Multicultural Bodies and Nervous System Work: What’s the Difference?

At Rising Embers Therapy & Wellness, this reflection explores multicultural nervous system work, body-based healing, and culturally responsive therapy for people navigating trauma, stress, identity, and intergenerational resilience.

“And I said to my body, softly, “I want to be your friend. It took a long breath and replied, “I’ve been waiting my whole life for this.”

–Nayyirah Waheed

Growing up in a Gujarati family, watching my female relatives and observing their relationships with their bodies and how our bodies were viewed not only in the community but also within Bollywood movies, the lack of representation in mainstream media (at that time) and seeing what was idealized in American culture I naturally began to see my body as something that was disconnected from me. At best, my body became something I was able to utilize to meet other goals in my life, however, not a part of me that I revered, respected or understood. Body-based traumas deepened the messages inside of me that my body continued to be a place that was at best a foreign land, speaking a language I could not understand.

Why Multicultural Bodies Need Culturally Responsive Care

As someone who was training to be in a healing profession since undergraduate studies, I had gone to therapy a few times in moments of crisis, navigating situations that felt so unmanageable I was not sure where to turn. What I learned quickly in both my studies and also in my lived experience, is the lack of understanding and knowledge working with families from the global majority–people who looked like me. Families and people who have had generations of ritual, practices and beliefs that anchored them into a sense of well-being, and displacement into a new country meant leaving the fabric of communities that supported safety, and also parts of ourselves that engaged in joy, laughter, and moments of freedom. I did not understand how my own experience as a first-generation person born in the United States of America was connected to layers of what my mother, grandmother, and generations before had experienced in different ways.

The ways the experiences of these women had also experienced colonization of their bodies in implicit and explicit ways–weilding the message that somehow what was naturally mine actually did not belong to me. It wasn’t until I started learning ways to befriend my own body that I understood there were so many living nervous systems within me, generations of wisdom, silence, pain, and also resiliency that I held and was also disconnected from trying to survive and fit into what was my present day reality.

What Is Nervous System Work?

Conventional models of therapy, typically, top-down approaches that work with cognition (thoughts and feelings), come from a white, Euro-centric, patriarchal approach of what it means to heal. These types of therapies and methods can be helpful to provide some temporary alleviation of symptoms like racing thoughts, anxious chatter about work on Monday, thoughts of wondering if life is worth living, quiet rumination of a marriage proposal, something an in-law mentioned, questioning how others experience you each moment in your new workplace. The idea behind many conventional therapies is that we can shift how we experience ourselves and the world by catching these thoughts, replacing them, reframing them, restructuring the beliefs about ourselves to create new beliefs.

Nervous system work goes a few layers deeper, understanding each thought and feeling is connected to a sensation in the body often activating something that is connected to a felt sense of something familiar from our past. Sometimes, we can know where this feeling came from (explicit) or there is simply the felt sense of this memory and no narrative (implicit). Our brain is a part of our body, and neural networks exist throughout the human body through our central and peripheral nervous systems. There are literally trillions of connections throughout our body from our neurons (brain cells), and to think our way out of distress is at best like putting a band-aid on a wound that is hemorrhaging. Our stress response is not just cognitive, it takes place in the body and our brain signals all other systems to stand back when there is a perceived threat in our environment. This is called neuroception, and our bodies are constantly engaging in this process to help us survive, all happening below our conscious awareness.

This is why somatic therapy, nervous system regulation, and body-based trauma support can be especially meaningful for multicultural bodies, BIPOC clients, immigrants, children of immigrants, and first-generation therapy seekers.

Nervous System Regulation as Body-Based Support

Learning to pay attention to the GPS of our nervous system through tracking (sensing into what your body is experiencing in the present moment) and gathering data about what is happening and what we can pay attention to next can start to break the cycles and loops the nervous system has learned connected to situations, thoughts and feelings that create further anxiety and depressive symptoms in our bodies. This can look like starting to interrupt a thought pattern by adding a moment of drinking water, going outside and sensing the temperature, touching a surface, smelling a soothing scent, while implementing a new thought or belief. Supporting the power of the pause can begin to make a difference in giving the body additional information about what is happening: Is there a threat to respond to? What can I pay attention to on the inside that lets me know I am here? Who or what is helping me right now get through this?

Your body is not broken if you are experiencing stress in the form of isolation, disconnection, fatigue, numbness or racing thoughts, anger/rage, panic attacks, constant irritability–these are all ways our nervous system is showing up as an adaptive and protective way to let us know something is off and there is something threatening your well-being. Going back to the GPS (tracking), once we know where we want to go (and where we are starting from!) We can start to use what we know about our nervous system to support us in getting there and making a choice of what direction feels best. This does not change the actual stressor in front of us, or even any obstacles we may meet along the way, but it can change how we show up to handle the situation. And something I’ve noticed since doing this work: it can change how I show up and experience myself in high stress situations. My inner dialogue sounds more like a companion instead of a nemesis in the passenger seat.

Side note: for many years I thought my internal GPS was broken, turns out I just did not know how to use it, I was too busy following others’ GPS and I was afraid to ask for help ( aka colonized systems of healing).

Befriending the Body Through Intergenerational Resilience

When we think about our reactions to toxic stress and trauma as biology and not mental weakness or as a lack of something inside of you, we can begin to see that there is immense power in beginning to befriend the body and learn the unique language of your nervous system experience. This lens opens up accessibility culturally for folks who may not have words to their experiences, layers of lived intergenerational traumas that have living memory in our bodies, and also provide space and choice based on what is working for you. Most importantly, these types of therapies support multicultural bodies by centering the lived experience of YOU, not a hierarchical relationship of what healing is from places and people that may not have any relevance to understanding the first thing about what it means to navigate your experience of the world. Body-based work is tapping into the lived wisdom and intelligence of your intergenerational resiliency, a path towards awareness with non-judgement and compassion. You can deepen the practices our ancestors and cultures have used for generations to support your capacity including dance, song, ritual, prayer and practices that are inherently based in engaging the sensory experiences of the body to bring wellness.

For clients seeking culturally responsive therapy in Chandler or online therapy across Arizona and Hawaii, nervous system skills can offer a grounded way to build capacity, reconnect with the body, and move through stress with more choice and compassion.

If you would like to learn more about working with nervous system with wellness skills, please also check out my monthly workshop: TLC for the Nervous System, where I teach the Community Resiliency Model (CRM)© skills and framework for folks as an introduction to using skills to support your nervous system immediately and to share with your community.

Search by Category

First Generation Therapy Seekers

July 6, 2026