What It Takes To Heal

I am excited to begin working with What It Takes To Heal: How Transforming Ourselves Can Change The World by Prentis Hemphill

The first chapter in this book is Vision and that’s where we begin.

“The first step in any change is imagining that something else is possible for you and for the world.

Recovering our ability to imagine what doesn’t yet exist and committing ourselves to what we envision are what carry us through the hardest moments.

Underneath our current reality is a future waiting to be conjured.

I don’t think healing begins where we think it does, in our doing something. I believe it begins in a place of potential, where possibilities reside, visions for ourselves and for the world that make us more whole. With our visions in place, we can realize them through what follows, our commitment and the steps we take toward them.

The factor that makes projections most accurate is the ability to anticipate new relationships, unexpected alliances and possibilities.

Be careful believing your life can be your own. For some of us, our visions are a threat to order.

~

Perhaps it is time to dream new dreams. It is vulnerable and hard to let ourselves desire beyond what we can trust will be fulfilled. 

We learn to stay ready, defended, our lives unfolding as a series of things that just happened to us, never something that we shaped.

Longing is a yearning that comes from our bodies.  Longing seeks fulfillment.
I wasn’t sure fulfillment was for people like me.

What do you long for? 

What do you yearn to feel or do in the world?

What makes your stomach jump just to say it?

~

Trauma can take the capacity for longing, for visioning, from us. We have little room for dreams or visions. It’s impossible to imagine that we can shape what comes and create a future we’ve never seen.

Name the longing for what your life could be, something that might be a powerful enough conjuring to allow you to feel what had felt too painful or unsafe in the past.

“I want to know how to love. I want to be able to give love, show the love I feel, and I want to let it in when someone says they love me back.”

“I want to know that I am worthy and that I can inspire the people I work with to believe in their own worthiness.”

What are your unseen, unnamed longings?

~

When we dream from the seat of ourselves, we come into relationship with one another, and have visions for a more reciprocal and balanced world. 

We need visions within that make our stomach quiver and cause us to come alive. Then we can show up more authentically, reshape the contours of our community, rework the structures of our world. 

Underneath our current reality is a future waiting to be conjured.

We name our visions; we say them out loud to bring them into being, and we move them toward fruition by staying the course.

Commitment is what gets us through the middle of change, when the outcome seems bleak. Commitment expects our despair but doesn’t waver.

To what and to whom are you committed? 

What do you long for? 

What is worth traveling through the unknown to reach?”

~

You can see my interviews with Prentis here.

Join us this Sunday to vision and explore together. Details and link are here.