The World I Want To Live In
We are working with What It Takes To Heal: How Transforming Ourselves Can Change The World, by Prentis Hemphill. The following are a series of quotes and reflections relating to Chapter two on trauma and healing, in which Prentis spoke of trauma in their family in childhood.
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“If we were to feel our pain out in the open, name it, step into ceremony with it, and let the knowledge guide our steps, how might that change every single thing we do? How might it change the world?
My work is not to imagine that I can bear the weight that someone else holds, but a commitment to not look away.
What was I ultimately fighting for if not for a world where I could sometimes be soft?
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Trauma breaks apart our ability to experience safety, belonging, and dignity.
These needs are core to our ability to develop as human beings, grow, create, engage with others and the world, and express and protect ourselves.
Healing is the process, often lifelong, of restoring and reawakening the capacities for safety, belonging, and dignity on the other side of trauma.
When we feel safe our nervous systems can quiet, allowing for other capacities like imagination and expression to come forward.
Belonging is our ability to feel that we are a part of something, of a community, and of the world around us. Trauma can make belonging contingent or dangerous.
I learned to seek connection at the expense of my bodily safety, to lose my own limits in order to belong.
We can’t heal or act effectively under active threat, when our safety is not assured. We either find safety or create it with who and what we have. Belonging is about bringing us back into the world around us, and back into relationships with others.
Even when our conditions change, we may never feel safe even though we have what we need; we may question belonging, even when we are clearly wanted; we may live with a persistent shame that doesn’t allow for boundaries or choices that care for us.
Dignity is the capacity to feel the inherent value simply in the fact that we exist, and is the seat of agency, of choice.
When we can witness and tolerate dignity in others, we build a foundation for collaboration, for co-creation, and repair. When dignity breaks down, shame comes in, telling us stories of our inherent worthlessness.
Dignity is where we feel our worthiness again, where we are about the business of eradicating shame and expressing our agency and choicefulness. These principles can bring us to a path of our own growth.
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It is our responsibility to one another to do our internal work.
Healing is when we are able to tolerate, feel and express something in our relationships that before was out of our reach. It reinstates our abilities to choose something other than what our fear dictates. It will make our responses correlate with what is happening now.
As we start to feel safe with one another and feel like we belong together, we can relax into appreciating the fullness of life and our place in this ecosystem.
We can bring our transformed and transforming selves to the necessary work of building a better society for everyone.”
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Join us Sunday to inquire and reflect together. Details and link are here.
Source our work with our visions, not our pain.
If we were to feel our pain out in the open, how might it change the world?
Can healing reach through the weeks, and months, and years, and free us?
I accept that I and others have been traumatized and hurt
I know our inherent dignity and our capacity to heal
What is worth traveling through the unknown to reach?
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