Tala Sammur is a yoga and meditation teacher and The Resilience Project team member. In this blog, Tala begins exploring themes from her upcoming online event, in collaboration with Tania S. Shoukair is a certified somatic (mind-body) coach, behavioral designer, writer and founder of The Deep Knowing.
Watch enough movements rise and fall, and you may start to notice some patterns.
At first, everyone feels empowered and energised to fight for the causes they care about. The group chat is active, people show up to every action, they share everything on social media. But as the weeks and months go by, momentum wanes and soldiers are lost to the war of attrition. People start talking less, they scroll past uncomfortable news more, and the once pervasive silence begins to slowly creep up again.
The forces of injustice don’t take a day off, and so some still push, despite exhaustion and loneliness. They rally, they scroll when they can’t bear to watch, they cry in private, until one day, the fire inside once fuelled by rage and hope is smothered beneath the ashes of apathy and subduction.
That same apathy bears heavy on the activists who used to lead the chants, now unable to get out of bed. It manifests somatically in the clenched jaw that won’t unlock, the shorbreath that’s trapped in the chest, and the restless nights of shallow sleep.
In somatic practices like yoga, you’re taught that tension is stagnation. A tight hip carries unfinished business. A breath that stays in the chest braces for a threat. The body starts to tighten and shut down when its resources run dry, not because it is faulty, but because an overwhelmed nervous system, exhausted by chronic activation and uncertainty, eventually trips the switch. The result is numbness, the defensive mechanism that keeps us functioning in dysfunction.
An organisation that starts with fiery momentum but no regenerative framework or protocol will eventually hit a wall if it never rests, never repairs, and never acknowledges its own limits. The people involved don’t stop showing up because they no longer care, but because their collective nervous systems have gone offline.
One of the patterns that movements need to overcome is pushing through chronic sympathetic activation (fight/flight) without recovery, followed by a crash into shutdown (freeze/numb), and all the relational and organisational tension that comes with it.
And while numbness is a brilliant evolutionary protector, it also mutes the signals that tell you what you need to recover. For changemakers, numbing to injustice is a survival mechanism that gradually malnourishes the movement and disconnects its members from their inner fire and aliveness.
So how do we break this pattern and keep nourishing momentum, and the people driving it forward?
If this is a question you would like to explore further, join Tania and Tala for this free event on August 12th 5:00 PM BST for a conversation where they’ll unpack what it takes to keep movements alive without burning out the people driving them, and how the wisdom of our bodies can show us a different way forward.
