We need community healing for our personal healing

Our culture is holding us back on our individual healing journeys, we need to create more community healing. Recently, I’ve had some deep shadow work come up, and have felt more intense trauma responses than I have experienced in a long time. When I was triggered recently, I remembered how hard it was to do a lot of my deepest healing work without the community support I needed. When we heal our trauma, we have to actually, as brave explorers, go back into the original trauma to heal it. You can imagine, with all of the severity of trauma that there is out there, how scary that must be. And when I didn’t have it before, I thought it was a me problem, but I recognize now that our culture just lacks enough community support in general.

To go back into our darkest and hardest experiences, face the voices of our deepest fears, we really need to have an abundance of resources: specifically we need to have people who are safe and healed enough to be able to hold nurturing, grounded, and safe space for us to go back into the traumatic experience and help bring us through emotional cycle back to regulation and safety. We also need these people throughout the whole cycle of getting through it, not just for an hour here and there.

The fact we don’t have these community healing space is a systemic failure to our spiritual journeys. Those people that will be able to go into those traumatic spaces practically alone, will be very few. Additionally, it keeps us all in collective unhealed trauma, which then to me, creates a lot of the “issues” we see in the world. Of course, we may be in a place to afford a therapist or a healer, but even if you can, usually it may be maybe 1-2 times a month? Or an amount that is really not enough to go into those traumatic places. Further, in western tradition a lot of the things that would help us go into our trauma, like connecting with your body, are absent in a lot of healing settings. And even when it is there, it may not be safe enough for us to go into our trauma. This is why I so believe it is important for us to bring back our land-based ancestral healing practices, which incorporate healing the body along with the spirit.

I hope that this conversation about the cultural failure to provide enough community healing resources helps you access more gentleness to yourself and your pace in your healing journey. We’re really not meant to do this alone, we’re meant to do this in a village, and whatever pace we move without having the tools we need, is brave and perfect. I also am day dreaming of ways to create more community healing spaces.