How has my collective healing practice changed?
Reflections on my personal practice's evolution
Collective healing is a practice for me.
I use myself as guinea pig to figure out what collective healing is: how to heal collectively-shared wounds that are alive in me. How to be in relationship with the world’s pain and changes. What this all looks like in practice.
Six years into this work, I’m reflecting on how this personal practice of mine has changed. What’s different about the way I go about doing things these days? What has evolved?
Four things stick out to me in particular that I’ve come to realize:
→ The world isn’t out there somewhere separate and at a distance from me. It’s actually in here. A place within me I can touch
→ Water is needed as much as fire when it comes to social change and my relationship with the world
→ Wounds mean something different to me now. Less scary, more filled with opportunity.
→ There’s no destination here. Ultimately it’s all ongoing, both change and collective healing.
Everything I share with you here through We Heal For All is born from my own experimentation and learnings. It’s always been the basis of my work; understanding that my offerings are my consciousness are my own healing journey. The questions that stir in my soul are the ones I respond to and turn into this work, trusting that they are questions some of you are grappling with too.
So that’s what I’d like to share with you here, how my personal practice has evolved.
Side note ~
This reflection is coming at a cool time, too, because I’ve officially finished the manuscript of my book—yayy!—and sent it to my editor. This is giving me more time and space to reflect on our relationship here, between me and you, as someone who reads my newsletter.
I’m so grateful to you for taking the time to read what I send you, in whatever frequency or infrequency you do. Your inbox has a million+ emails in it, no doubt, and the fact that you choose to open mine and connect with me here means a lot.
So, I’m curious… how are these essays landing for you? Do you find what I’m sharing helpful or interesting? Are there specific things I’ve shared recently or in the past that resonate? If so, I’d love to hear.
I ask this to see if there are ways I can be of service to questions stirring in your heart or particular themes or needs that are alive in your life. If there are, and you think I might be able to help, please let me know. I’d love to try.
Alright, personal practice of collective healing reflection. Let’s go:
My personal collective healing practice
You may have heard me say before, when I entered into this work I didn’t know what it was. All I knew is that collective healing brought me alive in a way that I absolutely had to say yes to.
I think back to my… how old was I then?… 29 year old self… is that right? …
I can see her now. Sitting at her office at the UN’s Sustainable Development Solutions Network by Columbia having this epiphany that she needs to pivot her work. Her unhappiness and this lightning-bolt-like inspiration converged to propel her into something new.
Let’s call her.. Venturing-Out-Into-The-Wilderness Liz. Charting-A-New-Path Liz. Voyager Liz. Seed Potential Liz.
Let’s also include an even younger version of Liz in the mix: 20-year old Liz.
Unbeknownst to her, she’s the one who really started me on this path. It was the feelings she felt the first time she learned about extreme poverty that set me on a path of being a social scientist and development practitioner. And ultimately, it was those feeling that brought me full circle to the work of collective healing.
What I practice, specifically
I didn’t have a sense of what I was practicing when I first began, but since 2018 I’ve come to describe it this way:
Processing my feelings as it relates to the world. Understanding that within what I feel are collectively-shared wounds that require a unique kind of care.
Having more intentionality around my relationship with the world. Naming that that’s a thing, and that it’s an intimate thing. Leaning into that intimacy.
Developing a healing-centered presence within myself that I bring with me into my relationship with the world: how I view current events, respond to change and tragedy, engage with friends and loved ones.
Ways my practice has changed
→ The world isn’t out there, it’s in here
As a social scientist and development practitioner, my perception had always been that the world is out there. I need to go save the world. I want to learn how the world works. I study and engage with a world that is separate from me and at a distance.
Therefore at the beginning, collective healing was about healing things “out there” for me. Community rifts, collective trauma, psychotic leadership styles. “If only these things would heal!” this seed view would say. “How do I get more healing out in the world?!”
Now, though, the locus of my collective healing focus is closer to home, sitting at the center of my chest, within me.
My collective healing practice has evolved to understand that I am the system, and that while getting more tools and programs out into the world for others is important, there is also huge value in recognizing that I am (and each one us are) an integral part of the system, therefore processing what we feel about the world, from the world, through the world has value.
→ Water is needed as much as fire
My feelings about the world have always informed my relationship with it. Twenty year old Liz knew this. She recognized the power of her feelings when she learned about extreme poverty for the first time. “Oh!” She thought. “If I can channel this energy in some way, I could be on to something…”
But, especially at that age, I didn’t know how to work with that power. I didn’t have any tools. Not even for feelings about my personal life, let alone my relationship with the world.
I also didn’t fully see the challenging aspects of having such strong feelings about the world. I hadn’t had enough real world experiences—hadn’t lived through enough elections, had enough hard conversations, been in the field long enough—to know the in’s and out’s and various manifestations of my feelings for the world, including the less helpful ones.
As a fire-y person by nature, my seed relationship with the world was driven by passion and conviction; ambition and mission; a drive and assuredness that pushed me to righteously go-go-go.
But life quickly showed me that unbalanced fire burns and destroys. Yes, it can transform. But it also can consume and dry things out.
Fire needs to be balanced by other elements when it comes to the world, especially social change work. The status quo of professional life and activism work is so fire-forward—we must act! Defend at all costs! Don’t stop! Don’t back down!
Water is needed to balance, soothe, and help with flow. Water also transforms things, but more slowly, over time. Smoothing and shaping things as it goes. It dances with the rocks and river beds around it, bending itself to adapt, while still moving with direction.
My collective healing practice is the practice of centering water in the way I relate to the world. Understanding the value of this, and being curious about what it has to teach me.
→ Wounds mean something different to me now
As I’ve deepened and developed my own personal relationship with trauma and emotions, it has shifted my relationship with the world’s pain.
When I tune into the wounds society holds, there is less darkness to what I see. Yes, darkness is still there but what I see more of these days is multidimensionality and opportunity.
Wounds used to be scary to me. I had to heavily call on the fire I mentioned earlier to work with them. To be in fierce spiritual warrior mode to do battle. Especially as it relates to the world.
But these days, I’ve come to see wounds with much more compassion. Almost as if they are children. Yes they can still be scary. And yes, they can certainly be intense.
But when I look out into the world and within myself at the collective wounds that are alive these days, what catches my eye are the wounds that are ready to be healed. The ones that are begging to shift and change, therefore they’re making themselves known really, really loudly.
My personal practice of collective healing involves looking for these glimmers of opportunity within it all and placing my attention there. Moving away from black-and-white perceptions of healing and the world, and towards a multidimensional perspective that sees pain as indicating there’s an opportunity to heal.
→ There’s no destination here
I used to think, “If only everyone just healed then there wouldn’t be these problems.”
There was a final destination in my mind’s eye that came with this notion of healing. That healing will get us somewhere. And that that somewhere looked a specific way—more harmonious, peaceful, green, multicultural, generative, free.
While that vision of the future is still with me, I now see healing differently.
Collective healing doesn’t offer us a set of policy solutions to the world’s problems. It instead offers us a way to work with the ebbs and flows of what’s going on. Ebbs and flows that are inherent to life, and that are a hallmark feature of the times we live in.
Because while, yes there are certain outcomes that healing ourselves and our communities produces, healing doesn’t result in some sort of static, completed state we can all rejoice in once we arrive there. It does not transmute darkness into light and then everything just stays in the light. It’s not linear like that.
Instead, my collective healing practice is an ongoing process that matches the dynamic nature of the times. I have let go of the notion that it’ll deliver us somewhere specific, instead believing—and practicing within myself—that it’ll support whatever things need to emerge and develop and reveal itself within me and society.
At the end of the day, this reflection shows me that much of my personal practice of collective healing is rooted in the evolution of ideas. Which, makes sense. Ideas are the building blocks of our worldviews, which shape the narratives we use to make sense of things. These narratives then form how we show up and act.
Healing as an idea means different things to different people, and has meant different things to me throughout my journey. I’m grateful for the way my own path has shaped my current practice of collective healing, and share this with you with a feeling of shaking out a towel, letting these practices loose in order to give them permission to keep evolving and show me what’s next.
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Grateful to you! Be well