Heal and Get Free

Healing (noun or adjective) - the way of becoming free from injury or dis-ease : making sound or whole

“What is it with you and healing anyway?”

I asked myself this question almost a year ago in my morning pages. The judgey tone of the question belies what was actually happening for me at that time - I was trying to make sense of the healing journey that I was on. A journey that I remain on today, and will probably remain on for the rest of my days.

Around the same time that I asked myself this question, I had made a commitment to my own healing from racial, generational, and personal trauma.

I began regular therapy sessions to better understand myself and my family system dynamics.

I formed a habit around movement practices including yoga and dancing to release stale energy from my body.

I became very curious about my relationship with substances, and began to practice periodic, conscientious abstinence.

I sought teachers to provide guidance on energetic alignment, especially focusing on imbalances that contain me from using my voice to tell my truth.

I started to read a revolutionary text called My Grandmother’s Hands by Resmaa Menakem, which illuminates for me the biological and neurological responses to trauma that I have long experienced but never fully understood.

What’s really remarkable about this is that the more that I invest in my own healing, the more I become invested in and responsive to the healing needs of others.

Not long afterwards, I was accepted into a certification program with Blooming Willow and began my journey of becoming a healing-centered coach.

I wanted to be a coach because I want to help people get free, and because I want to get free - and healing is the most generative path to liberation that I can imagine.

I want to be a coach because I want to illuminate, uncover, unleash possibility within myself and others. I never knew how powerful I was until I allowed myself to poke holes in and climb out of the containers that I grew up in - containers that told me that there was only one way to be “good” or “right” or “acceptable”. I’m still discovering my power and learning not to be afraid of it.

To me, coaching is like a mirror. It allows me to see what’s possible in me just as others are seeing what’s possible in them.

And quite frankly, the world needs the mirror.

Healing on the individual level is a fractal of the healing the world needs. Healing requires us to confront the traumas that are keeping us stuck in unhealthy, harmful patterns. It means turning around to face the monster, smell its breath, see the death in its eyes – and say “We deserve better than you, we are stronger than you, we don’t have to be afraid of you anymore”.

When we do this for ourselves as individuals, so much becomes possible. Healing in our relationships, our families and communities, institutions, and complex structures in society becomes more and more tangible.

If it works on the smallest scale, within my tiny hopeful heart - I know that it can work on the largest scale in this broken world that is so full of potential.

We have a right and a responsibility to healing and liberation. It’s our path to something beautiful and more meaningful and more impressive than we have ever even imagined.

So when I asked myself that question - “What is it with you and healing anyway?” - it was probably a nudge from future me, or from the ancestors, or from my future descendants. Encouraging me to start doing the thing I want to see in the world, to start being the thing I want to be.

Healed. Whole. Free.

For me. For us.

Radical Necessity

Ritual