Cultural Healing
Across the Earth there are great cultural movements to gently usher the collective human heart back to the sacred memory of our own divinity and interconnectedness for the health and wellbeing of people and communities everywhere.
We can begin to frame cultural healing as a process of coming back into a healthier and more balanced way of relating. A slow healing of disconnection, it involves mending a tear in the fabric of humanity’s ancient memory of sacred relationality and interdependence here on Earth, unraveling the Western cultural habit of objectifying life, and gently tending the wounds caused by unhealthy and disconnected cultural and ideological assumptions. In other words, it is the life-long prayer of revitalizing intimacy with our relations, and the reimagining of life-assumptions to leave the future generations with a more connected world.
RE-MEMBERING SACRED RELATIONALITY
IS A LIFELONG PRACTICE
Cultural healing is the work of healing a wound on the collective human spirit, but this is not a wound of the flesh. It is the wound of the heart, a wound across generations, and so the story, the mending, is a mending of Deep Time. It is the work of re-storying our life, rekindling the memory of a wider view, a larger picture, within which our lives dance. Re-membering sacred relationality is a lifelong practice, and even more, the bulk of this work happens at a root level, underground in a sense, in the Invisible place—it is not showy, it is silent at its core because it must listen, must be able to hear that which is beyond itself.
DECOLONIZING WESTERN PARADIGMS IS INTEGRAL
FOR RECLAIMING OUR RELATEDNESS
One of the first steps in acknowledging this messy process of reclaiming our innate relatedness is to first accept that Western culture has failed us in a way. In other words, decolonizing Western paradigms is integral in reclaiming our relatedness. This acknowledgment is fundamental—it is the painful beginning of a prayer, and we usually have to feel that pain for some time as it makes its way through us to plant new seeds of ancient memory. The objectification of life is an indicator of unhealthy culture (or rather, the indicator of pathogenic energy within a culture), and when we begin to look at the ways in which life is objectified on a collective scale, we also begin to notice how our own psyche objectifies those who people our environment: elements, plants, animals, food, medicines, other humans, and even ourselves.
HEALTH. CULTURE. CONSCIOUSNESS.
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This process of noticing unhealthy patterns of objectification within ourselves can be challenging. A healthy relationship with the thinking mind gives us a framework to work through all that will arise—including all the sticky, difficult, ugly, unpleasant things (thoughts, insights, sensations, and emotions)—during the work of cultural healing. The more aware we are, the more of our own pain we are able to hold without becoming overwhelmed. Awareness is not an object itself though, either; it is not an arrival. Rather, awareness too is always in motion, always in flux, and here we find even more nuance, more mystery.
Even more, deepening consciousness is a remedy for harmful culture, as well as a sign of healthy culture. Consciousness is also a weapon of defense against colonial violence. Violence is most powerful when it goes unseen or unnoticed, or when it cannot be named or spoken of. The journey of deepening consciousness is often difficult and painful, but the acceptance that the larger culture has failed you in someway is the beginning of healing and liberation.
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This perspective on cultural healing lives at the roots of my guidance and mentorship work. What I have to offer is a kind of perspective, framing, and presenced space-holding support around this often-subtle, often-unnoticed, and often-challenging-to-talk-about level, area, and dimension of healing. Through sessions, teachings, and workshops, I offer contexts, frameworks, stories, practices, and perspectives to help ease the grip of materialist Western assumptions on the mind and nervous system, restore balance to the entire human being (the heart, mind, body, emotions, and intuition)—which includes both the visible and invisible aspects of experience, and especially the more subtle and unknowable phenomena of our being—and revive the heart with a deeper life-honoring, relational foundation that many have been unjustly robbed of (including myself) due to misaligned and ungrounded colonial cultural realities and institutions of a vast, multigenerational scale.