Very well said. I’ve been journeying through similar themes of mind, body and spirit recently and come to a similar conclusion… that finding belonging and nurturing my sense of place where I am is the most radical and healing thing I can do for myself at this time. It’s so simple, but grounding into a loving life with my husband, our dogs, and a reciprocal and equanimous relationship within body and mind seems to be the most pertinent curriculum right now. That, and beginning to envision the next steps to increasing well-being of the land we have the privilege to be stewards of—for our greater local community to one day participate with us in—that is a sacred undertaking.
The change really does start within. While I used to have much more grandiose ideas of what that would look like, cultivating deep kinship with the humans and more than humans around me, right where I am, is a profound form of resistance and reclamation for ourselves as sovereign beings.
It does feel like there is a lot of individual and collective trauma to heal. Healing the self seems to be how we heal the collective. There is a lot of work to do. Paradoxically, I find that work is to learn how to rest—to relax the nervous system, to realize that beyond the fight, flight, freeze, fawn, or flop responses, there is responsibility: the ability to respond—to tend and befriend.
Tending to ourselves and befriending ourselves does seem like a good place to start. In my research into spiritual and religious trauma, I have come across the work of Hillary McBride and her podcast, Holy Hurt (https://holyhurtpodcast.com/). Interestingly, the series leads to some Unsettling Truths (https://www.ivpress.com/unsettling-truths) in the final episode, which addresses the collective harm perpetuated by an unresolved Perpetration-Induced Traumatic Stress (https://perpetrationtrauma.org/).
Very well said. I’ve been journeying through similar themes of mind, body and spirit recently and come to a similar conclusion… that finding belonging and nurturing my sense of place where I am is the most radical and healing thing I can do for myself at this time. It’s so simple, but grounding into a loving life with my husband, our dogs, and a reciprocal and equanimous relationship within body and mind seems to be the most pertinent curriculum right now. That, and beginning to envision the next steps to increasing well-being of the land we have the privilege to be stewards of—for our greater local community to one day participate with us in—that is a sacred undertaking.
The change really does start within. While I used to have much more grandiose ideas of what that would look like, cultivating deep kinship with the humans and more than humans around me, right where I am, is a profound form of resistance and reclamation for ourselves as sovereign beings.
It does feel like there is a lot of individual and collective trauma to heal. Healing the self seems to be how we heal the collective. There is a lot of work to do. Paradoxically, I find that work is to learn how to rest—to relax the nervous system, to realize that beyond the fight, flight, freeze, fawn, or flop responses, there is responsibility: the ability to respond—to tend and befriend.
Tending to ourselves and befriending ourselves does seem like a good place to start. In my research into spiritual and religious trauma, I have come across the work of Hillary McBride and her podcast, Holy Hurt (https://holyhurtpodcast.com/). Interestingly, the series leads to some Unsettling Truths (https://www.ivpress.com/unsettling-truths) in the final episode, which addresses the collective harm perpetuated by an unresolved Perpetration-Induced Traumatic Stress (https://perpetrationtrauma.org/).
My recovery from trauma has involved a process of resensitization to restore the sensitivity (heart) to make sense (mind) of my senses (body). At the moment, I am exploring The Blind Spot: Why Science Cannot Ignore Human Experience (https://direct.mit.edu/books/book/5740/The-Blind-SpotWhy-Science-Cannot-Ignore-Human).