Rootwork was a collaboration between Lumos Transforms and Healing Justice Ldn, supported through the Joseph Rowntree Foundation Emerging Futures programme.
Created in response to rising instability, polarization, burnout, and fragmentation across social change ecosystems, Rootwork explored a simple but consequential premise: systems do not transform themselves, people do. If we hope to build more just, liberatory futures, we must attend not only to strategies, structures, and institutions, but also to the internal and relational conditions from which those futures are imagined, organized, and sustained.
This series brings together reflections from participants, partners, and collaborators across the UK who engaged with Rootwork. Together, these pieces explore what becomes possible when embodied practice is brought into the work of social change, collective resilience, and the long project of liberation.
In this reflection, therapist and community researcher Loa Pourmirza explores collective trauma, diasporic grief, and the stabilizing role of community amid escalating violence in Iran and its global reverberations.
I am writing this at a time when my beloved homeland Iran and hamvatanan (country people) are facing both external and internal threats – American and Israeli bombs rain down upon my people from above, less than two months after the Islamic Republic’s massacre of protestors in January.
The violence, internet and communication blackouts, and suppression against the people who call Iran (1) their home has contributed to another cycle of re-traumatisation for generations who have a history of undealt with trauma. We are currently witnessing widespread stress responses—fight, flight, freeze, appease, and dissociate—manifesting as social disconnection, communication breakdowns, and ultimately a fractured community. Both on the streets and in digital spaces, diasporic Iranians are finding themselves in conflict with one another, fuelled first and foremost by their bottomless wells of grief and anger. The focus of this blog is not on the political divisions and fragmentations; I want to speak instead to the reality of what happens when the collective soma of a people becomes dysregulated in the face of crisis.
Through the Rootwork programme, I received a scholarship to the three-part Lumos Transforms Survival to Stability training which coincided with the protests and ensuing state-sponsored massacres that took place earlier this year. During this period, I have been contending with my own dysregulation whilst trying to learn more about collective resilience building. When I reflect on my coping strategies of recent, I find I have been compartmentalising to a point of numbness and at times, disassociation. I do this because it allows me to meet the demands of everyday life – even though the world feels like it’s on fire, my responsibilities aren’t suspended and life around me continues. This is not new, it is a conditioned response shaped by a lifetime of witnessing countless devastations across the world, both near and far.
My journey with somatics began early on in my activism, just under a decade ago, with Healing Justice London becoming an important anchor point for my learning. Like many others, I have been involved in grassroots organisations that have fallen apart because of extreme burn-out and relationship collapse, and so I recognise the importance of challenging our politically and socially shaped trauma responses and tending to our collective soma to build sustained capacity. At a time like now, when my community is steeped in pain, I am questioning how I can translate my understanding of this concept into practice, especially when I myself feel frozen under the weight of grief for my people and homeland.
And so I turn to this quote by Toni Cade Bambara, “the revolution begins with the self”, which so poignantly mirrors the key learning from the Rootwork tour and Survival to Stability training – that if we haven’t done the rootwork, we don’t know how to be with ourselves, and we have to be with ourselves to be with others.
Over the past two weeks, I have spent time with close friends who have all at one point or another asked me “How are you taking care of yourself?” to which I respond “I don’t know”. I quickly became aware of how I haven’t had the discipline, intentionality, and capacity to nurture baseline practices (2), which may have contributed to more effective ways of navigating the complexity of this moment.
The metaphor that is shared with us in the programme is that building baseline practices is like training a muscle. Doing so means that when stress levels are high, the reflex and ability to reach for rescue practices is more likely. I was sharing this particular reflection with an Iranian friend, my shame and disappointment clearly seeping through, and she very quickly challenged my perspective.
During the 12 day war on Iran in June 2025, I met two Iranian women who have since become like family to me. We set up a group chat, scheduled weekly meet-ups and have been holding each other through the tumultuous rollercoaster of emotions over the past couple of months. The youngest of the two didn’t miss a beat in sternly reminding me that what we have been doing is creating rituals, and that rituals demand presence, space and continuity – three things that we have been intentionally providing for each other in this trio of sisterhood. I knew she was right and immediately recognised that what we have been engaging in is the stabilisation stage of the Resilience Toolkit: finding safety and connection to disrupt the chaos and turbulence.
Photo by Arielle Allouche
I have since come to recognise that what keeps me going during the darkest of times is community. When it feels like the world is suspended in a state of permacrisis, community is the root that grounds us, giving us stability and hope. And so this is the learning that I take forward with me as I continue to embark on this journey of politicised somatics. Not only does it offer us an alternative pathway to reimagine our liberatory futures, reminding us that we are more likely to get there from a place of spaciousness rather than dysregulation, but it also demands that we do it together. Like the seeds of a pomegranate, we nestle tightly against one another, connected by the white membrane that threads us together as one.
(1) Iran is an ethnically diverse country, made up of Persians, Lurs, Mazandaranis, Kurds, Azeris, Balochs, Gilaks, Semnanis, Turkmens, Arabs etc.
(2) Daily somatic exercises that can lower your general stress levels whilst building muscle memory.
About the author
Loa Pourmirza (she/her) is a Pluralistic Therapist and Community Researcher whose work focuses on the intersections of race and diasporic identities, creativity, and bodymind health/ill-health. She is also the Founder of The Joon Project, a community initiative with the aim of supporting consciousness-raising processes centred around our collective liberation.
