We do not live in isolation.
“How do you heal yourself and help others?” I asked. The answers poured in:
“by building my mind, body, and community every single day.”“trusting my self to stand tall and reach out instead of within.”“by speaking my truth as lovingly as possible.”“Quiet meditation & working on things like afghans for veterans stuck in the hospital and small beanies & blankets for babies stuck in Children’s Hospital to help me heal.”
When we work toward our own healing, everything changes. Things ebb and flow – there will be times when we retreat from our interactions with the world in order to do some deep re-assessment or healing work that can’t be done during too much engagement. But then we cycle back out: we bring our healing selves into the world of change, into the world of joy, into the world of pain.
You will see from the few answers I selected – and I simply chose the first that came in – that this looks and feels different for each of us. In helping others, we heal ourselves. In working toward our own healing, we increase our capacity to help others. We also simply bring more healing into the world. That matters.
I won’t list everything that feels like it is going wrong in the world: all you have to do is check out the BBC, or Al Jazeera, or your Twitter feed to see it. I just want to remind us all that everything we do to counter injustice, dis-ease, hatred, or isolation, is a victory for the impetus of healing.
The personal is political. The political is personal. We are interwoven. Re-member.
In the trailer for the movie Starhawk is trying to make of the Fifth Sacred Thing, Maya Greenwood asks: “How do we become stronger healers than they are, killers?”
How indeed?
We show up every day. We start with ourselves, we continue in community. We start in community, and continue with ourselves.
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