Mariah will be presenting on:

Grief, Rage, and Imagination: What Social Movements Teach Us About Collective Healing

The grief and rage that emerge in response to the polycrisis are not pathologies to be cured or contained. They are evidence of the harm caused by systems designed to marginalize and control. When we situate trauma within a sociopolitical analysis, we can understand grief and rage as profound expressions of care and love in the face of injustice. Across cultures and generations, communities have mourned together, raged together and dreamed together, turning pain into healing, solidarity and possibility.

This session explores grief, rage and imagination as embodied intelligence and collective medicine. We will look at how shared feeling binds communities and fuels healing, drawing on somatic and liberatory frameworks, cultural and community rituals of collective mourning, and research on kama muta: the emotion of being moved by love and belonging. We will consider what social movements can teach clinicians about holding intense emotion without pathologizing it, and how imagination can become a somatic practice of liberation. Through teaching, story and a brief, verbally led experiential practice, participants will leave with frameworks for helping clients and communities feel fully, together.