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Why Healing Spaces Must Address Racial Bias in the Body: Somatic as Responsibility
- Juel McNeilly
- Jan 27
- 6 min read
Updated: Jan 29
Hello People,
I didn’t create Exploring the Veil because it was easy… or because I was asked to.
I created it because, again and again, I found myself inside spaces devoted to healing, embodiment, and care - while something essential was missing.
Not from the curriculum, necessarily, but from the felt sense of the room.
What remained was silence.
Discomfort with nowhere to go.
Patterns of bias and blindness living quietly in the nervous system...unnamed and unfelt by some.
For a long time, I waited for someone else to create a space where these realities could be met with depth, skill, and care. Slowly, it became clear: this was work I was choosing to step into.
On my own terms.
Let me be clear about that choice.
I do not do this work to perform pain, to educate on demand, or to carry responsibility that does not belong to me.
I am not here to do the emotional labour for institutions, communities, or individuals who are unwilling to meet themselves.
And I do not speak for all Black, Indigenous, or People of Colour.
I speak from my lived experience, not on behalf of anyone else.
What I offer comes from consent, not obligation.
Even when it’s uncomfortable, because the cost of not engaging, of staying silent, lives in the body too. In my body. And it comes from a deep belief that these conversations matter - especially in spaces that work with the body.
I see somatics as a form of activism.
Not loud or forceful.
Not performative.
But slow, relational, and deeply embodied.
Our bodies carry our conditioning. They carry history, bias, survival strategies, and unconscious allegiance to systems we may consciously reject.
If we are unwilling to meet that in ourselves, gently, honestly, and with support. We risk recreating harm in the very spaces meant to heal.
You cannot think your way out of bias.
You cannot breathe your way out of reality.
But you can build the capacity to be with what is.
That’s what Exploring the Veil is rooted in: trauma-informed, titrated somatic inquiry that meets internalized race, bias, power, and difference at the level where they actually live -
in sensation, impulse, contraction, and response.
This is not about blame or shame.
It’s about responsibility.
Why This Trauma-informed Anti-Racism Training Exists
As a mixed-heritage person, First Nation, Afro-Trinidadian, with colonial white lineage. I live at the intersection of belonging and displacement. That tension lives in my body.
And in recent years, it’s become impossible to ignore how often BIPOC bodies are asked to navigate healing spaces, even somatic spaces, without adequate safety, attunement, or awareness from those holding the container.
Exploring the Veil was born from that rupture.
From the ache of loving spaces that are not yet equipped to hold all bodies well.
From the grief of being unseen - and the refusal to harden or disappear because of it.
Mixed with a deep belief that we cannot meet this without engaging in the conversation, however uncomfortable that may be, from any side.
This work is not about calling people out.
It’s about calling people in, to presence, to humility, to the body as a site of truth.
Because the body remembers what the mind avoids, this work is about somatic healing for racial bias, meeting patterns that live in sensation, impulse, and response, not just in thought.
It’s about creating the conditions where our nervous systems can process, release, and integrate what has been carried silently for too long.
A Word to White Participants, Programs & Institutions
If you are white and this work calls to you: you are welcome here.
Not as the center, but as a participant with responsibility.
This is an invitation to explore your own conditioning somatically, without outsourcing discomfort or expecting education through someone else’s pain, or through a “magic-pill” Aha moment.
It asks for curiosity, nervous-system literacy, and a willingness to stay when things get uncomfortable - without defensiveness or collapse.
If you lead trainings, certifications, or communities - or if you’re a parent in a blended family - this work is not about optics or compliance.
It’s about whether your spaces are actually resourced to hold difference, rupture, and repair.
And whether you are willing to build that capacity within yourself, your relationships, and the environments you shape.
Because it starts there.
A Word to BIPOC Participants, Programs & Institutions
This work is also for you - but not because of you.
You are not here to explain yourself.
You are not here to justify your experience.
And you are not here as a teaching tool for anyone else.
Like everyone, we carry conditioning in our bodies. Internalized bias lives in us too... shaped by history, survival, power, culture, and the ways we’ve learned to move through the world.
For BIPOC bodies, that conditioning often sits alongside racialized harm, resilience, vigilance, and adaptation.
It’s layered. And it deserves space to be met for our own healing, not in service of someone else’s growth.
In my work, I hold different containers for different needs.
The Sanctuary exists as a place for BIPOC participants to land - without having to hold the room, explain context, be resilient, or manage the comfort of others.
A space to return to yourself, to soften, to be witnessed without effort...where vigilance can rest, and the body can exhale.
Exploring the Veil: A Somatic Approach to Healing Racial Trauma is different. It’s a space for both white and BIPOC facilitators, leaders, space-holders, and practitioners who are already navigating mixed spaces - and want to consciously grow their capacity in the body.
To feel into how we hold complexity, choice, and resilience without bypassing ourselves.
To build fluency, not armor.
Both spaces acknowledge that we are all conditioned - and that this conditioning is lived differently in different bodies. Because of that, it needs different kinds of space to unpack, unfold, and metabolize.
Exploring the Veil holds BIPOC experience with care, consent, and choice.
There is room for rest and expression.
For witnessing and voice.
And as a baseline, within this work, you don’t need to educate, translate, or perform strength... only to arrive as you are and stay close to your own journey.
Why I Work With Mixed Groups
I want to speak to this clearly, because it matters to me.
My choice to work with mixed groups is intentional and rooted in my belief in conversation.
As long as we only ever separate in the healing of race and bias, segregation continues quietly, sometimes disguised as safety.
And at the same time, I hold this just as firmly: BIPOC people are not here to be test subjects, and we are not responsible for building awareness or capacity for white people.
Both of these truths live together for me.
I believe that doing this work together, when it’s held carefully, creates something that separation alone cannot.
Shared somatic inquiry allows us to feel where awareness diverges, where conditioning lands differently, where rupture happens, and where repair becomes possible in real relationship.
This doesn’t mean anything goes.
Within the program, I intentionally separate BIPOC and white-bodied participants for initial sharing. This gives everyone space to speak without pressure, performance, polarization, or self-monitoring. Moving into full-group dialogue always comes with choice, consent, and pacing.
That balance, between separation and togetherness, is not a compromise.
It is the practice.
Learning to stay close to your own conditioning, rooted in your lived experience of life.
Why I Continue: Somatic Healing for Racial Bias
I chose this path because I believe in conversation, even when it’s challenging.
Because I believe healing spaces must be brave enough to look at themselves.
Because the body remembers what the mind avoids.
I do this work slowly. Clearly. With boundaries intact.
Not to save anyone.
Not to be consumed by the work.
But to contribute to a future where embodiment truly includes us all.
The body is where the truth lives.
And this is where I choose to listen.
Be the first to know when doors reopen.
Join the waitlist for the next cohort here
One love,
Juel
PS. Please remember to subscribe!
PS. You can dive into ways to reunite with your essence, pleasure & body with me here.
Juel helps people return to the intelligence of their bodies—so they can lead with presence, resilience, and truth.
Her work is somatic, trauma-informed, and rooted in nervous system awareness, guiding real change where the body still carries what the mind has tried to move past.
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