Sunday Service: Healing My Religious Trauma through the Body.
I never imagined that I’d one day hold a “Sunday Service” of my own. Not in a church ( although, GOALS!!) or beneath a cross, but in a room full of people breathing, moving, and remembering that their bodies are Holy.
Growing up in the Bible Belt, my Sundays ( Wednesday’s and even Saturday’s sometimes) looked very different. I went to Southern Baptist and Pentecostal churches — spaces that preached love but often delivered fear. I was told I was a sinner, a heathen, and unworthy of God’s love unless I looked and behaved a certain way. My hair was short, I wore pants, listened to rock-n-roll and loved to dance… somehow that made me less-than in the eyes of the Divine. I was taught to hide my body, to fear its power, to believe that my very existence could tempt or destroy a man.
Worse yet, I experienced harm at the hands of those who claimed to be God’s messengers — an act that split my sense of spirituality and safety apart. For years, religion wasn’t a source of comfort; it was the very thing that buried my voice and disconnected me from myself.
But the body has a way of remembering truth — even when the mind forgets. It was through somatic healing that I began to meet the places in me that still held that old fear. Movement, breath, sound and expression became my new forms of prayer. My body began to show me what devotion really feels like — not punishment or performance, but presence.
That’s why I call my weekly class “Sunday Services.” It’s a playful, reverent reclaiming of what once harmed me. I’ve borrowed the best of what I used to love about church — the music, the message, the communion, the spirit — and made space for it to live inside the body again. A student from this Sunday’s class reflected back to me that I can sound like I am delivering a sermon or Dharma talk. It struck me in that moment…I am in the process of alchemy— Creating the services I wanted and needed.
I think about how gospel singers used to move me to tears, not because of the words, but because of the way their entire beings were alive in worship. That movement, that surrender, was never exclusive to religion — it was the language of the soul. And in every sway, in every exhale, I’ve found that I can still touch that sacred pulse. Only now, it doesn’t come from fear. It comes from freedom.
This is my Sunday Service. A body-led rebirth. A reclamation of holiness on my own terms.
I hope you will come experience it for yourself.
See you there!
LESLIE
