Julie Jewels Smoot

My Body Is My Home and Sacred Temple honors the journey of returning. Not returning to who you were before the trauma. Not returning to a perfect version of healing. But returning to the understanding that your body still belongs to you. This piece explores the possibility that the body is more than a container for wounds. More than a record of what happened. More than a place where pain resides. The body is also resilience.

The title Tremor and Release reflects the understanding that the body has many ways of responding to stress, activation, and recovery. Not all release arrives through words, insight, or conscious decision-making. Sometimes the body participates in its own process through sensation and movement. Within The Body Kept the Record, this recording explores the relationship between activation and settling without assigning meaning to every experience.

Between Activation and Rest is a track from the album The Body Kept the Record, a collection exploring the body's responses to stress, protection, recovery, and the gradual return to safety through a trauma-informed listening experience. There are moments when the body is fully activated. Alert. Prepared.

In trauma-informed movement and sound, safety is not something I promise or create for someone else. It is something I listen for—and something the body signals in small, often quiet ways.

The ground does not demand performance. It does not ask for balance, coordination, or productivity. It simply offers support.

In both movement and sound, there is an assumption that something must always be happening—another cue, another tone, another instruction, another layer. But my training, experience, and listening have taught me something quieter and more demanding: sometimes the most ethical choice is to pause.

It did not teach me how to recognize the quiet signals of a body that is dissociating, bracing, or enduring instead of receiving. It did not teach me how to sit with discomfort without trying to fix it. It did not teach me how to trust silence. Training also did not teach me how power moves in subtle ways—how even well-intentioned facilitation can become intrusive if listening is replaced by agenda.