Welcome to The Me-First School of Global Healing
A blog dedicated to exploring the experience of healing in all domains
A HAPPY NEW YEAR’S RESOLUTION
A Happy New Year's Resolution
For a few years now, I’ve had an Economic Redress policy at Perennial Medicine. I do this in part because it feels good to stand behind what I believe in, but also because I want to introduce the Economic Redress concept to my community—especially to other anti-racist white people who often wonder what they can actually do to help end racism.
What is Economic Redress? It is an attempt to redress the economic aspects of racial injustice upon which this country was founded, by disrupting and re-patterning the way that our resources are currently being distributed.
As a white-bodied person in America, I am aware of my economic privilege in comparison with people who have darker skin than my own. However, ...
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October 30, 2020
Healthy Anger, in Autumn
What is healthy anger? That’s an easily politicized question—and I‘d like to disrupt the binary of healthy/unhealthy anger by instead suggesting that we consider anger along the polarity of healthier anger and less healthy anger. This is important for many reasons, chief among which is that anger is a dynamic process, and health is a moving target. Anger that is healthy right this moment will not be healthy after a few days, or weeks, or months at the most—it is part of a transformative journey. It has stages, just like grief. Passing through a stage is healthy; getting stuck in that exact same stage is not.
The most important question in considering anger is, where is it ...
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August 28, 2020
Alternatives to Trauma
Very often, despair and resignation may be a manifestation of unhealed trauma—specifically trauma that is no longer healthy.
What is healthy trauma?
Healthy trauma is a state of complete or incomplete dissociation from an injury that we do not have the resources to heal. This is why injuries that took place years ago—or centuries ago—can still remain unhealed. That is the nature of trauma—to remain unhealed, until we have the resources to heal.
But what if we do have the resources to heal?
When we do have the resources to heal, and our bodies recognize it, healthy trauma begins to heal, often immediately. However, there may be parts of us that are stuck in “trauma mode,” and do not recognize that ...
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July 17, 2020
Frederick Douglass
I read the autobiography of Frederick Douglass Jr. when I was in fourth grade. The part of the story that struck me the hardest was the description of little Frederick being sold up north to Maryland, to be a happy little white family’s very own first slave.
When Frederick first arrived, he joined a warm and loving family, filled with laughter and natural flow of kindness. Within a year, however, the family became cold and bitter. There was no more singing and easy affection, and there was severity where once there was kindness. The continuous strain of having to be “superior,” and needing to suppress their natural generosity and loving impulses towards a fellow human being—a child, in fact—meant ...
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June 19, 2020
Why a Healer Needs to Consider Race
Too often, “I don’t see color” is translated as, “I don’t want to hear about racism.” The white person who said these words might not have meant it that way at all—but it is important to be aware of how we are coming across in a context where there really are a lot of white people who just do not want to hear or know about racial pain.
Those of us who are white healers supporting BIPOC clients do need to take some extra steps to signal clearly that we are ready to listen, and ready to have our awareness stretched beyond our own lived experience, into domains of experience that we haven’t known.
We ...
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June 4, 2020 Healing Moral Injury
Love is Necessary for Healing
Have you ever said or done something that, in hindsight, might have been significantly hurtful to someone? Maybe you realized it yourself, or maybe someone pointed it out to you. That’s a difficult moment. How did you feel, and how did you support yourself through those feelings?
There are many kinds of trauma, but one of the most painful is what is called “moral injury.” Moral injury occurs when we do something that, in our heart of hearts, we know is harmful or wrong—and we just can’t face it. In many ways, it is more difficult to heal our moral injuries than to heal the harm we’ve received from others—because we are more likely to be ...
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February 22, 2020
I'm white.
Racism doesn't affect me, does it?
I’m going to take a moment to write about a fairly new venture of mine, which I’ve been calling Whole Heart Whiteness. It has arisen in the context of the work I’ve been doing in Baltimore (and soon also in NYC) around healing interracial injury and pain. Most of that work, by invitation, has been with people of color. Now I am realizing how important it is for me to be taking this vital and life-giving work back to white-skinned people.
Whole Heart Whiteness—a version of Whole Heart Connection especially for white-skinned people—is an opportunity to learn body-based skills and practices that allow us to explore important conversations about racism in a healing and ...
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