Body Rites: A Holistic Healing and Embodiment Workbook for Black Survivors of Sexual Trauma

A written companion and workbook for readers seeking to reclaim their bodies as home in healing from sexual trauma.

Body rites as a holistic healing journey, anchored in the practice of decolonizing healing and reclaiming body sovereignty, reaches back into indigenous roots and land-based healing. It centers remembering as a means of survival.

This workbook is the first of its kind: a resource of rituals divided into four healing journeys for Black women, femmes, and nonbinary survivors of sexual assault. The experiential workbook moves beyond prescriptive self-help models by providing a gentle guide and liaison to explore the impact of sexual trauma on the mind, body, heart, and spirit. It is an invitation to heal holistically, drawing upon:

• psychophysiology
• lived body wisdom
• trauma-informed embodiment practices
• kinship and ancestral connections
• African spiritual practices

Most urgently, this book is a series of intimate conversations with your “self”; and remembrance that healing lives at the core of your intuition.

40 figures, 17 full-color icon illustrations

shena j, young, PsyD, is a licensed body centered psychologist-healer, artist, and Iyalorisa. She owns a private practice, embodied truth healing & psychological services, rooted in Los Angeles, California, where she offers mind-body-heart-spirit care in healing from sexual, racial, intergenerational, and ancestral traumas.

Dr. shena's work has been featured in Bustle, Huffington Post, Lily by The Washington Post, Therapy for Black Girls, and she has consulted for The Body: A Home for Love, Black Girl in OM, Loveland Foundation, and Me Too movement communities.