YOH: healing is a cycle
The day after tentatively announcing this Year of Healing (YOH) project, I saw this tweet and it hit so hard that at first, I thought, “well, this idea I’ve been sitting on for a year is a total waste of time and I shouldn’t even try to make sense of anything just yet.”
But from my years of going to therapy (almost a decade now) and working towards healing, I don’t think the process is ever “this or that.” We do not experience trauma and then one day after processing it, we are cured from any ailments it brought. I see healing as a cycle not dissimilar from reincarnation. My personal story and perspective includes all of the traumatic events I have worked to heal from. The hope is to not be actively triggered by these past experiences and the reality is that these memories are always with me somewhere in the bodymind that continues to interact with the world.
The idea behind YOH is that collective trauma requires collective healing. The goal here is to get us all to look at this metaphorical knife in our side, because I know so many of us are still in denial and cannot wrap our minds around the breadth of this tragedy.
It is my experience that the trauma and fears I faced in February 2020 are not the same fears and trauma I face in February 2021. They might have the same cause or they might even be so interconnected that they look identical, but I know at least some level of healing has occurred over the past year.
Healing is not a lump-sum, it is a journey. And although it’s true that covid-19, systemic racism, and corrupt government still plague the hell out of us, I don’t believe we can’t begin our healing process. The sooner we share how this year has affected us, the better off we’ll be.
And if we were to go into a hospital for a knife wound and we were losing blood, wouldn’t doctors give us blood to heal from that symptom of the wound before removing the knife? Then we would be better off to survive the removal, cleaning, and stitching process. @showupforthis makes a very good point and I do not want to negate it, but I felt compelled to write this to dispel the myth that we’re either healed or we’re broken. No, in fact, we are always in a process of healing.
The goal of YOH is to start this process together. To enter this second year under covid-19 with reverence and awareness for how the year before affects us still. It is my hope that our generation does not become grandparents whose PTSD continues to ail our families. A great generational curse is happening right now and we can start dealing with it in realtime.