ABSTRACT
This chapter examines the role of movement in healing. Our bodies are made to move and express themselves physically and emotionally in a variety of diverse ways. We experience, interpret, and feel the world through our physical bodies. Yet we live in societies that are constructed for normatively able-bodied people, societies which often actively create barriers to those with different abilities. Movement is not just a matter of getting from one place to another; it is also a means of creative expression and play. Humans evolved to move. In traditional cultures, running, walking, dancing, hunting and gathering, planting, and harvesting are everyday ways of life. Decolonizing our relationship with movement starts by removing the artificial barrier that Western binary thinking has constructed between being, knowing, and moving-as-embodied acting. By inscribing shame on the bodies of racialized, gendered, and differently abled people, the ideology of settler colonialism has exerted control over how bodies encountered one another in the public realm. Fatphobia, ableism, sexism, homophobia, and transphobia are rooted in deep histories of oppressive colonizing frameworks that make us feel unsightly and unworthy of being and movement in public spaces. Social work practice increasingly recognizes the importance of movement and play in supporting well-being.
