The holidays pull the curtain back, every single time. The kind your body speaks before your mouth ever does.
And today, you’re one day away from a national holiday that many of us now recognize as steeped in mythology built to obscure violence against Indigenous nations on this land. That matters. It deserves acknowledgment. It deserves collective reckoning.
But here’s the paradox we have to name without flinching:
This is the same empire that runs on extraction, burnout, and urgency. It demands productivity under duress, glorifies endless labor, manufactures scarcity, and then throws scraps of “time off” back at you like it’s benevolence.
So when the calendar finally allows a pause, the body gathers, anyway — because it’s starved for connection, not celebration. Starved for community, not mythology. And in those gatherings? You are face-to-face with generational patterns, roles cast by family systems, reinforced by media narratives, enforced through silence, and metabolized in the body as tension, longing, and sometimes grief.
Somatic Pause
Right here, stop for a second.
Feel your body in the space you’re in right now — not the one you’re reading about.Drop into your seat, your bed, your floor, wherever your body actually is.
Inhale without urgency.Exhale without performance.
Let your tongue rest instead of brace.Let your shoulders soften instead of narrate.
Ask your body gently:
“What do I need to stay here without needing to carry the room?”
Stay with that answer for a breath before you move on.
Grief and awareness make space when you let the breath move first.
Let all of that be here.
Talking Point 1: The Holidays Are Not the Holidays — They’re Mirrors
The gathering isn’t the real event. The reflection is the real event.
This season holds up:
* the roles you played without consent,
* the boundaries you tried to whisper and now speak louder,
* the inherited expectations you’re finally ready to shed.
Reframes
* You’re not overwhelmed — you’re somatically awake.The body doesn’t resist what it doesn’t see. It resists what it has translated for you physically.
* The mirror isn’t shaming you — it’s positioning you with data.
* Discomfort at the table doesn’t mean dysfunction — it means clarity is rising.
Reflections to land with
* Your boundaries are being tested by familiarity, not lack of growth.
* Your body now speaks earlier than your voice used to.
* The mirror is evidence you can no longer perform your way out of truth.
Practice Your Praxis prompts
* What is this mirror reflecting about the family role I inherited without question?
* Where have I been abandoning my body to maintain a tradition that never protected me?
* What does liberation sound like when I rehearse it in my mouth ahead of time?
Talking Point 2: The Grief Is Because There Was Love There
Grief doesn’t exist without love preceding it.
I told you in today’s live: If you’re grieving something, it’s because you cherished it. This is a form of love asking to be felt, not fixed.
Reframes
* Grief is not emotional excess — it is emotional evidence.
* You are not regressing — you are remembering with consciousness.
* Grief isn’t separating you from love — it’s showing you where love was lodged.
What this is metabolizing
* You’re grieving the history, not the loss.
* You’re grieving the role, not the rupture.
* You’re grieving what wasn’t allowed to evolve, even while you did.
Practice Your Praxis prompts
* What love lived in me that grief is now revealing?
* Who told me grief was “dramatic” or inconvenient — family or media, or social conditioning itself?
* What would shift in my inhale if I stopped treating grief like an interruption and started treating it like translation?
Teaching nugget for listenersGrief held without narrative becomes somatic truth.Grief named accurately becomes liberatory language, not collapse.
Talking Point 3: The Body Knows When You’ve Changed, Even When Others Haven’t
Your body registered the inner migration long before your family updated the script.
This is where healing meets family systems and media influence — and why unlearning is a physical threshold evolution, not just cognitive.
Reframes
* You were conditioned, not confused.
* Your family position was scripted, not inevitable.
* Unlearning a role doesn’t mean unloving the people. It means unwriting the cultural instructions that shaped the stage.Love remains. The script doesn’t have to.
What listener bodies are carrying
* The older version of you people expect is a hologram, not a reflection.
* The nervous system backlash is grief hitting expectation at a dead sprint.
* The body knows the gap between who you are and who others still try to conjure you into.
Practice Your Praxis prompts
* What media myth carved my family role into my body earliest?
* What emotional or authoritative position did I absorb that never protected my healing?
* What narrative am I ready to release so the mirror becomes my teacher instead of the television?
Somatic Pause
Pause with me, love…
Drop the tongue from the roof of your mouth.Relax the diaphragm.Place a hand to the chest to witness what’s rising there, without rushing to narrate it into neatness.
Now tell your body slowly:
“You don’t need more time to prove you’ve changed. Your body already filed your liberation notice.”
Stay there until the breath drops low again.
Final Close
This season will mirror the inherited mythology.It will also mirror your liberation arc back to you.
You can choose not to go.You can choose takeout and a movie instead.You can choose grief and gratitude in the same breath.
None of that disqualifies your love.None of that disqualifies your thankfulness.It just means you’re done performing your way out of yourself.
If this has landed in you, there is deeper medicine, deeper lessons, and deeper body clarity for you beyond the free articles. That’s exactly where the work continues.
Ways to Journey Deeper
If this season is revealing things you’re ready to work through more deeply, I created tools, somatics, and guided support for moments exactly like these.
✨Download and use the TableTalk app
A space for unpacking who is at your holiday table and how to be empowered and embodied to deal with family systems. tabletalkapp.store
How Table Talk Unpacked Supports This Work
The Table Talk Unpacked resources are designed not only to help interrupt patterned family dynamics, but to help you see and map the scripts. Inside, you’ll find:
* Tools to name and map the archetypes and family positions in the room — who is playing which roles, who inherited what story, who expects what performance.
* Reflection questions and conversation prompts that help you undo media-mirrors and ancestral narratives in real time.
* Grounding scripts and somatic resets for preparing before you step in — because your body already feels those scripts.
* Practices to call out numbness, patterns of silence, and generational loops with clarity and care.
If there’s a recurring pattern that feels so familiar it shows up every year, this tool helps you see it, name it, and step into a new way. Take the Quiz
✨ Ebook: Dismantling Supremacy Culture (2nd Edition)
Understanding and Overcoming Its 15 Pillars — a foundational guide to identify, name, and unlearn the habits of dominance within ourselves and our systems. Now expanded to include a digital workbook, somatic support and an app based learning system.Download the Ebook
✨ Join the Liberation Education Academy
Be part of co-creating the next evolution of liberation education.Join the Academy to experience the 2026 curriculum, offerings, and community learning pathways.Become a founding memeber of the Academy
✨ 31 Days of Shadow Work for Liberation (App)
Step into the Season of Descent with 31 guided prompts, somatic practices, and altar invitations for just $11.A sacred container to support your shadow work and liberation journey.Download the App
✨ Support the Work & the Healing Homestead
Partner with me and LadySpeech Sankofa in building the Selenite & Sage Healing Homestead — a sacred initiative to purchase land that will serve as a community healing, education, and retreat space.
Your offerings sustain the vision of land stewardship, communal healing, and intergenerational repair.Support the Healing Homestead
✨ Direct Offerings of Gratitude
Support my ongoing journey into becoming a PsychoSomatic Practitioner (began September 15th), or simply offer gratitude for the labor and love that goes into this work. Every gesture of reciprocity sustains the work of liberation and care.
CashApp • Venmo • PayPal: seleniteandsage@gmail.com
✨ Explore More Tools and Resources
From e-books to guided meditations, workshops, and more — explore the growing library of liberation tools.Visit My Resource Hub
In solidarity and liberation,Desireé B. Stephens, CPS-PEducator | Counselor | Community BuilderFounder, Make Shi(f)t HappenWriter of Liberation EducationSteward of Selenite & Sage Healing Homestead Co.Where Reflection Meets Transformation
Thank you Taylor McC, Sam Beard, Tiffany Donnelly, mia lopez cox, Ingrid, and many others for tuning into my live video! Join me for my next live video in the app.
