Collective Spotlight: LB Moore
Meet LB Moore, Certified TCTSY (Trauma Center Trauma Sensitive Yoga) Facilitator. LB (they/them or ze/zir) will be leading a 6-week Trauma Sensitive Yoga series at Sanctuary, November 7-December 19, 2024.
What are some of the factors that shaped your path to becoming a certified TCTSY facilitator (TCTSY-F)?
I tend to be most interested in winding paths–the ones that bend around a curve into the unknown. Being a somatic trauma steward wasn’t a role I always envisioned for myself, yet this stretch of the trail with TCTSY has been particularly generative.
I stumbled upon an opportunity to be trained in TCTSY as part of their first certification cohort specifically for trans and nonbinary practitioners in a season of trying to find ways to make my trauma therapy practice feel more holistically aligned for myself and the folks who choose to work with me. Yet, walking in the door to the first weekend training, I was also full of righteous, skeptical uncertainty about a clinically-developed Yoga modality. And while I have maintained the ongoing, intersectional self-study about what it means to be a white, US-based practitioner using this model, the model itself really resonates. Prior to working with TCTSY, I’d had a lot of experience in physical movement spaces and mental health spaces from all sides of the dynamic–for better and worse–and I was looking for a framework that could help me facilitate embodied possibilities for myself and others in ways that could be deeply rooted in the nonviolence of genuine choice. A way to explore trauma transformation that doesn’t rely on verbal processing or compliance–because I know that these aren’t required for healing.
While TCTSY isn’t the only way that I think about or work with bodies, movement, and healing, I’m grateful that it’s part of my world! And I’m hopeful that it might be useful to folks in the Sanctuary community.
What do you gain from this work?
Because facilitating TCTSY means that I am also practicing, my relationship to my own body, movement, and trauma transformation has been deeply impacted by my study and practice of TCTSY. This has supported my overall health, self-awareness, and capacity for making values-aligned choices in various areas of my life. Which I’m into! It’s also continued to shape my other movement practices…for example, I recently began learning to roller skate for the first time, and I was delighted to notice that I could really feel each wheel under my feet–all of that practice feeling the ground through my feet coming through in a new way!
Candidly, as a socially anxious & neuroqueer practitioner, TCTSY has also provided a powerful and exciting way to connect with folks and move alongside them in a trauma-sensitive way that doesn’t require the same verbally-focused framework of talk therapy. I’m honored and grateful to get to work with folks who have shared that talk-based models aren’t accessible for them, but TCTSY is.
What do you hope your participants experience working with you?
I aspire/hope that participants feel like they have more access to themselves. Which, of course, is really expansive. I’m grateful when folks let me know that they didn’t like something or it didn’t work for them; not only because feedback is so generous, but also because that discernment (“this isn’t for me”) is at the core of making self-informed choices. While I of course hold a hope that people enjoy what I offer, I’m actually more interested in growing within communities where we are collectively building our capacity to feel it all–curiosity and uncertainty, relaxation and dissonance, connection and boundaries–and move from that capacity.
How does your work inform your activism or understanding of the world?
Oh gracious, my trauma/movement work and my broader paradigms are deeply co-informing. My work is an expression of my dreaming toward collective liberation. People deserve access to choice, and to be in their bodies in ways that work for them (including not being in their bodies). Simultaneously, complex trauma is an expression of larger systems of power and harm, like white supremacy, ableism, capitalism, colonialism, and their powerful sibling and offspring systems; I practice believing that processes intended to heal that trauma are/should be inextricably bound up in the parallel process of dismantling those traumatizing systems. Additionally, as individual bodies surviving and taking action against systems of harm, I also believe that our efforts are more sustainable if we can be on the same team as our bodies–speaking a shared language, making informed choices, and connecting with other bodies in aligned ways.
What’s one of your go-to comfort activities?
I notice that I need different kinds of comfort on different days/times/seasons, so I’ll share two! One is walking–particularly in plant-immersive spaces like the woods or meadows near where I live. The movement is really helpful for my chronic pain, and being with plants and creatures is super regulating to my system (especially when the weather feels good and there aren’t too many mosquitoes!). Inside, I really enjoy reading webcomics. I maintain a mix of stimulating and fluffy/wholesome stories so that I can call in the narrative energy that I need.
What has made you smile recently that you want to share?
I spend a lot of time outside, and I love the fall. So while I often find myself smiling at the breeze or the palette of falling leaves or the burbling river, in this moment I’m thinking about the squirrels. They’re very active where I live, and this moment is a special season in their cycle of preparing for winter. I am so endeared watching how they bury nuts and seeds–often haphazardly–with their tiny hands, knowing that they may be food when it gets cold, or as easily become seedlings in the spring!
