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

by Prentis Hemphill

Trayvon was innocent. A young man caught in the crossfire of something set in motion a long time before him.

It’s hard to heal when you’re still being hurt. There was something disingenuous about trying to fit each client’s emotion neatly into personal therapeutic rooms when what they were feeling was never only individual. We needed, I thought, to be willing to step outside of these rooms and into the world, in a way that involved and maybe implicated all of us.

What are we going to do about all this grief?

We are not far from that eruptive moment. It is still calling on us to change. The world as we know it is in an ever-escalating state of collapse. Much of what has seemed solid—institutions, cultural mores, global power relations, and even our weather patterns—is decaying or morphing into something unfamiliar and potentially devastating.

Feeling and the Body: To embody change means that our declarations are more than good ideas, and our actions become more than performative. The change we seek unsettles our patterned ways of being, and our truest values become what we practice.

Things Fall Apart: Our greatest challenge is to not allow our ruptures and breakdowns to become new sites of trauma for one another. We need skills to navigate our conflicts and crises with groundedness apart from the reactivity of our times.

Without new visions we don’t know what to build, only what to knock down. We not only end up confused, rudderless, and cynical, but we forget that making a revolution is not a series of clever maneuvers and tactics but a process that can and must transform us. —Robin D. G. Kelley, Freedom Dreams: The Black Radical Imagination

Visioning is not easy. We are born into other people’s visions for us and for the world. From the moment we take our first breaths, we are surrounded by expectations and futures imposed by our families, our communities, and our society: visions about who we will be, what we will do for a living, who we will marry, and how many kids we’ll have.

my instructor, Liu Hoi-Man, had said that an obstinate and uncomfortable desire to love and be loved had led her through her own healing journey.

I did not really believe that I was worth loving.

“I want to know how to love,” I said. “I want to be able to give love, show the love I feel, and I want to let it in when someone says they love me back.”

And it made me wonder if somehow, maybe in ways I couldn’t anticipate, naming it had made it more possible.

Through the years, I’ve learned that, more than anything, presence is a kind of permission for honesty. My work is not to imagine that I can bear the weight that someone else holds but a commitment to not look away.

What was I ultimately fighting for if not a world where I could sometimes be soft?

Healing and social change are not, in fact, unrelated. To pry them apart is to exacerbate the issue. They are inextricably linked, braided together, interdependent processes of transformation. To ask if we can heal at the same time that we engage social change is, to me, like asking if we can love at the same time we make change, if we can make music or eat food. How could our personal development ever truly be at odds with social transformation? How could it happen without it?

I don’t remember and neither does she if we are shaking or crying or still, but it is terror that is coursing through me, and everything in me, barely even formed, is already shattered.

Mutuality, relationship, is an exchange, an interface with unknown outcomes. It is a reminder of and encounter with the infinite. We usually consign this kind of union to the romantic, believing that the specialness we sense in another person is unique to the one we love. We don’t always know that rich relationship and deep connection are available without attraction or desire. That each person possesses as much potential magic as the ones we already love.

In my pep talk to myself in the car outside the diner, I kept saying, I choose what to share, I choose what I respond to, I choose when to leave.

I think, perhaps because I am a Black, queer, nonbinary woman and have researched history enough to see that the foundation for this trust in institutions was always tenuous at best, I have felt less destabilized in these periods of upheaval. I have always been more cautious about where I place my trust.

Because of how we’ve seen people use the power we give them, we assume that power is only domination and exclusion, not generosity and protection. The test of power, how we show what guides it, is in how we wield it. To me, the root of any power is in the body, specifically in our ability to be embodied in a way that organizes our cells and our self to act out a vision.

But power is not only an individual’s expression. It is first felt in the alignment of our own bodies, then multiplied and amplified in our syncopation, in our coordination with one another. We cultivate power in ourselves, and we build power when we work together.

We know somehow that romantic love can do it, can fuse our lives to another person’s, but it’s a magic we’re told is reserved for the one. Queerness says different.

After a while, I took my anxieties to my supervisor, who explained to me that empathy was a way of being with another person and allowing what they are holding to touch you.

Fixing, after all, is just another way to stop feeling. With empathy I found more feeling, not less. More connection, not less.

Malidoma Patrice Somé, the late spiritual teacher and author, once said of conflict that it is the nature of a relationship asking to deepen.

We don’t always pay close attention and so we may not understand how good we have become at these habits and what effect they really have in our lives.

We have practiced, whether we realize it or not, who we are right now.

When we fall in love with practice, we are less prone to the frustration and despair that come from repeating behaviors that don’t work for us.