What It Takes to Heal: How Transforming Ourselves Can Change the World

by Prentis Hemphill

When something that seems innate is taken from you, the pain of its loss tells you its shape.

If we are to meet this moment, it requires that we find our way to one another and risk confronting the past. That we acknowledge the harm done and do the challenging and rewarding work of learning to relate to one another in new ways, expanding our sense of who we are and who we are related to.

When we choose to deny that interconnection by othering, by seeing some of us as less worthy, we refuse to submit to a clear and urgent lesson from our universe: When we don’t care for all of us, what is allowed to happen to me will eventually be done to you.

A culture of individualism doesn’t require us to consider that as our power grows, so too might our responsibility to others.

There is no real intimacy that does not begin with listening.

The law of entropy tells us that everything eventually falls apart. Despite our best efforts, our good intentions, and how much we’ve healed, whatever we build—our relationships, our organizations, our families, even the society we have come to know—can and will break down.

Going out into the streets to protest is not a substitute for building relationships or making the close-in changes in the places you live, work, and worship. If the next day’s actions do not leverage the power we summon in our openings, our calls to transformation, we get swept back by the force of things as they already are.

Practice can be small, subtle, but its impact can still be significant. It is the steady revisiting and refinement of our efforts. Any change we cull doesn’t just arrive; it is made in the seemingly mundane and quiet return to practice, when no one is looking, a fire that catches from kindling.