The Body Knows Best: Raina's Innovative Somatic Approach to Nurturing Mixed Identities
Applications for the new "Find Your Roots" program open from March 18 - April 8!
Y’all!
I’m so happy about the growing number of coaching, counseling, and therapeutic programs that help Mixed people navigate the complexities of our identity journeys.
We need and deserve these wonderful resources, and one of my Mixed Auntie priorities is to share them with you.
Meet Raina LaGrand, a somatic therapist, coach, yoga teacher, speaker, facilitator, and space holder specializing in racial identity, relationships, trauma, and embodiment. What is somatic therapy? Harvard Health says that it, “explores how the body expresses deeply painful experiences, applying mind-body healing to aid with trauma recovery.”
“Our depression, our anxiety, our trauma triggers are all ways our bodies have learned to protect us against persistent harm. So how can we honor that and work with that instead of beating ourselves up about it?”
Raina, who provides virtual coaching worldwide through her business, Root to Rise, is Mixed with ancestors on the lands now called Cameroon, Turkey, England, Ireland, Scotland, Greece, and Albania. She was born and raised in southern Michigan, growing up, as she says, “a nerdy and awkward Mixed girl in a super segregated city. She lives on Anishinaabe land, aka Ypsilanti Michigan, USA.
The blend of expertise that Raina brings to her work includes:
Licensed Masters in Social Work (Clinical) & Masters in Public Health, University of Michigan
Integrative Somatic Parts Work Certificate, The Embody Lab
Trained in Gottman Method for couples therapy
Extensive training in trauma treatment, including Sensorimotor Psychotherapy Level 1 & Jane Clapp's Movement for Trauma
Certified Yoga Teacher, A2 Yoga
Background in health education & health coaching, including sexual health, consent, sexual assault prevention, and more.
Her offerings include a Monthly Mindful Mixer, free of charge, the first Sunday of every month from 12:30 to 1:30 pm Eastern to mindfully connect with your body while connecting with other Mixed folks. Note: The April 7 Mixer will be held half an hour earlier, from Noon to 1:00 pm Easter, and the May 2024 Mixer is cancelled.
FIND YOUR ROOTS: A virtual group healing program designed to help Multiracial and Multicultural people feel connected to themselves and others.
As part of her identity and belonging coaching for Multiracial and Multicultural people, Raina created a new program called Find Your Roots: An Embodiment Group for Mixed People.
Raina says she created the “Find Your Roots” program as part of her mission “to help Mixed folks experience belonging from the inside out through community and somatic practice.”
“Find Your Roots” is a four-month group healing program tunning from April 15 to June 21 that integrates:
● Somatic (mindful body-based) practices
● Nervous system regulation
● Self-compassion work
● Parts work
● Yoga
● And mindful strength building
Doors open for “Find Your Roots” applications MONDAY MARCH 18 and will stay open through APRIL 8!
“Find Your Roots” consists of a half-day group retreat, “Embodied Dignity,” three one-on-one sessions focused on each participant’s unique needs and desires, and five two-hour group sessions focusing on:
● Discernment
● Personal Sovereignty
● Grief & Rage
● Relational Presence; and
● Liminality and Playful Risk
Each session will combine yoga, mindfulness, presentation, self-reflection, and discussion to help participants feel validated in their identities, have a loving relationship with their bodies and emotions, feel validated, more emotionally connected to others, and more comfortable taking up space.
Q: What is it about your Mixed journey that inspired you to help others?
I always assumed it was just me. I felt so alone in my mixedness most of my life. It wasn’t until my mid to late 20’s when I began developing deeper relationships with mixed people (AND feeling more confident to be in Black spaces).
When I became a therapist and observed how all the mixed people I worked with also felt so alone (and sometimes “weird”) I realized we needed to be coming together and healing as a mixed community. Despite my own suffering and fear of rejection, I continually put myself out there over and over again.
This relentless willingness to “fake it till I made it” combined with my professional training that addresses the way racial and interpersonal trauma show up in our identity and relationships helps me relate to my clients and empower them to keep putting themselves out there for the sake of belonging.
Q: You bring many forms of expertise and experience to this work. How does this benefit your clients?
I sometimes feel like a healing artist. My relationship with my own body and somatic practices like yoga help me infuse creativity into my work. I don’t think anyone is unhelpable, I think we just need to stop assuming that if one approach works for someone else that it should work for us. I approach every obstacle in my clients’ healing as information, something to get intensely curious about, something to have reverence for.
Q: When did you get into somatic work and how has it impacted your own Mixed evolution?
I have been a dancer since I was a child. I was fat, Mixed, neurodivergent (didn’t know it yet), and a nerd. I struggled big time with my confidence, but I always felt alive and comfortable on stage. My love for movement led me to yoga during college, which really helped me FEEL confident and strong in my body and also made me less afraid to take risks and fail. Somatics and embodiment is a practice, not something that can be achieved and checked off a list. That reality mirrors how we should approach life I think, as a big experiment that’s never over.
Q: You mention “liberation-centered somatic therapy.” Can you please tell us more about what attracted you to that specific approach, how you apply it to your work, and the impact you see it having on your clients?
As a clinical social worker, I’ve seen firsthand how systems and ideologies can exacerbate people’s suffering. Western talk therapy can be helpful, but it is also steeped in an assumption of a “normality” measured within the constraints of whiteness and white supremacy. It also does not address the social and political determinants of health, but places blame on the individual for not being “healthy” or “functional” enough.
Liberation-centered work adds the context of so-called “mental health” back into the picture: the impact of present-day and intergenerational oppression. In practice that reduces a lot of shame because it’s not you, it’s the system. Somatic practice (especially from a trauma lens) also seeks to help us understand how powerful and wise our bodies are in surviving these systems.
Our depression, our anxiety, our trauma triggers are all ways our bodies have learned to protect us against persistent harm. So how can we honor that and work with that instead of beating ourselves up about it (or policing other people’s responses/personalities either).
CONNECT WITH RAINA HERE:
Website: https://www.roottorisesomatics.com/
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/roottorisesomatics/
TikTok: Raina LaGrand ︴Therapist 🍉 (@roottorisesomatics) | TikTok
YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@roottorisesomatics
FREE BELONGING VIDEO PRACTICE : https://www.roottorisesomatics.com/belonging