Cultural Imprints of Our Bodies

This practice was created by Ian Goh in 2025. Please acknowledge the source when you use any of these practices.

The Cultural Imprints of Our Bodies invites participants to witness their bodies as living archives that carry both the wounds of oppression and the seeds of collective healing. Inspired by the Decolonised Spiral of the Work that Reconnects conceived by Mutima Imani, Molly Young Brown and colleagues, this practice bridges one’s social location with existing systems of oppression through exploring the intersectional relationships that manifest in our bodies. By bringing awareness to how cultural conditioning shapes our embodied experience, we create space for both recognition and liberation. 

Method

This exercise is done in silence with eyes open. Participants are invited to notice their relationship to various aspects of their embodied experience, acknowledging both the cultural conditioning and the potential for liberation that exists within each aspect.

The skin. Look at your hands, your arms. Notice the color, tone, and texture of your skin. This skin carries stories; not just of sun exposure or genetics, but of how societies have constructed meaning around melanin. Feel into your relationship with your skin color. 

What messages did you receive growing up? 

What privileges or challenges has this skin brought you? 

Notice any feelings of pride, shame, neutrality, or complexity that arise. Your skin is not just biology, it carries the weight and gifts of cultural history, resistance, and belonging.

Body modifications and sacred markings. Notice any tattoos, scars, piercings, or other modifications on your body; whether chosen or imposed by circumstance. In many cultures, these markings carry deep spiritual significance. Colonial systems often demonize traditional body modifications while commodifying others. 

What stories do your modifications tell?

If you have chosen markings, what meaning do they hold for you?

If you have scars from injury or medical procedures, how do you relate to these marks? 

For those from cultures with traditional scarification, tattooing, or piercing practices, what is your relationship to these ancestral traditions? 

Notice any feelings about authenticity, cultural appropriation, or spiritual significance that arise.

The hair. Run your fingers through your hair, noticing colour and texture. Or touch and feel your scalp if your head is shaved or covered. Hair has been a site of cultural control and expression. In many cultures, hair carries spiritual significance, while colonial and corporate systems have created hierarchies around texture, length, and style. 

What is your relationship to your hair? 

What rules, spoken or unspoken, have you learned about how your hair should look? 

Notice any tensions between cultural authenticity and social acceptance.

Facial features. Gently touch your face; your nose, lips, cheekbones, eyes. Notice the texture of your face and its meandering contours. 

These features connect you to ancestral lineages while also positioning you within contemporary beauty standards and racial categories. 

Eurocentric beauty norms have created global hierarchies of facial features, while indigenous and many cultures in the world hold different values. 

What stories do your facial features carry? 

How have beauty standards, colorism and ageism influenced your relationship to your face?

Speech patterns. Speak a few words aloud, or simply feel your throat and voice box. 

Your voice carries accent, cadence, volume, and linguistic patterns that connect you to community and also mark you within social hierarchies. Some voices are deemed “professional” and “credible”, others “uneducated.” Some accents open doors, others close them. 

What is your relationship to your voice? 

How has code-switching, accent modification, or linguistic pride shaped how you speak? 

What voices in your lineage have been silenced or celebrated?

Body size and shape. Feel the weight and shape of your body as you sit or stand. Our relationship to our body size has been profoundly shaped by cultural ideals, pathologizing by Western medicine and consumer capitalism. Despite how different cultures across time and space have been celebrating vastly different body types. 

What messages has your culture given you about your body size? 

How has diet culture, fatphobia, or body celebration movements influenced your relationship to your physical form?

Notice and hold space for images, thoughts and feelings that arise.

Sex characteristics.* Bring gentle awareness to your chest, your genitals, your body hair, the shape of your hips or shoulders. These features carry profound cultural weight beyond their biological function. Breast size, facial hair, body hair distribution, hip-to-waist ratios – all have been assigned meaning by patriarchal beauty standards, medical pathologizing, and gender policing systems. Some cultures celebrate body hair, others demand its removal. Some honor diverse expressions of gender through the body, others enforce rigid binaries. 

What messages have you received about these aspects of your body? 

How has gender socialization shaped your relationship to these characteristics? 

For those who are trans, non-binary, or gender non-conforming, how do these features relate to the way you express yourself?

Notice any feelings of alignment, dysphoria, pride, or complexity that arise.

Space. Notice how you naturally hold your body. How much space are you taking when you are sitting? These patterns carry cultural coding about gender, class, and social position. Some bodies are conditioned to take up space like “manspreading”, others to minimize themselves. Some are seen as graceful, others as disgusting or threatening. 

How were you taught to take up space in your body? 

What cultural messages about gender, respectability, or safety have shaped your physical presence in the world?

The hands. Look again at your hands. Beyond their evolutionary gift from our primate ancestors, these hands carry the history of human labor and class systems. 

Soft hands versus calloused ones tell stories of privilege and work. 

Firm hands versus wrinkly ones tell stories of age and impermanence. 

The color and condition of hands can reveal or conceal social status. What work have your hands done? 

What messages have you internalized about “manual” versus “intellectual” labor? 

How has the dignity or shame of different types of work shaped your relationship to your own hands?

Integration. Take a moment to appreciate your body as a living archive; carrying both the wounds and wisdom of cultural conditioning, while also holding the potential for healing and liberation. Your body is not just a biological inheritance, but a cultural artifact that you can intentionally engage with, honor, and potentially transform.

Things to note

Placement in the Spiral

This practice is ideally placed after Coming from Gratitude and before Honoring our Pain for the World. Grounding in gratitude ensures participants are resourced before engaging with potentially challenging material. Exploring cultural imprints before the grief work makes explicit the existing harms and complicities in our lived experiences, connecting personal pains and collective suffering.

Open Sentences

Here are some open sentences that could be used for discussion in pairs:

• One way my body has been valued is…
• I became aware of these cultural beliefs when…
• One way my body has been excluded are…
• Towards these imprints of my body, I felt..

Emotional support

It is natural for unpleasant feelings to arise after practice. Consider these integration steps:

Invite everyone into a short guided contemplation on tantric aspects of our emotions, similar to those found in the Truth Mandala. Here’s an example:

Our sorrow is in equal measure love. We only mourn what we deeply care for.

Our fear shows our trust and courage it takes to experience it.

The anger we feel comes from the source of our passion for justice and care for nurturing Life.

To feel hopelessness is to rest in surrender, allowing space for emergence.

If you have introduced some form of Lovingkindness meditation, grounding with gratitude practice or any other somatic/trauma-informed/embodiment practices earlier in the first part of the spiral, feel free to reinforce them after this practice. 

*Be aware that exploration of sex characteristics may be inappropriate with participants consisting of mixed genders. It may also bring distress to trans and non-binary participants, especially if practising alongside cisgender participants. You may consider avoiding this aspect altogether unless you are holding a workshop for a specific affinity group, including but not limited to queer-affirming, LGBT-only, women-only, men-only, couples-only circles and have adequate resources to support your participants (e.g. being trained in trauma-informed practice).