses to make meaning from the pieces.

I don’t use her language as mine for her has a depth to it I can’t reach in a blog post, but I feel the pulse of it in my work and in my own body. Because this gathering, this re-membering, is not just theoretical. It lives in our tissues, our breath, our fascia, our patterns of holding.

Fragmentation Lives in the Nervous System:

The nervous system carries every story of fragmentation: the freezing, the bracing, the endless readiness. You can feel it in the jaw that never unclenches, in the pelvis that forgets it can rest, in the shallow breath that never quite drops into the belly.

These are not random habits. They are the body’s choreography of survival. Over time, they become the architecture of disconnection, the quiet dismemberment of daily life. And yet, the same system that stores rupture also carries the map toward wholeness.

It’s through sensation that the fragments start to speak again.

The skin becomes a messenger. The muscles start to whisper back. The gut stirs. The pelvis, that deep center of identity and creation, begins to thaw.

Re-membering begins not as insight, but as noticing:the temperature of the air, the ground underfoot, the heartbeat that’s been there all along.

Re-Membering as Resistance

To re-member yourself is to resist the demand to stay efficient, pleasing, productive, numb. It’s to slow down in a culture that only rewards speed. It’s to say: my body deserves to belong to me again. This kind of healing is not about perfection or mastery, it’s about coherence. About letting the nervous system renegotiate safety after years of pretending. About listening long enough for the body to trust that the danger has passed.

Sometimes that looks like trembling.

Sometimes like tears that have no words.

Sometimes it looks like finally exhaling.

The pelvis remembers before the mind does. It knows when it’s ready to soften. It knows when it’s time to hold. It knows the difference between tension that protects and tension that silences.

The Slow Work of Gathering Back

Healing after trauma, personal, collective, ancestral, is not a single revelation. It’s a thousand small acts of noticing.

The warm hand held in your own.

The spine lengthening after years of hunching inward.

The quiet realization that you no longer need to rush your own healing.

Every sensory anchor, temperature, touch, rhythm, sound, becomes a thread that weaves the fragments back together. Every regulated breath tells the body: you are safe enough to stay.

This is not an ending. It’s a continual practice of re-membering, the act of finding home again in what was once too much to hold.

Body Notes for the Season

• Let warmth be medicine.

Heat grounds fragmented systems. Wrap yourself. Soak. Rest. It’s not laziness; it’s reassembly.

• Follow the tremor.

When your body shakes or sighs, don’t stop it. That’s your nervous system completing what trauma interrupted.

• Stay with sensation longer than thought.

Feel the chair. The floor. Your weight. Sensation is the language of re-membering.

• Trust the body’s timing.

You cannot rush coherence. It arrives in its own rhythm, often slower than your mind would prefer.

• Remember that gathering is not linear.

There will be days you feel scattered again. That too is part of the story, the ongoing act of becoming whole.