Titration

Titration is a choral song cycle composed during the spring and early summer of 2022. As a person of southern heritage, growing up in a politically conservative family, but having traveled a “moon trip’s distance” philosophically from home, the political debates of the country always land at the dinner table, deeply dividing my family, and also dividing me. We disagree on a great many topics, and yet I love my family dearly. I carry the contradictions and tensions of my family within me, no matter how far away I may fly.

Home is complicated. Is home a feeling of safety? How is safety created? How do I make home in myself? How can we disagree so strongly, and still come to the table together? How do we make a society where all bodies can experience the same promise of safety? How can I become a safer person for other people? How do I work through difficult emotions like fear, grief, disgust or rage? How can I grow in my capacity to feel more?

As a child I often understood the best way to deal with big feelings was to go silently into my bedroom and remain there until I could come out with a “better attitude.” The story of my learning how to identify feelings and stay connected to my body is ongoing. The details of what has happened to me personally to make emotion and body awareness difficult were not necessary to tell. Instead I wanted to share some explorations in asking the question, “How do I keep on feeling in this mean, mean world?”

The song cycle is not a therapeutic model, but points to healing modalities, teachers, and ancient practices about which I hope you, the listener, will become curious to research. There is a “how” which I did not invent, but that can be cultivated deliberately. I would like to acknowledge and offer gratitude to the Somatic Abolitionist body of work of Resmaa Menakem specifically from whom I am learning to value humming, to orient to a space, to rock myself, to notice the silence, to notice the rage, and the importance of gathering with others in practice to heal racialized trauma. To the work of 4000 years of Qi-Gong practitioners and to Master Chunyi Lin and Master Daniel Li. To polyvagal theory author Deb Dana. To my compassionate Somatic Experiencing therapist. To artist Helga Davis who held my hand and told me about the co-regulation of heart rates. To everyone who has come together to practice with me, and to Laughter Yoga.

– Shara Nova