Healing happens in community
we heal in relationship. we heal in community. activating our personal and collective healing is the core of realizing our capacity for change. through a collaborative therapeutic process, we work together to explore your emotional landscape, experiences, family and community dynamics, social and economic systems that impact this and identify practices that support your embodied adaptation and healing. together, we hold space for intentional change that grows our "capacity to embody the liberated and just worlds we long for." — adrienne maree brown. we engage in healing through a liberatory, embodied + collective practice.
many of us seek healing from the suffering rooted in historical trauma + oppression. Indigenous Psychologist Eduardo Duran refers to this historical trauma as the soul wound. with this holistic view of people within communities and cultures, Duran offers an indigenous approach to healing that emphasizes our need “to attend to the ways that traumatic events disrupt a person’s mental, physical, and spiritual life forces.” the approach suggests that trauma creates fragments in our lives, disrupting the interconnections that inherently exist in mind body spirit. as a Black person with roots in the Afro-Caribbean diaspora, i acknowledge reverence for Indigenous healingways that disrupt the co-opting and oppressive pillaging of the cultures of Indigenous peoples and reach back for the Indigenous wisdoms of Black + Caribbean people.
seeking to deepen my practice of liberatory pathways of healing brought me to the work of Decolonizing Therapy for Black folk with Shawna Murray Brown, LCSW-C. In her decolonial learning experience, Shawna discusses the ways engaging in liberatory healing practice means mapping back to Black healing traditions and weaving in ways Black folx have always healed. healing in community is a Black ancestral healingway. from the praise house of our enslaved ancestors to the communal dance of the ringshout, Black folx have historically healed in community.
healing happens in relationship
“we deserve to feel our connections. we deserve to feel belonging to all the life within and around us.”— Prentis Hemphill
healing is an act of “connecting the disconnected” + uprooting the disconnection caused by oppression and colonialism happens in our relationships. i gained the beautiful resource below, “Ripples of Relationship,” sharing space with the Black Embodiments Institute in 2021. the tool amplifies how we are all nested in relationships and need our intervention to shape healing and change. the core wounds of disconnection and unbelonging, created by the trauma of oppression, are healed in how we choose to engage in tender, generous, loving relationships. in how we create healingways in our families; in how we weave webs of care in our communities and institutions. healing is in how we reshape our social norms + create historical forces of care for generations to come. healing is in how we restore regenerative relationship with my environment, ecosystem, spirit, and land.
healing happens in community, healing is collective
“rarely, if ever, are any of us healed in isolation. healing is an act of communion.”- bell hooks
bell hooks reminds us we must practice beloved community and move beyond theory and cultivate community in concrete, deliberate and sustainable ways daily. she offers the map of healing being an act of communion. this is the vision of healing that speaks to me the most + informs all the ways we are moving toward liberation at radical resilience. we are choosing the collective. we are choosing to situate our approach to healing in a way that acknowledges the impact of trauma and oppression connects us to the collective nature of Black and African ways of knowing. we are choosing healing that reclaims the lineage of embodied wisdoms that our ancestors cultivated. we are choosing to connect to global struggles for Black liberation and honor the ways healing + liberation are deeply linked. without healing, we have no liberation, and without liberation, we can not heal.
[radical resilience is a therapy and healing practice for Black and Brown LGBTQ+ + gender-expansive creatives who want to stop shrinking and finally take up space. it's an ongoing initiative that seeks to bridge collective healing + liberation through mental health and wellness programs + services. our work is a response to histories of trauma and oppression, habituation to violence and toxic behaviors, lack of access to care, limited intersectional support systems, erasure of queerness, classism, racism, ableism, colonization+++ we are working toward collective healing spaces + experiences. connect with our healingways newsletter for updates]
footnotes:
deep liberation— langston khan
teaching community— bell hooks
