True Body Cohort Feature: Rana Dotson

Each month we feature an individual from our True Body 2020 Leadership Training Virtual Cohort.

Rana Dotson joins the True Body Cohort from the D.C. area. Rana is a poet, policy maker and most recently a host for Three Sisters, a podcast from The Well. She shares her journey to embodiment and why healing, personal and publicly, is so important.

We cannot pour long from broken vessels but a cracked and repaired vessel is beloved and poured from over and over again.

Eleven years ago I experienced a catastrophic injury that reoriented me to my body and the way that I experience the world through my senses. In a white hot flash of an instant, everything changed. For eleven years, I have pulled from disparate sources to plot a way forward in this New Body- one that was both post-maternal and post-injury. It’s been a path full of slow learning, of crushing failure, and of humbling persistence to keep going.

All the while, the refrain that has stayed with me has been this: My body wants to heal. My body is always healing. The most helpful support has always keyed into my own listening, my own paying attention, to teach and equip me with tools and strategies and empower me on the path of health and healing. True Body has helped me become more attuned with the body that so pained me for so long, to re-enter regions of sensory awareness long abandoned and to slowly learn trust and calm there again.

Everything I do in life is focused outwardly on some aspect of community and systems healing; and in order to do my best work for my family, the community and ultimately the world, I need to be fully grounded in my body’s own healing wisdom, to be a healing agent by way of example, not just by the words I speak or the community programs I support.

The work I do supports children, families, communities and governments to increase their capacity to fight all forms of labor exploitation; to reduce the need for families to rely on children to do dangerous jobs; to increase opportunities for young people to access high quality education, for them and their parents to have access to better economic opportunities; for governments to be better able to protect and provide resources, paying special attention to those who have been historically vulnerable to labor abuses. Although I’m several bureaucratic layers removed from the people who are working towards healing “on the ground” in their own communities with the support of our programs, I am reminded through this True Body work that everything comes down to bodies, the labor they perform and the way we value or disregard them, the ways they are treated.

Ultimately the dream is to bring it all home to local communities in practice with my sisters and “sister cousins” who do individual and community-level health, healing and wellness work. While the bulk of my career has crossed international borders, I feel the tug home to my own body, my own community and a calling home to the people more directly within my reach, my touch.

Connect with Rana (and her two sisters) through Three Sisters Podcast. You can also find her at www.highgraceroad.com