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Liberated to the Bone: Histories. Bodies. Futures.
Self-transformation requires social transformation. Social transformation requires self-transformation.
The newest title in the Emergent Strategy Series, Liberated to the Bone addresses the intersections between healing our physical bodies and healing our relationship within systems and structures that are shaped by violence. The book illuminates three different approaches to healing: ending violence, the significance of being rooted in the present, and creating the conditions to address unfinished histories and generational trauma. By showing how these approaches are intricately connected—whether it be physically or emotionally—Raffo interrupts the traumatic binaries of the political and spiritual, the physical and intellectual, and healing and organizing.
The newest title in the Emergent Strategy Series, Liberated to the Bone addresses the intersections between healing our physical bodies and healing our relationship within systems and structures that are shaped by violence. The book illuminates three different approaches to healing: ending violence, the significance of being rooted in the present, and creating the conditions to address unfinished histories and generational trauma. By showing how these approaches are intricately connected—whether it be physically or emotionally—Raffo interrupts the traumatic binaries of the political and spiritual, the physical and intellectual, and healing and organizing.
264 pages, Paperback
Published November 16, 2022
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Displaying 1 - 29 of 29 reviews
March 7, 2026
If you are a white person with guilt surrounding your culture and heritage and are looking for a way to assuage or heal that guilt, then this book is for you.
This book so often runs face first into the point but still misses any form of nuance. From the perspective of a healer Susan Raffo does much to express there is a need for everyone to heal and gives a bullet point list at the end, of ways we can attend to this need. However, she so constantly centers perpetrators throughout the book that she misses her own point.
Additionally, if you are someone who views anger as a natural part of human existence, this is not the book for you. Susan Raffo believes, as I am sure many others do, that healing, and rest is not possible without the absence of violence and anger. She says as much, word for word. I think this book is for some people, it has clearly gotten some rave reviews. However, I don't think it's for everyone or for the communities it is meant to express deserve healing.
Two stars for understanding the problem but not being able to understand them well/fully or come to any actual conclusions.
P.S. Weird Pro-Life undertones and All Lives Matter undertones.
This book so often runs face first into the point but still misses any form of nuance. From the perspective of a healer Susan Raffo does much to express there is a need for everyone to heal and gives a bullet point list at the end, of ways we can attend to this need. However, she so constantly centers perpetrators throughout the book that she misses her own point.
Additionally, if you are someone who views anger as a natural part of human existence, this is not the book for you. Susan Raffo believes, as I am sure many others do, that healing, and rest is not possible without the absence of violence and anger. She says as much, word for word. I think this book is for some people, it has clearly gotten some rave reviews. However, I don't think it's for everyone or for the communities it is meant to express deserve healing.
Two stars for understanding the problem but not being able to understand them well/fully or come to any actual conclusions.
P.S. Weird Pro-Life undertones and All Lives Matter undertones.
November 17, 2022
Liberated to the Bone is an excellent book on its own, but I particularly love the way it fits into AK Press’s Emergent Strategy series, as well as into conversation with a number of other recently-published titles. At a meta level, there’s something deeply refreshing about how all these books that are recognizing a deep need for humanity to re-enter into relationship (with ourselves, with other humans, with lineage, with land, with non-human kin) are also in relationship with each other, filling in different perspectives within a larger theme.
Like Emergent Strategy itself, this book operates from a healing justice lens and prioritizes relationship and practice, blending learnings from movement organizing with learnings from healing and nature. What is different is that “healing” here zooms in on the physical human body and focuses on the responsibilities of white people (and especially white women and non-binary people in healing professions). This book will have a lot of resonance, I believe, for white folks (especially queers and feminists) who’ve operated in both movement spaces and healing or spiritual spaces, and who have struggled to figure out an ethical approach to justice that is both accountable and loving. I would especially recommend it to bodyworkers and current organizers.
Author Susan Raffo is a craniosacral therapist in her sixties with deep roots in so-called Minnesota, and is a queer white woman whose work is informed by indigenous teachers. She has significant history in organizing spaces and in the healing justice movement, with strong ties to local community efforts, and wrote some of the pieces in this book originally as a blogger, receiving feedback from her audience before eventual publication. All of these things clearly inform her writing, as does a tone that ranges from nurturing and poetic to unflinchingly direct in naming the sins of capitalism, colonization, and white people in general.
Raffo provides a lot of detailed information about the body in a lyrical, inspiring format, reminding me of Emergent Strategy but also Alexis Pauline Gumbs’ Undrowned in how she uses natural metaphor to write about our present context and urgent work of liberation. While the metaphors here do also include references to non-human kin as those two titles do, Raffo focuses primarily on what our own bodies can teach us about liberation. She explains that “the body communicates in poetry,” approaching anatomy not as a hard-and-fast set of rules but as a poetic language or a cultural understanding that can shift and vary according to context and personal experience.
We learn about the role of cellular membrane, for example, and how every single cell in our body holds a kind of memory, making decisions in a vast relational network. We learn about the lungs and all the crucial roles of the breath, and I especially appreciated how tenderly Raffo addressed this for those of us who are actually struggling to access a full breath due to COVID and feel very disconnected from our somatic practices because of it. We also learn about how our lives begin and how embryos start life surrounded, as pretty much all living bodies are surrounded, by multiple layers of support and protection. Each of these lessons are woven seamlessly with more conceptual considerations around relationship, human nature, and change. Raffo also suggests practices from these body-based teachings that we can try in the moment as we read, for example consulting all three of our “brains” (thinking mind, heart, and gut) and holding their contradictory truths as wisdom from a body-based community.
I love the way Raffo brings a dialectical approach to her work and acknowledges the importance of what is emerging, and thus by definition unfinished. I mean dialectical here in the sense of acknowledging contradicting things to be simultaneously true—white people on Turtle Island are colonizers and perpetrators, for example, and humans deserving of love and care and holding our own traumatic wounding. Individual healing is necessary to collective change and we cannot center our healing, especially if we are white. Campaigns matter to stop a crisis, and campaign work is necessarily reactionary and insufficiently relational to sustain a movement. We can be both oppressors and oppressed.
One fascinating example of this as applied to the body comes up in the context of considering chiropractic vs. craniosacral therapy (and similarly, deep tissue bodywork vs. a lighter touch approach that encourages the body to do its own shifting.) Raffo acknowledges that sometimes deep, forceful work is required to re-align our bodies, but we also require a more gentle, consistent approach over time to address lifelong trauma. The same is true when it comes to approaching justice—she emphasizes in several contexts that a lightbulb moment through a bodywork session or in another healing or organizing space may be immediately transformative, but it doesn’t actually change much unless it becomes part of a consistent practice over time.
While most of the overall themes Raffo presents are not new to me, I found lots of new context and specifics, as well as plenty of instances of timely remembering. In the opening sections, which provide the most coherent structural frame before topics begin to wander a little more throughout the rest of the book and read more like an essay collection, Raffo lays out the basic groundwork of the anti-Black, anti-indigenous history and overall context of the United States, as well as the importance of the body and relationship. But through an emphasis on her own context, I learned more about the specific history of Minnesota, as well as a somewhat surprising background to the foundation of genocidal boarding schools that I hadn’t considered before—one that shows how the women running these horrifically abusive institutions actually started out focused on Native sovereignty. Similarly, Raffo’s focus on craniosacral therapy brings in a perspective that I haven’t seen in other books written by healers and bodyworkers (e.g. Hilary L. McBride’s The Wisdom of Your Body or Laura Mae Northrup’s Radical Healership).
I was more familiar with Raffo’s topics around movement spaces, including the depressing shift in the late 90s towards a focus on same-sex marriage, but I appreciated the vulnerability here of continuing to hold the dialectic and appreciate the perspectives of those we might prefer to write off. Raffo considers a range of topics from the concept of moral injury to a framing of triggers as time-travel. She gets specific about the dynamics of justice-oriented spaces, addressing how both grounding and activating practices have their place, what it’s like to organize in a space without relational context for the participants, and the balance between communication as a plea to be seen and as a form of self-expression. She also describes how cis white men learn to “self-settle” to unconsciously avoid taking on any responsibility or experience of being out of control, which is a concept I think could be broadly applicable to understanding how movement work gets sabotaged. This is very much a starting point to a conversation, and I didn’t agree with every take, but there is something important in how she connects our personal experiences of trauma and embodiment with how we come together and attempt to make change.
The book does a lot of heavy lifting, but it’s also clearly written from one woman’s perspective, without any claims to broader authority. It’s hard to read about some of the really fascinating radical efforts Raffo has been a part of, around mutual aid and care for example, and then to realize that these movements have either never really gotten off the ground or are still in their infancy. That said, it’s an honest accounting of where we are right now, in this moment. You’ll likely bounce between deep grief, frustration, and hope as you read. At the same time, Raffo guides you through this by encouraging the reader to take a somatic approach in the framing chapters at the beginning of the book. She regularly suggests that you take a pause, attend to your breath, and check in with your own inner knowing, trusting that knowing to guide you beyond the actual words you read. She also suggests other body-based ways to absorb the material as you go, rather than simply reading about the body, grounding your learning and your emotion.
For white readers, Raffo strikes an unusual balance between the sort of “here is what you must do” list of homework and a vulnerability that is not simply “let me tell you how I fucked up before I knew better” but is more “let me tell you how I am continuing to struggle, and how I can often be both right and wrong.” The ambiguity here is critical, as this is never a linear or complete story. I often feel exhausted when reading large piles of suggestions that are both super important and incredibly daunting to attend to alongside struggling to meet my basic needs. I then end up doing a lot of self-tending, reminding myself that trying to jumpstart any significant sense of interdependence at nearly forty in the middle of a pandemic is hard work to try to undertake alongside all these suggestions that are best implemented in relationship and alongside an existing community, that the point isn’t to punish myself, and that it’s only internalized whiteness that creates a sense of discomfort when I can’t really achieve or resolve anything in this work, as it is meant to remain open.
I’ve done a lot of the kinds of reflection Raffo describes, and I also know that I will have a lot more work to do until the day I die, always holding the very real responsibility in one hand and the exhaustion and need to not enact counterproductive self-punishment strategies in the other. While I in some ways agree with Raffo’s essay in this book that suggests we stop using the term “empath,” as if being sensitive to the energies around us is an abnormal experience rather than remembering what is very, very natural, and I have found trauma-processing useful, I do also think that for some neurotypes it is simply a fact of how our bodies operate that we will always be a little extra sensitive to criticism, others’ pain, and the reminder of our own legacies of harm. That’s something we may never fully learn how to hold in a capitalist, colonized world.
That said, while my nerves did on occasion feel a little shouted at, Raffo didn’t abandon me to do my own work but instead contributed some of that caring, self-tending voice as well. She reminds the white reader that we start doing this work from a place of both privilege and almost total deprivation around some of the things that matter most, like community and relationship, and that each of us can only be one actor in a collective movement. These realities are often either just given lip service or overemphasized in abdication of responsibility, and it’s rare to find an author that simultaneously holds the voice of fierce advocate and genuinely caring peer. While I certainly don’t believe that white folks shouldn’t be coddled around racism or that any of the facts should be tempered to feed our egos or meet our fragility, I do think there is perhaps the most transformation to be found in an approach like this that blends rage with compassion.
The way Raffo describes the history of white folks and our carrying of trauma from generation to generation is hard to sit with, but it also helps the white reader to understand why we are so disconnected and deficient, and not to expect significant change in this lifetime, given our distance in some cases of many thousands of years from an intact culture. Through the language of trauma and relationship betrayal, Raffo demonstrates that oppression is at the core about cutting ourselves off from relationship, which is at the center of everything. Like coyotes, humans have the ability to survive without a pack, but we aren’t supposed to. And since white folks are never taught the actually useful skills that children learn in an intact culture, we are likely to simply perpetrate cycles of harm, over and over again.
Raffo suggests practices that might break this cycle, such as trying to reconnect to and know our lineages, build relationship with elders, and learn to protect our communities’ children, but I also get the sense that given the state of pandemic, many of us will not be able to do that work in our lifetimes, and that’s something we simply have to make peace with. Perhaps we are in a generation of simply starting to fumble towards desire for connection, and pass on that desire, even if we will not all have the opportunity to be in presence and relationship with each other again. “Shifting the soft tissues, the nonlinear aspects of the fluid self, shifting our habits and patterns: this is slow work,” Raffo writes. “It takes a long time and it does not ascribe to a rigid strategy, because what shifts over a small period of time then shifts everything that happens afterward. There is no map, there is just living.”
[ARC provided through Edelweiss.]
Like Emergent Strategy itself, this book operates from a healing justice lens and prioritizes relationship and practice, blending learnings from movement organizing with learnings from healing and nature. What is different is that “healing” here zooms in on the physical human body and focuses on the responsibilities of white people (and especially white women and non-binary people in healing professions). This book will have a lot of resonance, I believe, for white folks (especially queers and feminists) who’ve operated in both movement spaces and healing or spiritual spaces, and who have struggled to figure out an ethical approach to justice that is both accountable and loving. I would especially recommend it to bodyworkers and current organizers.
Author Susan Raffo is a craniosacral therapist in her sixties with deep roots in so-called Minnesota, and is a queer white woman whose work is informed by indigenous teachers. She has significant history in organizing spaces and in the healing justice movement, with strong ties to local community efforts, and wrote some of the pieces in this book originally as a blogger, receiving feedback from her audience before eventual publication. All of these things clearly inform her writing, as does a tone that ranges from nurturing and poetic to unflinchingly direct in naming the sins of capitalism, colonization, and white people in general.
Raffo provides a lot of detailed information about the body in a lyrical, inspiring format, reminding me of Emergent Strategy but also Alexis Pauline Gumbs’ Undrowned in how she uses natural metaphor to write about our present context and urgent work of liberation. While the metaphors here do also include references to non-human kin as those two titles do, Raffo focuses primarily on what our own bodies can teach us about liberation. She explains that “the body communicates in poetry,” approaching anatomy not as a hard-and-fast set of rules but as a poetic language or a cultural understanding that can shift and vary according to context and personal experience.
We learn about the role of cellular membrane, for example, and how every single cell in our body holds a kind of memory, making decisions in a vast relational network. We learn about the lungs and all the crucial roles of the breath, and I especially appreciated how tenderly Raffo addressed this for those of us who are actually struggling to access a full breath due to COVID and feel very disconnected from our somatic practices because of it. We also learn about how our lives begin and how embryos start life surrounded, as pretty much all living bodies are surrounded, by multiple layers of support and protection. Each of these lessons are woven seamlessly with more conceptual considerations around relationship, human nature, and change. Raffo also suggests practices from these body-based teachings that we can try in the moment as we read, for example consulting all three of our “brains” (thinking mind, heart, and gut) and holding their contradictory truths as wisdom from a body-based community.
I love the way Raffo brings a dialectical approach to her work and acknowledges the importance of what is emerging, and thus by definition unfinished. I mean dialectical here in the sense of acknowledging contradicting things to be simultaneously true—white people on Turtle Island are colonizers and perpetrators, for example, and humans deserving of love and care and holding our own traumatic wounding. Individual healing is necessary to collective change and we cannot center our healing, especially if we are white. Campaigns matter to stop a crisis, and campaign work is necessarily reactionary and insufficiently relational to sustain a movement. We can be both oppressors and oppressed.
One fascinating example of this as applied to the body comes up in the context of considering chiropractic vs. craniosacral therapy (and similarly, deep tissue bodywork vs. a lighter touch approach that encourages the body to do its own shifting.) Raffo acknowledges that sometimes deep, forceful work is required to re-align our bodies, but we also require a more gentle, consistent approach over time to address lifelong trauma. The same is true when it comes to approaching justice—she emphasizes in several contexts that a lightbulb moment through a bodywork session or in another healing or organizing space may be immediately transformative, but it doesn’t actually change much unless it becomes part of a consistent practice over time.
While most of the overall themes Raffo presents are not new to me, I found lots of new context and specifics, as well as plenty of instances of timely remembering. In the opening sections, which provide the most coherent structural frame before topics begin to wander a little more throughout the rest of the book and read more like an essay collection, Raffo lays out the basic groundwork of the anti-Black, anti-indigenous history and overall context of the United States, as well as the importance of the body and relationship. But through an emphasis on her own context, I learned more about the specific history of Minnesota, as well as a somewhat surprising background to the foundation of genocidal boarding schools that I hadn’t considered before—one that shows how the women running these horrifically abusive institutions actually started out focused on Native sovereignty. Similarly, Raffo’s focus on craniosacral therapy brings in a perspective that I haven’t seen in other books written by healers and bodyworkers (e.g. Hilary L. McBride’s The Wisdom of Your Body or Laura Mae Northrup’s Radical Healership).
I was more familiar with Raffo’s topics around movement spaces, including the depressing shift in the late 90s towards a focus on same-sex marriage, but I appreciated the vulnerability here of continuing to hold the dialectic and appreciate the perspectives of those we might prefer to write off. Raffo considers a range of topics from the concept of moral injury to a framing of triggers as time-travel. She gets specific about the dynamics of justice-oriented spaces, addressing how both grounding and activating practices have their place, what it’s like to organize in a space without relational context for the participants, and the balance between communication as a plea to be seen and as a form of self-expression. She also describes how cis white men learn to “self-settle” to unconsciously avoid taking on any responsibility or experience of being out of control, which is a concept I think could be broadly applicable to understanding how movement work gets sabotaged. This is very much a starting point to a conversation, and I didn’t agree with every take, but there is something important in how she connects our personal experiences of trauma and embodiment with how we come together and attempt to make change.
The book does a lot of heavy lifting, but it’s also clearly written from one woman’s perspective, without any claims to broader authority. It’s hard to read about some of the really fascinating radical efforts Raffo has been a part of, around mutual aid and care for example, and then to realize that these movements have either never really gotten off the ground or are still in their infancy. That said, it’s an honest accounting of where we are right now, in this moment. You’ll likely bounce between deep grief, frustration, and hope as you read. At the same time, Raffo guides you through this by encouraging the reader to take a somatic approach in the framing chapters at the beginning of the book. She regularly suggests that you take a pause, attend to your breath, and check in with your own inner knowing, trusting that knowing to guide you beyond the actual words you read. She also suggests other body-based ways to absorb the material as you go, rather than simply reading about the body, grounding your learning and your emotion.
For white readers, Raffo strikes an unusual balance between the sort of “here is what you must do” list of homework and a vulnerability that is not simply “let me tell you how I fucked up before I knew better” but is more “let me tell you how I am continuing to struggle, and how I can often be both right and wrong.” The ambiguity here is critical, as this is never a linear or complete story. I often feel exhausted when reading large piles of suggestions that are both super important and incredibly daunting to attend to alongside struggling to meet my basic needs. I then end up doing a lot of self-tending, reminding myself that trying to jumpstart any significant sense of interdependence at nearly forty in the middle of a pandemic is hard work to try to undertake alongside all these suggestions that are best implemented in relationship and alongside an existing community, that the point isn’t to punish myself, and that it’s only internalized whiteness that creates a sense of discomfort when I can’t really achieve or resolve anything in this work, as it is meant to remain open.
I’ve done a lot of the kinds of reflection Raffo describes, and I also know that I will have a lot more work to do until the day I die, always holding the very real responsibility in one hand and the exhaustion and need to not enact counterproductive self-punishment strategies in the other. While I in some ways agree with Raffo’s essay in this book that suggests we stop using the term “empath,” as if being sensitive to the energies around us is an abnormal experience rather than remembering what is very, very natural, and I have found trauma-processing useful, I do also think that for some neurotypes it is simply a fact of how our bodies operate that we will always be a little extra sensitive to criticism, others’ pain, and the reminder of our own legacies of harm. That’s something we may never fully learn how to hold in a capitalist, colonized world.
That said, while my nerves did on occasion feel a little shouted at, Raffo didn’t abandon me to do my own work but instead contributed some of that caring, self-tending voice as well. She reminds the white reader that we start doing this work from a place of both privilege and almost total deprivation around some of the things that matter most, like community and relationship, and that each of us can only be one actor in a collective movement. These realities are often either just given lip service or overemphasized in abdication of responsibility, and it’s rare to find an author that simultaneously holds the voice of fierce advocate and genuinely caring peer. While I certainly don’t believe that white folks shouldn’t be coddled around racism or that any of the facts should be tempered to feed our egos or meet our fragility, I do think there is perhaps the most transformation to be found in an approach like this that blends rage with compassion.
The way Raffo describes the history of white folks and our carrying of trauma from generation to generation is hard to sit with, but it also helps the white reader to understand why we are so disconnected and deficient, and not to expect significant change in this lifetime, given our distance in some cases of many thousands of years from an intact culture. Through the language of trauma and relationship betrayal, Raffo demonstrates that oppression is at the core about cutting ourselves off from relationship, which is at the center of everything. Like coyotes, humans have the ability to survive without a pack, but we aren’t supposed to. And since white folks are never taught the actually useful skills that children learn in an intact culture, we are likely to simply perpetrate cycles of harm, over and over again.
Raffo suggests practices that might break this cycle, such as trying to reconnect to and know our lineages, build relationship with elders, and learn to protect our communities’ children, but I also get the sense that given the state of pandemic, many of us will not be able to do that work in our lifetimes, and that’s something we simply have to make peace with. Perhaps we are in a generation of simply starting to fumble towards desire for connection, and pass on that desire, even if we will not all have the opportunity to be in presence and relationship with each other again. “Shifting the soft tissues, the nonlinear aspects of the fluid self, shifting our habits and patterns: this is slow work,” Raffo writes. “It takes a long time and it does not ascribe to a rigid strategy, because what shifts over a small period of time then shifts everything that happens afterward. There is no map, there is just living.”
[ARC provided through Edelweiss.]
February 6, 2023
There was a chapter or so that felt like it was written for specifically radical, white healers that I found extremely boring. The rest of the book varied from really good to amazing. I love books that hit me in the brain and heart, and this was definitely one of them.
September 11, 2023
Raffo describes Liberated to the Bone as an act of emptying her pockets, to share what has been collected over the years. As a queer, racialized as white, healing practitioner and cultural worker, those are often the people she is speaking to and with. But in the ways that these systems have hurt as all, she’s speaking to collective wounds of life and land. It is a collection of stories that ask us to honor the lineages of healing work that are too often not named, to be with the complexities of identity and the construction of race, to explore the questions of what comes after, for us all. What feels particularly resonate for me is the practice of stopping the violence and getting to the origin of our collective pain. I think this is the dance that is required, and has been practiced by many peoples for time immemorial. The deep healing that can come only when violence is stopped. So, we move between attempting to stop violence in all forms, in real time, to traveling to the depths of our pain, grief, greed, to sit with what needs to be seen before new/old life and culture can emerge. The deep healing in each of our threads of identity is what is necessary for our movements to ripple in ways that are actually transformative. And the violence ensues, so we must move between. Raffo explores her experience, and more importantly, her practice, doing this throughout this book. I’m in the questions of: What is mine to stop? Where does the violence of the generations of white supremacy live in my body? Where does it live in other people whom I love? It is part of the work of white people to be in these questions, and to work towards the root of what’s there, to see that whiteness actually hurts all of us. Some people may read and feel put off by Raffo’s desire to hold this complexity, but for the abolition of supremacy, it’s necessary. For me, her words felt like a companion.
Especially into: “It Starts with the Land,” “Agitation as a Part of Healing… and Organizing,” “What Happens to the Body When It Hates and Why It Is So Pleasurable,” “Listening: Three or More Brains,” “On Eldering, Attachment, Fear, and Control”
Especially into: “It Starts with the Land,” “Agitation as a Part of Healing… and Organizing,” “What Happens to the Body When It Hates and Why It Is So Pleasurable,” “Listening: Three or More Brains,” “On Eldering, Attachment, Fear, and Control”
May 29, 2024
an awesome read on healing justice. deeply encourage it if you consider yourself, or aspire to be, a healing practitioner
September 25, 2024
This author definitely has a unique writing style and may take a minute to adjust to. That said, the concepts and ideas around trauma and harm are powerful and helpful in dreaming of a new world.
February 4, 2023
“Being liberated to the bone means not only being liberated to the center, to the place of holding, protection, and structure, but also liberated across time, to the beginning places, the moments when all children and elders were safe, and even before then, to the time when stars exhaled, releasing the smallest parts of themselves to float through space, eventually landing as the seeds that nourished life, on this land, now and also back and forth across time.”
“Liberated to the Bone” by Susan Raffo is a poem, a prayer, a practice guide and mostly a pondering of necessary questions. It’s not a prophetic text in a way that it tells you what to do, it’s a contemplative text that invites you to deeply feel the pain of the original wounds, to follow your felt sense to a truthful knowing of what your body and soul longs for and to have the courage to practice by trying and failing in a messy, but forward-facing way. It is hard to find white queer teachers and elders that both hold the complexity of white supremacy and cisheteronormativity and offer guidance on the healing journey to re-become human. I’m deeply grateful for Susan Raffo offering some of the collected pebbles in her pockets.
“Dealing with the Original Wounds” made me sob and shake. “The Overwhelming Arc of Violence” has built the foundation for a collective grief ritual in my practice group. “Helping White Men Lose Control” was as much a challenge as it was a gift that I didn’t expect. “On Rest and Being Part of a Pack” is my current medicine to heal my self-reliant safety shape.
I will return to this book over and over again, just flipping open a page and drop into discernment.
“Liberated to the Bone” by Susan Raffo is a poem, a prayer, a practice guide and mostly a pondering of necessary questions. It’s not a prophetic text in a way that it tells you what to do, it’s a contemplative text that invites you to deeply feel the pain of the original wounds, to follow your felt sense to a truthful knowing of what your body and soul longs for and to have the courage to practice by trying and failing in a messy, but forward-facing way. It is hard to find white queer teachers and elders that both hold the complexity of white supremacy and cisheteronormativity and offer guidance on the healing journey to re-become human. I’m deeply grateful for Susan Raffo offering some of the collected pebbles in her pockets.
“Dealing with the Original Wounds” made me sob and shake. “The Overwhelming Arc of Violence” has built the foundation for a collective grief ritual in my practice group. “Helping White Men Lose Control” was as much a challenge as it was a gift that I didn’t expect. “On Rest and Being Part of a Pack” is my current medicine to heal my self-reliant safety shape.
I will return to this book over and over again, just flipping open a page and drop into discernment.
Read
July 11, 2023DNF. This is another book in the series that seems to talk more about caveats of privilege, the author's and that of others, more than the actual topics I thought it would be about. If you'd never heard of any of it, perhaps it's a good entry point to thinking about this stuff. I'm just kinda tired of it and feel like it ends up taking up more space than it should. I don't think we should abandon the practice of introspection and dismantling internalized supremacy, just that it shouldn't be the focus because it still puts the focus on the privilege which I doubt is the intended outcome.
October 18, 2023
I have
January 24, 2023
If you are a practitioner, therapist, cultural worker or orbit around the word “healer” in your life and work, read this book! This text is a mitzvah, a Hebrew word meaning both blessing and duty. This book offers so much food for thought and action, and invited in the writing space for presence and embodiment rather than singular, distancing intellectualization. The roots of healing justice run so wide and deep. I felt truly thrilled to read this text, and feel it shaping me as a practitioner with more purpose and courage.
December 10, 2023
If you are an academic or looking for a book with lots of citations, you will not enjoy this book. But if you are interested in the reflections of an elder who has been a tremendous influence in the world of healing justice, Raffo’s prose is succinct and engaging and will draw you in. Also, I wish all white writers of nonfiction situated themselves in their opening the way Raffo does—not with guilt, but a clarity in naming her context and a practice in disrupting whiteness as a constructed category that affords white people not having to name their lineage.
December 19, 2024
Provocative and so inviting, a humble beckoning into Raffo's long experience with social justice as a way of living and wondering and learning. The long-term bodyworker also broadens this society-level investigation with the perspective of individual bodies down to a cellular understanding--not too mention how she urges other bodyworkers to travel from the individual through their lives and choices to the societal. This is a book to return to--a companion to walk alongside and inspire re-remembering and forward dreaming and sometimes sitting to breathe in a pine tree's healthful terpenes.
July 25, 2024
Wow. The way that Susan weaves together knowledge is poetic and accessible. I cried many times while reading this book. This book picked me up and carried me while I was on my own journey of “time traveling” to a past with tons of harm. How we can all begin to heal. Towards the collective healing we need and deserve in our movements & broader. That requires the bravery of looking original harms squarely. Thank you Susan for this gift.
July 30, 2025
I wish I enjoyed this book more! I believe I will be able to appreciate it better in the future. Right now, the pain and trauma feels too raw to engage in text analyzing said pain/trauma.
A good recommendation for anybody who is in that mindbodyspace and looking to develop a more complex picture of somatic trauma (for example, deconstructing and rejecting harmful binaries that paint the mind as separate and/or superior to the body).
There’s a lot of thoughtful information in this book!
A good recommendation for anybody who is in that mindbodyspace and looking to develop a more complex picture of somatic trauma (for example, deconstructing and rejecting harmful binaries that paint the mind as separate and/or superior to the body).
There’s a lot of thoughtful information in this book!
January 11, 2023
i think this book just didn’t quite click for me. it was well written and definitely gave me food for thought, but I struggled to get through it at times and I think there was just a lot I was unfamiliar with. probably a 3.5 stars, imo, but if you’re a healer/community builder of some fashion then this is a definite read for you. maybe something I’ll come back to in the future.
July 28, 2023
Life changing and life affirming.
For an excellent and thorough review I agree with, read this one by Avory (or check the reviews under this title for Avory’s review, 5 stars):
https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...
For an excellent and thorough review I agree with, read this one by Avory (or check the reviews under this title for Avory’s review, 5 stars):
https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...
September 25, 2024
incredible read. and reflection. and so much to take in.
already planning a re-read. highlighter and pen in hand. and looking for a book study to wrangle with on this one.
read it. you will be glad to have done so.
already planning a re-read. highlighter and pen in hand. and looking for a book study to wrangle with on this one.
read it. you will be glad to have done so.
May 20, 2025
I had to read this really slowly because it was so juicy and I want to read it again. It gave me lessons that I'm actually bringing into my everyday life and that's how I know a book is actually good, in my own internal rating system.
February 14, 2023
So wise and so necessary
June 8, 2023
Susan is my cousin so I’m biased but this book is absolutely incredible.
November 5, 2023
everyone pls read this book
February 27, 2024
I want everyone to read this! So powerful.
June 9, 2024
3.5, i really loved parts of this book and it also felt like there were big key points just missed also
November 3, 2024
I wasn’t a fan of the author’s writing style, but I very much value everything that was said in this book. Seems only fair to give it a 3 on that assessment!
January 19, 2025
I already know I’ll be revisiting this book throughout my life for guidance and peace
January 20, 2025
Many gems here.
July 10, 2025
Absolutely amazing.
October 18, 2025
pro mě něco jako bible, pochopila jsem, že někdy informace chápu skrz tělo, nejsem schopná říct, o čem to bylo, a přece mě to pohltilo a zůstává to se mnou, určitě plánuju číst znovu a znovu
January 20, 2026
please drop everything you're doing and read this book
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