January 2025

I’ve been feeling pretty disoriented this month, and if you’re in the States, my guess is you might be too. The speed, swirl, and overwhelm of executive orders raining down from the new administration are difficult to process in a way that allows me to know how to proceed. It’s an experience of confusion and disempowerment, leaving me unable to orient.
‍In somatic circles, we spend a lot of time orienting—a physical practice that reminds our bodies that we are, in fact, here, in this place, at this time. In Somatic Experiencing (SE), "orienting" describes the process of using our senses to scan the environment, allowing the nervous system to assess safety or threat. There are two types of orienting: exploratory(relaxed, curious) and defensive (hypervigilant, threat-based). Traumatic experiences can disrupt this natural process, making people either hyper-focused on threats or dissociated from their surroundings.What’s less explored is the state of disorientation—which isn’t exactly the opposite of being oriented. It’s not exactly dissociation, nor is it hypervigilance.
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Disorientation can be an effect of a traumatic experience, but doesn’t have to be. It is a state of confusion, a loss of spatial or temporal awareness, a disconnection from body and environment. When we become disoriented, the impulse is often to immediately fix it—to steady ourselves, find coherence, and feel connected to the here and now.Disorientation has interested me for a while. When our reliable markers dissolve, we feel unmoored, disorganized, and confused. There’s something about the mess of that state that intrigues me. The sense that we don’t know how to proceed, what to do next, or how to make sense of what’s happening—it’s deeply uncomfortable. And maybe… this discomfort is a necessary experience to have in order to find an unknown path forward.

‍In Authentic Movement, the mover frequently experiences disorientation—both in space and in time. With eyes closed, it’s easy to lose any sense of where we are. I’ve noticed two different impulses arise in disorientation:

1) An impulse to quickly reorient. I might reach for a wall, look for the direction of light to locate myself, lower my body to feel more grounded. In terms of time, I might feel unsure if my internal sense of time matches reality—leading me to check my timer, searching for external confirmation.

2) An impulse to sustain not-knowing. To allow myself to risk collision with another person moving in the space, to miscalculate my place in the room. To experience fully having no idea whether I have 20 seconds or 20 minutes left. To let go of needing to know if the timer is even working at all.

If I can sustain this disorientation—if I can let go of the markers that help me settle, and instead fully embody this non-oriented place—something shifts. The shift I experience feels akin to surrender—but also not quite. It’s a mix of interdependence (on my witness) and permission (for whatever wants to surface). New moves are made. New ideas grow. In sustaining a disorienting discomfort, I become available to being moved, rather than needing to move.

‍When our habitual patterns are interrupted this way, we become temporarily freed up from default responses. Perhaps the ask right now is not to orient, but instead, tolerate a level of disorientation and resist the urgency to act so that new options surface. And I feel pretty certain that something new is desperately trying to emerge.This isn’t to dismiss or diminish the invaluable, consistent work that has been oriented around the countering of greed, self-reliance, and supremacist ideology for centuries—work that has made real change. But perhaps the current feeling of disorientation itself is what we need to break free from the tight binary of power and control that shapes our current paradigm.
‍Maybe it’s within tolerating disorientation—our willingness to resist immediate reorientation—that we may find an escape from toggling between powers, and instead stepping into something creatively and divinely generative.
‍A way to proceed that doesn’t rely on external knowing and organizing, but instead lives inside the mess of our very bodily experience. And perhaps, if we commit to not trying to urgently orient ourselves, but stay inside the disorientation with care for each other, we can make space for what’s needed to move forward, together.