Thinking about Healing Justice
I wrote this for my patreon back in June 2020:
I’ve had the honor of attending a 6+ month course with API Chaya (learn more and donate to this amazing org doing tremendous work to heal and resource the community through numerous programming and individual advocacy for situations of sexual assault, domestic violence, and state violence https://www.apichaya.org/donate-online) called Natural Helpers https://www.apichaya.org/community-organizing where community members come together every other week to learn, discuss, and create safety plans around topics like state violence, human trafficking, sexual assault, child sex abuse, prisons, disability rights, queer rights, and much much more.
We discussed healing justice and how it looks in the communities we come from. To be honest, I don’t see it in our western medical or education systems. If anything, our current systems perpetuates harm other-ing those who aren’t seen as “normal”. Again, I’m constantly asking myself diverse or deviation from what? Abnormal from what standard? How would our definitions of health, wellness, and success change if it was defined for all body shapes and abilities, all skin colors, all brains and ways of thinking, learning, and doing? We have terms like justice because we endure injustice. What if both terms could be eradicated and our systems treated everything and every body like it was sacred just as they show up in that moment?
I learned the term Healing Justice after meeting a group of mostly BIPOC healers at Resmaa Menakem’s 2018 psychological first aid and cultural somatics training (now called somatic abolition) at Bastyr. We built community over the next couple years and when the pandemic hit, we brainstormed and listened to black and indigenous folx lead on how to organize and provide mutual aid to our communities. When CHOP (Capitol Hill Occupation Protest) was established in 2020 in response to George Floyd’s death and police violence, I quit my part time and steady income job at a pediatric clinic to help create and maintain healing space and services to whomever wanted to show up and whomever had the capacity to offer. Although this 206 HJ crew fizzled out, these interactions created a basis for me in how I’m playing with and practicing healing justice.
Cara Page and Kindred: Southern Healing Justice Collective defined the term Healing Justice in 2007 as “ healing justice...identifies how we can holistically respond to and intervene on generational trauma and violence, and to bring collective practices that can impact and transform the consequences of oppression on our bodies, hearts and minds.”
Most folx that enter my practice are weary and exhausted from the harm of healing practitioners and the medical system. As outlined in Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha’s piece A Not-So -Brief Personal History of Healing Justice Movements: https://micemagazine.ca/issue-two/not-so-brief-personal-history-healing-justice-movement-2010%E2%80%932016
”Everyone I know longs for healing. It's just hard to get. The good kind of healing. Healing that is affordable, has childcare and no stairs, doesn't misgender us or disrespect our disabilities or sex work, that believes us when we're hurt and listens when we say what we need, understands that we are the first and last authority on our own bodies and minds.”
Healing justice is for everyone, everything, every body and every non-body. Healing justice is done in community. Healing justice doesn’t have an expert. Healing justice listens, reflects, affirms, and loves all where they are at.
I want to leave you all with something a client reminded me of yesterday as he stepped into what he was calling his higher, wiser, elder self. He said he learned from reading Robin Wall Kimmerer’s Braiding Sweetgrass (one of my personal heros and fellow moss lover!) that in indigenous communities, there isn’t a punishing of fear but a healing of fear.
What would a world look and feel like without punishment and resources were put towards healing?