As I learn more about systemic perception, field energetics, and somatic practice, I am sensing how specific domination fields get hooked into my nervous system, that it’s not just dealing with “capitalism” or bureaucratic systems that is activating, but that there are actual residual attachment-trauma-consciousness-energies embedded within the bodies of the cultural institutions that are mediating our survival.

I am one of the 70% of chronically ill people whose initial application for social security disability has been denied, meaning that I’m now beginning the next steps of an appeal process.

When I received my denial letter last month, I got to observe my nervous system moving through many layers of enmeshment with this particular domination field.

I watched my system move from numbness and a kind of factual “ok now I have to do more advocacy for this” energy to immense feelings of impotent rage and abandonment helplessness in a kind of squirmy "can’t get them to understand" despair, and then a wash of all of the layers of self-doubt and internal gaslighting about whether I actually am disabled enough to “deserve” this.

My practice when I notice these kinds of activation happening is to recognize that my nervous system is trapped within the energy of a domination field, to pause and take a break from whatever I am doing, and to open my sensing to the field of primordial love that is the foundation of all matter.

After 5 minutes of reading the Social Security “Letter of Disapproval,” I notice that my arms and legs feel tingly, that my breathing is shallow, and that I feel jittery as if I have just drunk a bunch of caffeine. So I stand up, leave the letter on the kitchen table, and walk over to my ancestor/nature altar.

I light the candle on my altar, greeting all of the supportive beings around me, feeling my body held by the solidity of this land-being Mni Sota Makoce and all the nature beings who nurture my aliveness. I greet all my wise coherent ancestor beings, especially those ancestors who lived with chronic illness while remaining in contact with the field of primordial love.

I turn on a drumming music soundtrack to dance to and begin to shake my arms and legs, bringing movement to the trapped mobilization energy in my nervous system as I entrain to the deep rhythm of the drumming. Moans and whimpers come through my mouth as I dance with the powerlessness.

I have a moment of sensing the specific field-entity-energy that is feeding off of my nervous system. The energy feels old, like some sort of strange repetition of an abusive family system that over hundreds of years has found a nesting place within this “social safety net” institution that is gatekeeping basic survival needs for so many people who are disabled.

I sensed into the presence of a young child within the family system whose function was to absorb the impact of unprocessed emotions from older family members within their own body, and how then a part of the ongoing structure of that family system was to gaslight and blame the child when their body became sick from absorbing that impact.

How this unmetabolized trauma pattern has become infused into the very bedrock of industrial cultural, steeping into the organization of the very systems that are supposed to “help,” a strange unconscious ritual enactment of this abusive family dynamic, but now on a mindless repeat where there is “no there there” anymore, the violence is distributed across a reductionistic bureaucracy that cannot hear you, reinforcing the experience that no one will care.

I am growling now. My hands grow claws as my knees bend, legs braced wide as I squat low to the ground. The energy of a mother bear comes through, potent, with tearing claws and snarling teeth. The snarling ferocity of that protection of what is innocent that will not let the old traumas stand.

As I dance with the energy of bear, I feel a wave of ancestral support behind me— so much support is here, so much love from those old ones who know how to metabolize the toxicity, who know how to compost what is ready to die back into the ground of that to which we fully belong.