Embodied code-switching is more than just shifting languages—it’s a deep, somatic experience of navigating cultural identities through movement, awareness, and presence. In this captivating episode, Timothy Hayes speaks with Marcia Bonato Warren, a trauma-informed body psychotherapist and the insightful author of Movement and Identity: Multiculturalism, Somatic Awareness, and Embodied Code-Switching. Marcia shares how her multicultural upbringing inspired her exploration of identity, belonging, and the body’s role in cultural adaptation. Prepare for a thought-provoking conversation on embodied awareness, living across cultural divides, and how we can embrace the fluidity of who we are.
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Marcia Bonato Warren, Author Of The New Book Movement And Identity: Multiculturalism, Somatic Awareness, And Embodied Code-Switching
Marcia Bonato Warren is a trauma-informed body psychotherapist, somatic counselor, intra-culturalist, and author. With over 30 years of cross-cultural and mental health experience, she is a licensed professional counselor in the state of Colorado and holds a Master of Arts and International Relations from Johns Hopkins University, a Master of Arts in Somatic Counseling/Body Psychotherapy from Naropa University, as well as certificates in Clinical Supervision, Intercultural Foundations, Sensorimotor Psychotherapy Trauma Training, and Indigenous Psychology. Her first book, Movement Identity: Multiculturalism, Somatic Awareness, and Embodied Code-Switching, will be available in March of 2025.
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Welcome, Marcia. Thank you so much for agreeing to meet with me.
It’s a pleasure. Thank you for having me.
What Led To The Writing Of “Movement And Identity”
I’m delighted. I’m looking forward to hearing if you’re willing to share with us how you got into the work you do, what drives your passion for it, and what led to your writing this book, Movement Identity: Multiculturalism, Somatic Awareness, and Embodied Code-Switching.
I will warn your readers that my way of communicating is storytelling, so this may be a little bit of a story, which also comes into play as the way I wrote the book, too. This book was born from my lived experience. I am the daughter of a Brazilian immigrant to the United States. My mother came in the 1960s to teach Portuguese and Spanish.
My father is Native American. I’m an enrolled member of my tribe, Santa Clara Pueblo in New Mexico. I grew up in Santa Fe, New Mexico. I’ve been going back and forth to Brazil to visit my mother’s family and going back and forth to my tribe to visit relatives and for traditional events. In many ways, this work was born in me as a multicultural person.
In a particular way as well, I didn’t learn the languages of either of my parents growing up, not fully. On a somatic level, and I’m a somatic therapist, I was learning nonverbal communication pretty much from the get-go in order to try to understand the cultures that I was a part of and the environments that I was in, as well as the relationships I was trying to form within them.
From a very early age, I understood the difference, and I understood the difference in a way that I saw around me and I saw within me, but I didn’t quite have the words for it. As I went through life, I was always seeking ways of trying to contextualize that. I did my undergraduate degree in International Studies. I did my first graduate degree in International Relations. I was always seeking a way of trying to bridge cultures.
Eventually, after getting married, having kids, staying at home, and raising the kids, I wanted to go back to school and focus on what I had done earlier in my life, which is advocacy, into a personal relational career. That’s when I found Naropa University and did the somatic program. This is a long story, I know, but stay with me.
During that time, I began to understand movement and identity in a way of it being a distinct relationship within me. That’s part of what that degree brought to me. It was a way of embodying all the parts of myself, which are the parts that I express and the parts that are unconscious and move through me. That’s when I discovered something called code-switching. We can talk about this more in detail, but it’s a way of switching between languages and then identities. I got curious about how we do that in our bodies with identities. That was the birth of Embodied Code-Switching.
Fast forward, it took about ten years until the opportunity to write a book came through. It was a gift. It was out of the blue. An editor found me after I had done a workshop online where I talked about embodied multicultural identities and offered me the opportunity to write. That was the greatest gift that I’ve ever had.
I was able to do that and deepen into an experience of writing and bringing through what I felt were all the important parts of being multicultural in this world, both the challenges and the strengths and the gifts it can offer not only to us as therapists and the clients we work with, but to almost anyone that wants to bring together their experience as a human being on this planet.
Let me slow you down and back up. Your mother’s heritage is Italian-Brazilian?
That’s right. In Brazil, there was a large Italian immigration after the freedom of slaves when slavery ended. My mother’s family were farmers. They came to Brazil to work the land. Her grandfather immigrated to Brazil. She, in fact, was the granddaughter of an immigrant. Interestingly enough, when she came to the United States, she only intended to stay a few years and improve her English so that she could go back. She was a linguistics person, so she was trying to fine-tune that. She met my father and ended up staying. I call her, in some ways, an accidental immigrant to the United States.
Your father has a heritage as an indigenous American. In what tribe?
We are from Santa Clara Pueblo, which is in Northern New Mexico. We’re enrolled members, which is in itself a privilege. A lot of folks who are indigenous in the United States may not be actual enrolled members of their tribes or have official affiliations. It doesn’t mean that we’re any less of an identity, but there are different ways of being part of one’s community.
Your mother was into linguistics. What was your father into?
Code-switching isn't just language or even our frame of mind. It's truly about what our bodies are doing and how they respond to others. Share on XThis is a wonderful story. They met in Lincoln, Nebraska, of all places. He was teaching Latin American colonial history and she was teaching Portuguese and Spanish. He had a graduate student who decided that they would be a great couple to see if they could get together. He was trying to set them up on a date. They were the last two single folks on campus in the faculty. This was the idea behind that. That’s what happened. My father made up an excuse that he didn’t know how to pronounce a particular name of a river in Brazil. That’s how he got to meet my mom. That was it.
There’s this history of academics as well as multiculturalism for you.
Not just in my parents’ generation. My grandmother on my father’s side went back to school herself when my father was in college. She got her college degree when my father was getting his college degree. On my mother’s side, she was the first woman in her family to go to school and the first woman to graduate from college. Her mother pushed for that in a time when it was not a common thing for girls to go to school all the way through and then go to college. Education is a big part of our family’s culture.
Culture Shock And Code-Switching Experiences
In some of the interviews you’ve done with other people, I’ve heard you talk about the culture shock you had between different sides of your own family when you were in New Mexico and then went to Brazil. I’d like to ask you to talk a little bit about that and see if in that process you can clarify or expand on that phrase code-switching.
Let me start with code-switching because that might help some context. I know it helped me when I first heard this term. We’ll start with where it was created. It was part of the linguistics field. Folks were getting interested in terms of when someone spoke two or more languages on how they knew how to switch between the languages.
For instance, in my case, if I speak Portuguese and English, how do I know to switch to Portuguese versus English? Most of it comes from social cues or from external cues. We’re looking to know when we’re supposed to be speaking that particular language. If you have two languages, then you’re switching between the two. That’s the code-switching between languages.
The next field to get interested in was the field of psychology, particularly for biracial and multiracial folks. They started to get interested in the psychology of it. Not only language switching, but then the cultural frames and the frame switching is also another terminology for that. How do we know that we’re in a different culture and act accordingly to those cultures?
In my case, what ended up happening was I didn’t have the language cues because I was working in English most of the time, and if I wasn’t, I didn’t understand the other languages being spoken, which would’ve been Tewa for my Indigenous community and Portuguese when we went back to Brazil. I was relying on the nonverbal cues of that. A lot of what that meant for me was noticing eye contact, noticing how close people stood together, and noticing even the volume of speech.
When I was in New Mexico growing up, I would go to the pueblo. This is my subjective experience. I want to say that because everyone’s experience is subjective to the cultures they’re in. It doesn’t mean that you’re not gathering that information, but how you interpret it is important to acknowledge, too. My interpretation and what I was gathering was that it was a lower tone of voice in terms of lower volume, less eye contact, and less hugging. If there was hugging, it was lighter and there was a little bit more personal space between people.
As a kid growing up with that paradigm and then going to Brazil, you go to Brazil and it’s almost the opposite. Once we got to Brazil, there was a lot of closer contact. The personal bubble is a lot smaller. Greetings almost immediately are 2 kisses or 3 kisses on the cheeks. There is a lot of eye contact, a lot of touch, and at least from my Brazilian family, a lot of conversations that are loud, being interrupted, and a lot of movements that are very quick. In my body. I knew two very different states of being.
Code-switching is not just language or even our frame of mind. It is what our bodies are doing in those spaces and how they’re responding to other bodies in those spaces. If you’re conscious of it and you’re aware of the move in between or the switching in between, it can be incredibly expansive and a very much-needed skill of cultural fluidity.
When you’re young like I was, it’s very disorienting. The signals for me felt inconsistent. I didn’t quite know what to do with myself. There was a person that could show up on the Santa Clara Pueblo, a person that could show up in Brazil, and a person that showed up in between. It’s that in-between person that had a lot of questions about who I was, what to do, and how to be in the world for a long time.
As I’m listening to you talk about it, I’m thinking about people that I know and have worked with personally and professionally who have a rigidity to their thought pattern and their personality that would make it almost torturous for them to have to go between two such different cultural families.
This is the hard part. When we speak about multicultural identity, it’s not just about race. I do want to make that clear. Gender affiliation and identification, sexual orientation, ability in terms of ability and disability, all of these are cultural identities. I would even say neurodivergence. Wherever there’s a set of cultural norms, a way of being with others who are sharing those cultural norms with you, that is part of your lived experience in that identity.
You can handle it in a number of different ways. One is you can compartmentalize them. In some ways, what happens with folks where the identities are so incompatible or have been told they’re incompatible is that you have to fragment. Maybe you have one side of the family negating the other side of the family, for instance. This is not the case in my family. Both sides of my culture were completely accepting of the other.
Let’s say for some reason my mother’s culture wasn’t happy with my father’s culture. What that would’ve produced in me would’ve been a split. Many folks do have that, particularly in the United States where there seem to be so many more choices about what box we check on our forms. You’re either this or that. If you find yourself in both those boxes, do you make a choice? How do you do that in your own body? You can’t.
Privilege is a call to action. Oppression is a call for empathy. Share on XSome folks compartmentalize if it’s too hard of a choice to make. Some folks alternate, which is also an element of choice. Which one comes forward? Which one comes back? That one aligns a lot with my Embodied Code-Switching Model. Others say, “I’m not going to have anything to do with any of them. I’m going to be of nothing or of everything.” There are many different ways of being multicultural and holding those identities in one’s psyche and one’s body.
Helping People Adapt To Different Contexts
In this book about movement, identity, and Embodied Code-Switching, do you offer hints or clues for people who might have a little bit more difficulty in this fluid movement from one situation to another? I’m thinking in terms of people I know who are very literal in their interpretation of words. They have a great deal of difficulty dealing with sarcasm or various forms of humor that are not based on literal translations of words. Do you have ideas to help people get more fluid or more flexible?
Absolutely. One of the things I offered in the book was always a return back to the reader in terms of, “How do you define these things? How do you feel about this?” I’m only one person on the path. The point of my book was to let other folks in this lived experience know that they’re not alone. Ironically, with an identity like this, you would think you would feel like you’re part of everything. In fact, it can be quite lonely.
My particular combination is shared by my brother. There is no one else in the world that I know of who has lived this experience of being of a Brazilian-Italian mother and a Native American father except for him. He and I have very different experiences around how we’ve expressed our identities even within our family.
Is he older or younger?
He’s thirteen months younger. I want to give a shout-out to him. He went back to our pueblo to live when he was younger. My grandmother had left to go to boarding school and my dad had not grown up full-time in our tribe but my brother went back and learned the language. He is amazing. He’s been our grounding in our link and our lineage holder for our Indigenous side. He’s done amazing work in the world. He’s taken this part of our lives and brought it into our family in a beautiful way. That is one expression of how our heritage expresses itself in our family.
I’ve taken a different path, which is that I’ve tried to balance and integrate all parts of my experience. That’s a different way of being in the world. A shout out to my dad, he was the first Deputy Director of The National Museum of the American Indian in the Smithsonian. He has done quite a bit in his life to uphold indigenous cultures, not just domestically but worldwide. I’m very proud of my family’s lineage.
That’s excellent.
To answer your question about the book, it offers so many experiential and self-reflective exercises. It’s also the book that I wish I had when I was starting to study this. It’s a balance of personal writing. I use myself as an example. I decided not to do client case studies. It’s not my story to tell. I wanted to use my story to tell.
I have a good deal of research. I cover everything from identity to multicultural identity to even what multiculturalism means. In a way, it’s a broad discussion. I talk about power, oppression, privilege trauma, intergenerational trauma, and all of that before I talk about Embodied Code-Switching because we can’t get to the fluidity until we know the parts, the pieces, and the lineages that are present. I don’t want to move people so fast into, “This is what I think we need to do.”
What Oppression And Privilege Create
Let me slow you down and back up. Your quick speech has me trying to figure out power, oppression, and privilege. Did you say those three?
Yes, I did.
Those three are the formative factors that make it so important for us to develop code-switching and fluidity. What do the power, oppression, and privilege create?
Power, oppression, and privilege are intrinsic when we talk about identity. Western culture or the dominant culture in the United States, which is quite individualistic, would have us hold everything within ourselves as meaning to the question of who I am. In reality, it’s not only that. We interact with systems and institutions. We interact with ideologies. We interact with other people. When we talk about oppression and privilege, those are the areas where they appear.
For me, as a woman in this country, there’s going to be a different experience I have with particular systems, which would mean educational, medical, and all of those anywhere from outright discrimination in some cases to subtle microaggressions. It is all along those ranges. A person of color as I am also experiencing life in a different way through the institutions. I’m also being told by the institutions how to categorize myself and where I’m going to land in terms of services being offered or access to resources.
When we talk about power, oppression, and privilege, it’s talking on a societal level and an interpersonal level the other factors that help shape and form how our identities get to exist in the world and also how we internalize those messages that we’re getting. There is something about internalized suppression that is incredibly significant. When we start forming our sense of who we are, we absorb those messages of less than, powerlessness, and not having access or having ability. All of those things come from systems of power and oppression.
I’m hearing that power, oppression, and privilege create barriers, rigidity, and definitions that we don’t even have to accept. We have to deal with them because they’re being placed on us from the cultural energies.
We are constantly evolving and growing. How we relate to ourselves impacts how we can move between letting go and integration, and the adoption of new and more expansive ways of being. Share on XThe word privilege can give people some reactions. For me, what it means is that there’s an area in which through experience or through birth we have found ourselves in a position of having greater access to resources, whatever those resources are, whether that’s knowledge, ability, finances, or education.
If you are in a position of privilege, it’s a place of action. It’s a place of having the ability to open a door where others could not open a door. In a lot of work that I’ve done, when we’re doing trainings around power, oppression, and privilege, often, there’s a sense of freeze if you’ve identified a part of yourself that has a privileged position.
I’ll speak for myself. I’m highly educated. I have two Master’s degrees. I am very fortunate to have been able to do that in my life. That’s not the case for many of my Indigenous relatives and community members. That’s a place of privilege. I could either freeze around that and feel guilty, retreat, and be defensive about it or I can use it to open a door. That is what this book is as well. I am an indigenous voice that’s able to write a book that gets out in the world. Hopefully, this will shed some light and insight for others who would’ve never been able to understand this particular lived experience in the way of sharing it.
Privilege, for me, is a call to action. Oppression, for me, is a call for empathy. All of us have areas of oppression that we’ve lived. All of us have identities that have felt oppressed, have felt depersonalized, and have felt excluded. If we can tap into that, then we can understand another person’s experience in the same way. That’s where we meet each other.
If you can open that doorway to compassion, then it’s like a cosmic grease. It helps everything work more smoothly.
The thing about power is that as much as we may want to reject it, it is what drives us. What I say about that in the book is that it’s an energy flow, however you define it. If you think about it, it’s a word that can be used as a verb, a noun, or an adjective. It’s pretty much everywhere. If you think about electricity, it has power. If you think about our sense of agency, it has power. You think about our systems that have power.
All of those things have power in them. How we move with it is what’s important. For me, I’m very focused on how we shift from a power-over paradigm to a power-with paradigm that can produce power within a state. That, to me, is the shift that I believe multicultural individuals, as we’ve negotiated our identities, have always had to navigate.
I’ll take your word for it since I don’t have that in that lived experience. I’ve worked with a lot of people who have. I know that there are very powerful forces that each of us has to deal with. I’m old enough to have been through enough decades and watched it morph in different ways. There are people who have different sexual preferences, people who have different gender identities, and people who have different sense of perceptions. There are people who have a tendency to be on what they call the autism spectrum. These are highly intelligent and relatively high-functioning people who have a tremendous amount of negativity thrown their way simply because they experience the world differently or relate to it differently.
There is no greater pain than feeling misunderstood. One of the hardest things for me growing up was looking into someone else’s eyes that seemed to be confused about what I was saying or doing. That’s a huge disconnect for folks. No matter what your lived experience is, people have had that moment in their lives.
All of us hold a multicultural identity. I would offer that you do as well. We’ve gone through life in different shapes and forms with the different roles that we’ve carried, different careers, and different ways of being. Even within a spiritual practice, we are constantly evolving and growing. How we relate to our own selves has a lot to do with how we can move in between a letting go, an integration, and an adoption of new and more expansive ways of being.
I have to agree with what you’re saying. At the same time, I acknowledge that I was extraordinarily fortunate because if I’d been born a few decades earlier, I’d have been an outcast as an Irish. As I look at the way things came together for me, a White male, the culture at the time that I was born, and the level of financial stability, certainly not wealth, but relative wealth to people who were poor, that gave me this opportunity to go to college.
It then gave me this opportunity to have the intellectual capacity to decide then after 4 or 5 years out of college to go back to grad school. There’s that privilege that you were referring to. Some of it I lucked into because of the decades I was born in. Some of it is because of cultural preference, the lighter-skinned males kind of thing in a patriarchal society.
I appreciate you bringing your example in because it shows how the categorization of who’s in and who’s out can change within a generation or two. The Irish community was very much deemed not White in the sense of White privileged ability to access resources, education, and all those things. A few generations down, it is underneath a privileged category. It’s a sociopolitical phenomenon as we categorize people as in or out at the whim of whatever is happening in that historical moment of why certain groups of people are of use to society. How do they have more access? What are they providing?
In a capitalist society, we see a lot of marginalized groups and immigrant populations that were allowed to come in to serve a particular purpose in terms of building infrastructure or providing labor. How their identities in terms of citizenship were handled had a lot to do with the politics of the time. It’s fluid and yet consistent.
There are a lot of people who are alive on this continent who don’t know about the horrible treatment and basic slavery that was imposed on the Chinese out in the Western part of our country. When I lived out there for five years after college, I learned about it in a new way. For a long time, brighter people who can take that 30,000-foot perspective have known this.
I remember seeing the line in the movie Blazing Saddles where they said, “We have to build a fake town overnight. We need all the help we can get.” The debate goes on, “Who will we let help us?” Finally, the guy says, “We’ll take the Blacks and the Chinese, but we don’t want the Irish.” Finally, they were compelled to let the Irish.
People have understood that it’s like a rolling wave of who we’re going to pick on. The sad truth of how each time a group has gotten picked on is when they make it out of that picked-on status, then they’ll pick on the next one. They’ll join with the bully against the next one that’s going to get identified as less than. If there’s anything we can do to interrupt that pattern, we’d all benefit.
Nonverbal communication and somatic awareness play a powerful role in perpetuating existing stereotypes. Share on XUnderstanding Power And Human Interactions
That’s what I’m talking about. That’s the power-over dynamic that we see over and over again. It is the tried and true way that humans seem to have interacted with differences. We are hardwired within milliseconds to determine if another person or another group is either a danger, Friend, Foe, or they’re someone that we want to meet with. I have a professor who called it the three Fs. I’m not going to mention the last F.
I understand. I know what you’re talking about.
In a way, we’ve got to make a purposeful call for us to evolve because if we are hardwired to categorize others within milliseconds in this way, we also have the capacity to override that. By overriding that, I mean to gather more information and to pause. That’s where the somatic piece helps. Our bodies will react to perceived threats in very distinct ways that are far faster than how our thoughts will catch up to them. In fact, our thoughts will try to make meaning out of what we’re feeling at that moment.
One of the exercises I used to do with students and in trainings had to do with personal space. I would illustrate that beautifully, much to the surprise of the participants. What it is, and I’m sure many folks have done this, is one person would stand still and another one would be the mover. The person standing still is receiving the person that’s moving towards them. I would tell the person moving towards the one that was standing still to go slow but start going towards the other person. Once the person who was standing still could feel their personal bubble touched, without a word, convey that.
After a few times of people trying to talk or laugh and then you would settle into the exercise, you could see that the nonverbal cues that happened between both people were so loud. What happened in those moments when personal bubbles did touch? Either someone felt a surge of whatever sensation they were getting. Everybody was different. A lot of folks felt a sense of wanting to push away or step away, or, in some ways, collapse. It depended on what their experience was, but they were surprised at how quickly they knew that they felt their personal bubble had been crossed.
We then got to talk about how if that happened without words more than a few times, because we don’t need much in order to establish patterns in our systems, what that could do in terms of laying down the groundwork for generalizations about that person. If that person felt like a threat, it’s like, “This person did this 2 or 3 times coming into my space. They don’t feel safe.” All of a sudden, it can turn into stereotypes.
This is where you start seeing how powerful nonverbal communication and somatic awareness are in perpetuating existing stereotypes in all of the isms that we see, sexism, racism, homophobism, and all of that. It doesn’t take much. It takes a few times of feeling another person is a threat, and then you generalize it to all “those people”. You then have it laid down in your system as a somatic reaction to discrimination.
As you’re talking, I think about the book that John Cleese wrote with his psychiatrist. His psychiatrist and his wife would have these seminars. They would ask people at the very beginning of the seminar, “Put your paper and pens down, walk around the auditorium, and pair up non-verbally. Make sure it’s with someone you don’t know or nobody you came in here with.”
They would watch from the stage until most of the people had paired up and they’d say, “Now stop. Those of you who have paired up, stand together. Those who haven’t paired up, come over here to a little group on the side.” They would give them instructions about communicating. What they found was people were pairing up with people who were like other people in their family of origin in various ways, which was fascinating all by itself.
The thing that got me was what they found every time they did it, the people who didn’t pair up, got in a group, and started talking, every one of them was either an only child, orphaned, or abandoned. That doesn’t mean that people who were an only child, orphaned, or abandoned never paired up. It means that when they did it, the people that took the longest and everybody else were paired up, those people were always in that. Their point was that we communicate volumes of information to each other before we ever open our mouths.
I would give people the assignment to go out and pay attention the next time they go to a store, the next time they’re at a mall, or the next time they’re out in a crowd. Notice how for most of the people, they look right by. Some people, they’ve got an instant attraction for. Others, if they come around the corner and they start walking down an aisle in a grocery store, somebody else comes around the other aisle and they can’t wait to get out. It’s not that they’re screaming at their kid. There’s something there energetically. If you start to pay attention to that, the nonverbal response is far faster than the conscious logical one.
It is amazing. It’s not just external. When we talk about somatic awareness and nonverbal communication, most folks think, “What am I noticing in my environment?” which is important. That’s the first place we’re going to look to, but how do we then pay attention to ourselves inside, interoception, proprioception, and all of those parts of the internal experience?
Our internal experience has as much to say as what we’re receiving from the outside. That’s the part that, for me, was a big a-ha moment in my own personal development and professional development as a therapist. It’s a concept called oscillation that we use in somatic therapy. It’s a movement between points of awareness.
We were invited to bring our attention first to where we’re used to it. For me, it would be external. Going in between cultures, I was always like, “What’s this person doing? What’s this group doing?” Everything was externally oriented. I didn’t check in with myself, what I was feeling about it, and how my body felt in those spaces. My work was coming back inside and checking back in. What I found is that I didn’t know. I wasn’t tracking, “Is my heart racing? Are my muscles relaxed or tense? Are my thoughts racing even? What is my body doing in this space? How can I rely on it as a partner to help me make the next decision about what I want to do in this space with these folks?”
The oscillation piece, which I talk about in the book, too, is so incredibly important because it helps us move. That is part of the fluidity. It doesn’t necessarily even have to be about between identities initially, but starting to practice that. All of us have our home bases. Some folks are more cognitive. Some folks land in emotion first. Some land in the body first. We want to move between the three, but wherever you land, what happens if you want to move between one thought and a complexity of thoughts and then go back to the one thought? That’s oscillation. Go wide and narrow. If you have an emotion, can you move back from it a bit and come back into it again? That’s oscillation.
For body awareness, this is where we get all those body scans that are so amazing. Many body scans are out there. Can we go into, “What am I feeling in my pinky finger?” to, “What do I feel in my hand back to my pinky finger?” It’s that kind of stretching of awareness that is so essential to being able to touch into where our learning edges are and where our growth edges are and be gentle around them. It’s not necessary to push all the way through and absorb more than you can absorb. What is important is to know where that edge is, treat it gently, get to know it, come back a little bit, resource, and go back into it. That’s a trauma perspective, too, in terms of being trauma-informed.
One of the first books that introduced me to that was Peter Levine’s Waking the Tiger and the exercises about becoming aware of how we’ve dissociated so much from everything below the neck. All of these resources of energy, proprioception, and felt sense that we ignore sometimes are because of the initiation of trauma, and sometimes because it’s what our culture directs us to. If you’re going from the quiet New Mexico family over to the Brazilian family and you don’t pay attention to that outside stuff, you’re flooded.
We are the culmination of our ancestors, carrying both their wounds and their wisdom. At this moment, we have the tools to heal what they could not. Share on XCultural Embodiment Awareness And Identity
This is where the cultural embodiment concept, for me, became important to talk about. As I was playing with it in the book and in my life, I thought about the ways we talk about cultural embodiment have been about sensory awareness, nonverbal communication, and the body. All of that is part of it, but for me, there was a level of awareness to it that I also wanted to include. One of them was social awareness, which is what we’re talking about, being aware of how others are in space. Part of that is things like mirror neurons, which are how our bodies talk to each other, like that sense of belonging and empathy.
The other one was environmental awareness. That’s the importance of space in place and how those spaces talk to us. Not just buildings, architecture, or art, but land. For me, I’m very tied to the land of both of my parents. Home cultures speak to me. The smells, textures, plants, and skies, I notice all of that. To me, it all cues me into knowing how to be in those spaces and places.
Then, emotions. There is fascinating research coming out that emotions are not universal. They are culturally bound. How we feel them, how we describe them, how we share them, and even what we notice about them are determined by our cultures. Culture has very much a hand in everything. It has a body sense awareness.
If we can engage with all those levels of awareness, what a beautiful complexity we have access to. There are a lot of nuances once we start to realize, “I’m getting a lot more context about who I am, not just who I think I should be in these contexts, but what these contexts are offering me as reflections of how I can be in them and what I find value in being part of them.”
It puts to mind David White, the poet slash philosopher, who talks about genius loci, this idea that a location has its own particular energies, intelligence, and impact on anyone or anything that passes through there. In a way, you can talk about each of us as having our own genius loci. There is this melding of forces and energies from my life experiences but also the heritage from Mom’s side and Dad’s side and the blending of those cultural influences. They’re all meeting here in me at the moment.
Think about that for a minute. Isn’t that amazing? If you think about us in this moment, you and I having this conversation, and how many of our lineage holders or our ancestors are beside us and behind us and have brought us to this point in time to have this conversation. There is something about the alchemy of all the combinations that have come together in order to form me, form you, and form the readers who’ll be reading this at this moment. It’s a beautiful mix of the difficulties, traumas, challenges, lived experiences, histories, strengths, wisdom, resilience, creativity, and willingness to go on when nothing else made sense. All of those things serve us in terms of what we can tap into that lives within us.
When we talk about intergenerational trauma and healing, so many people I know are very aware that they are the culmination of their ancestors and that they have the ability in ways that perhaps their ancestors did not to heal these wounds that have been carried forward. At this moment in time, they have the tools to do it. Is it easy? No, but what a gift because not only does it heal all the previous generations, which I do believe it does energetically and physically. We are tied to everyone who has come before us through our genes, the cells in our bodies, the land that we walk, and everything.
Far more than just the genes and cells in our bodies are the energetic impressions. If you think that you’re the result of a sperm and an egg, this level at which quantum physics lets us know that it’s all energy. All energy carries information in it, etc.
It’s not that a sperm and egg got together and resulted in this tall guy with no hair who walks funny. It is everything you said from both sides of the bloodline. It is all those successes, all those strengths, all those challenges overcome, and all those slip-ups and failures. They’re all here. They’re all expressed in different ways. Have you had exposure to the family constellations work?
I’ve heard about it for so many years. I haven’t been in the midst of it.
You’re talking about it, right?
Yeah.
It’s this psychodrama that gets played out with a good facilitator when people come together. They do the recognition that we all brought our ancestors into the room with us. We ask to be informed by that energetic interplay between us and the other people. It’s a phenomenal process.
For me, I feel like our bodies are an immense repository of inner wisdom and knowing that we often forget exists. Most of the time, we do because our bodies feel like they’re vehicles. They feel like they’re something we need to control. They feel like it’s a very material or physical aspect of life. The body itself is what connects us to everything. If you think about it, without this body, our feet wouldn’t touch the Earth. Without our bodies, we wouldn’t have the genetic and energetic capacity to connect to our ancestors and to other people. This is the instrument that we have in order to exist in the reality that we are in.
It’s rich. It’s complex. It’s layers.
If we can remember to come back inside, be with it, and listen to its language. Get to know our own body language. I don’t mean that in the sense that you hear in the media, like, “Learn your body language.” Learn how your body communicates to you. For me, it has been a deeply spiritual process. There are many things that I’ve been given insight into that couldn’t have come from anywhere else than the connection that I’ve had with my ancestors, the land that I come from, and the body that I’m living in.
My mind couldn’t have come up with any of those things. It wouldn’t have made sense. This is something that I found when I work with clients. When we go into that space of inviting the body in, it speaks in such beautiful metaphors and such beautiful movements. I don’t even want to say the word speak because it’s its own way of being.
Our bodies are an immense repository of inner wisdom and knowing that we often forget exists. Share on XIt communicates.
It already knows. It’s waiting for you to find it.
It extends. It offers. It resonates with valuable stuff or information, if you want to put it in that word. Many of us have been conditioned to cut ourselves off at the neck and ignore all of these somatic inputs and resonances. It’s a huge part of why somatic work and therapy is so valuable. It’s like somebody who’s trying to operate with 1/10 of their brain functioning if you’re not tuned into what’s happening in the body.
Embodied Code-Switching: Identity, Trauma, And Cultural Awareness
There are so many ways of entering into that experience. For folks who have gone through trauma, the body may not be the safest place to be full-time for many reasons. We want to be gentle about that. We want to honor that. It might feel better to interact with the physical environment, like sensations and things like weighted blankets or being outside. How you bring sensation back into your sense of being without it being overwhelming and then coming into the body and how that feels safe is very much about trauma.
There are the movement parts of that. Many folks are not aware of how powerful movement can be. I’m not talking about exercise. I’m talking about moving and knowing that you can, even if it’s moving your hand to your heart for a minute. If you can find a sense of connection with yourself, that can be deeply meaningful and powerful. You get to carry that with you wherever you go.
In the book, it’s such a complex thing that I’m trying to bring together. I’m fully aware of that because it feels very much like I was trying to connect the dots. I love to integrate so many different things into maybe one way of holding it. What I hope I offer is for folks to be able to go through the book and have moments of pause and self-reflection with some of the experiences that are in there, some of the journal prompts, or some of the offerings of information.
I offer something through Embodied Code-Switching a feedback loop called Sensation, Interpretation, and Action that helps us slow down. Whenever we’re in a moment, it’s to feel what we’re feeling in our bodies, notice what thoughts and feelings come in and how we interpret them, and then decide what we want to do with that, which is the action part. “Do I want to engage in this relationship? Do I want to be by myself? Do I want to go outside? Do I want to be inside?” It’s all those moments of like, “I’m getting all of this information. Let me decide next what I want to do.” It’s both the present moment and a sense of agency that encourages us to find our own power in choice.
Give me that again. Is it SIA?
Yeah. There are two parts to Embodied Code-Switching. One is SIA, Sensation, Interpretation, and Action. Sensation is about the sensations we feel, not just external and environmental or what we’re getting from the outside, but also what our body is feeling, which is both sensory awareness and nonverbal communication.
Interpretation is what we make it mean. For some folks, it’s going to be about what their emotions are telling them about it. For others, it’s going to be what their thoughts are telling them about it. All of that is meaningful. You’ll get it pretty much in a minute. You’ll hear a core belief, have a judgment, have a wish, or have some other kind of interpretation of what happened in the body.
What I think is important at this point once the information is gathered is to remember that you have a choice. That’s the Action. Action can be whatever you want it to be. It can be standing there or deciding what you want to do with this environment that you’re in, the cultures that you’re encountering, or the identity that you’re holding. There’s no particular order. We get them all. All of those different entry points happen. Wherever it’s most comfortable for people to start, that’s where we can start. Integrate them and let them keep moving and informing.
That’s the first part of Embodied Code-Switching.
The second part is what I call an identity expression infinity loop. It’s a lot of words but basically, it’s an infinity loop. You think about each point of the infinity loop representing a cultural environment where one of your identities comes forward. For me, it would be Santa Clara Pueblo on one side and Brazil on the other.
In this loop, I ask folks to either visualize or move through the experience of being fully within that culture and noticing how they are embodying that culture and what all the things coming up around that are. I would immerse myself in the Santa Clara identity and take on the positions, gestures, postures, and the whole thing.
I would then start walking towards the midpoint and feel what it’s like to transition towards another culture. What’s coming up for me around then? Do I want to do this? Do I not want to do this? Is it comfortable? Is it familiar? All these prompts are part of that to get a sense of the transition point. Stay in the midpoint and see what it’s like to be in the middle or the in-between space. Checking in with the comfortable and uncomfortable, how do you embody it? Is this familiar? All those prompts that are part of it. It is then moving to the other cultural identity and noticing that shift.
What I’m inviting is embodying fully our polarities, embodying the liminal space or the in-between, moving between them, taking it slow with choice, and noticing all along the way what it is like to have these places within you that exist. You are inviting them to start being in a relationship with each other, not only to their polarity positions but to the liminal space or the in-between space, which is so important as well to acknowledge.
I love the way it’s lighting my brain up when you talk about having those places within you. It’s reinforcing the shift of focus from the external to the internal and noticing that in a very real way, they’re not separate except that we’ve conceptualized them as separate. There’s always going to be this activity in me that’s in communication with what I’m calling this outside, but we’re all in this energy movement together. I can’t move from one place to another without having an impact on me. If I can be aware of what got stirred up in me, then I can interact more effectively with those around me.
Being part of a group does not have to mean that you give up all of yourself. With embodied code-switching, it’s about deciding how much of your identities come out. Share on XFor me, the shift when I was working with myself and with others is that oftentimes, when our identities are being called forward or being told to be pushed back, there’s a sense of powerlessness in that. There’s a sense of shame about that. There’s this fragmentation or division that can happen. The narrative that went around in my mind was, “I can’t fully show up in who I am. If I try to, it’s never going to be enough for this particular culture because I don’t know all that I need to know.”
It could also be that it’s going to be too much.
I could also be like, “I’m going to break a rule and I’m not going to know what that rule was, and I’m going to be ostracized.” It feels like life and death because, in a lot of ways, it is. We are social animals that are meant to be part of groups to survive. If we don’t stay part of the group instinctively, it feels like life and death.
It’s not that way anymore. Part of the information we have to offer ourselves is we do have a choice. We have many ways of surviving. It’s a whole nother conversation about how isolated people are getting in this day and age and how that’s not healthy. Being part of a group does not have to necessarily mean that you give up all of yourself.
For me, Embodied Code-Switching is about deciding how much of my identities come out to meet their environments in a way that feels resourceful to me, that feels authentic to me, and that feels like it is within my decision-making capacity. I do it so that I can meet my environments and get the most I can out of my environments.
When I go back to the Pueblo or I go to Brazil, I’ve come to a place where I know I’m not going to ever be 100% Pueblo or 100% Brazilian, but I will be part of it in the way that I know and the way that it knows me. It’s not all up to me. There’s a sense of over-responsibility I carry, too, in terms of trying to know it all and do it all. It’s not all up to me. It is how I meet people there and how they meet me and the alchemy that happens with that in terms of relationships.
The Power Of Multicultural Identity And Healing
I realize we’ve gone much longer than I normally go for these episodes. People say, “You got 35 or 40 minutes. That’s plenty.” I wonder if you would take a minute, get centered, and think about what we’ve talked about from the book and from other things. Do you want to go back and highlight something we’ve already talked about or is there something we haven’t even mentioned yet that you want to put in this interview?
I feel like I want to say that having multiple cultural identities, however you define it, whether it is multicultural, polycultural, or hybrid cultural, is a superpower. It is a skill that we need in this world. The ability to not only bridge differences within ourselves but to be in relationship with those parts of ourselves that may feel very different in their worldviews and the way they embody the world and what they notice is incredibly important.
Through empathy, a sense of belonging, power with lineage, and the wisdom that’s come through trauma, creativity, and healing, all of those things that live within us, that’s the complexity of what it means to be human. I would offer that as encouragement for folks as they read my book or as they encounter this healing path on their own to bring in all the parts of yourself, have them be in a relationship, and let your wisdom shine.
Own that superpower.
Own it. We need it.
Thank you so much for sharing. The book is Movement and Identity: Multiculturalism, Somatic Awareness, and Embodied Code-Switching. I look forward to getting a hard copy and getting through it. Thank you so much for taking the time to share with us. It’s been an honor.
It’s been an honor and a pleasure. Thank you so much.
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Marcia Bonato Warren is a trauma-informed body psychotherapist, somatic counselor, intra-culturalist, and author. With over 30 years of cross-cultural and mental health experience, she is a licensed professional counselor in the state of Colorado and holds a Master of Arts and International Relations from Johns Hopkins University, a Master of Arts in Somatic Counseling/Body Psychotherapy from Naropa University, as well as certificates in Clinical Supervision, Intercultural Foundations, Sensorimotor Psychotherapy Trauma Training, and Indigenous Psychology. Her first book, Movement and Identity: Multiculturalism, Somatic Awareness, and Embodied Code-Switching, will be available in March of 2025.
Marcia’s therapy practice, Embodied Code-Switching, focuses on developing the resilience and unique expression of multicultural identities through somatic awareness. Her work has been featured in journals and publications. Marcia is proud of her heritage and the gifts of her ancestors and identifies as an enrolled member of Santa Clara Pueblo in New Mexico and as Brazilian-Italian. She’s passionate about developing the potential in human beings to embrace diversity through multicultural embodiment. You can connect with Marcia at MarciaBonatoWarren.com.
Important Links
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- Movement and Identity: Multiculturalism, Somatic Awareness, and Embodied Code-Switching
- Waking the Tiger
About Marcia Bonato Warren
Marcia (MAR-see-uh) Bonato Warren is a trauma-informed Body Psychotherapist/Somatic Counselor, Interculturalist and author with over thirty years of cross-cultural and mental health experience. She is a Licensed Professional Counselor (LPC) in the state of Colorado and holds a Master of Arts in International Relations from John’s Hopkins University (SAIS), a Master of Arts in Somatic Counseling/Body Psychotherapy from Naropa University, as well as certificates in Clinical Supervision (I and II), Intercultural Foundations, Sensorimotor Psychotherapy Trauma Training (I and II), and Indigenous Psychology.
Marcia’s therapy practice, Embodied Code-Switching®, focuses on developing
the resilience and unique expression of multicultural identities through Somatic awareness. Her work has been featured in journals and publications over the past decade.
Marcia is proud of her heritage and the gifts of her ancestors and identifies as an enrolled member of Santa Clara Pueblo in New Mexico and as Brazilian-Italian. She is passionate about developing the potential in human beings to embrace diversity through multicultural embodiment. Her first book, Movement and Identity: Multiculturalism, Somatic Awareness, and Embodied Code-Switching ® will be available March 2025.
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