I’ve been working on and am so excited about the new Writing to Heal class I’ll be teaching starting in January (Want to be the first to hear when enrollment opens? Click here to join the waitlist).
In my previous blog post, I said that healing is not only personal but also work that supports the values of human rights, equality, and a healthy ecosystem. I want to clarify what I meant. It's so easy to just say that self-help is the way to heal the world, and then turn away from the collective. So much of the language of healing has been co-opted by a neoliberal philosophy that diverts our attention from the whole.
But I truly believe that the way we approach healing has everything to do with how we approach others and the earth. To understand how healing and the larger collective go hand in hand, we need to look at the history of healing.
This essay is long, but I hope you'll read it; the discourse around healing has been distorted for such a long time that it needs to be examined in some detail.
A Strange Attitude Toward Healing...
First, I want to start with an experience I had in my mid-thirties that baffled me:
When I was deep in my healing process, I had a conversation with an older woman, a wonderful writer, editor, and mother, I very much admired. I told her that I was healing and searching for wholeness. I remember so well that when I said that, she replied, with a kind of chortle of dismissal, “Is there really wholeness?”
At the time, I didn't really say anything, and I continued to pursue my path of healing and wholeness. But I noticed there was a real divide between the intellectual circles I’d been raised and schooled in and the fields I was exploring: alternative wellness, trauma healing, and spirituality. (Spirituality, notice—not religion, which is often dominated by men.) In the intellectual circles I grew up in, even the words "wholeness" and "healing" were almost considered suspect, naive. They were associated with unsophisticated thinking, a kind of "woowoo" quackery, and all of these terms were themselves associated with women. Interestingly, women themselves often went along with this viewpoint, too.
I myself felt conflicted because I really wanted to be respected and valued in that intellectual world that I grew up in. But I also knew that the work of healing and wholeness was essential. So why did people I respected poopoo it?
It was only when I started to read about women's history that I understood why the work of healing has been taken less seriously.
The Long History of Healing and Wholeness..Yes, Even Shapes Can Be Controversial. Circles vs Lines...
In her wonderful book, The Chalice and The Blade, Riane Eisler tells us that in prehistoric times, the symbol of a chalice—a circular vessel that contains, that holds, that is round like a woman's body and round like the Earth—had a prominent place in religious ceremonies. These societies were not strictly divided between male and female. They were much more egalitarian, and they often worshipped in a polytheistic, earth-centered spirituality.
I think of the Hopi Kivas I saw on my trip to the Southwest last year, or of Knowth, the 5,000-year-old mound I visited in Ireland, or of the 30,000-year-old circular cave paintings associated with fertility and women's reproduction that my daughter recently saw in the south of Spain. Circles, sexuality, fertility, art, spirituality—they were all part of a sacred system. There was sky, earth, fire, water; the many parts were all understood as necessary, supporting one another.
According to Eisler and many other scholars, at a certain point, usually with the advent of metal—this very strong substance forged from the earth—a more male-dominated society began to come into being. That was partly because of the plow. The metal blades were heavy, and they needed male force, and also the force of domesticated animals to plow the earth. Sheer physical strength became more important. Over time—and we can see this across society—the image of this vessel, the chalice, the circle, became forcibly replaced by an image of a blade, a projectile, a phallic image that represents strength. Those societies were becoming much more linear and hierarchical.
So we live in a world where we have all inherited—at least in part—linear, hierarchical ways of thinking. A world where this is better than that, where this is divided from that. Where dominance and physical strength are seen as the greatest power. If we look at our churches, our temples, they're reaching up to a single god who is nearly always portrayed as male. And we live in a society that in a million ways, both explicit and often subtle, does not respect women, wholeness, or healing.
When we talk about healing and getting back to wholeness, we’re talking about a return to a vision of connection in a circle: connection with equality, not hierarchy; connection with the earth; connection with our physical bodies that are not seen as dirty, sinning, or unclean, but rather as sacred vessels, chalices through which new life emerges.
That image of the chalice is not exclusive to women. We are all part of this community. We all have our place in it.
But for literally millennia, there has been a very concerted attempt to dismiss that wholeness and healing work, that work that was centered in, though not exclusive to, women, women's bodies, and the earth.
The Long History of Demonizing (Literally) the Work of Healing
In the aftermath of the black plague, when the population of much of Europe had been decimated, the kings and rulers wanted to increase the population to enhance their power. To do this, they wanted more babies to be born. It's no coincidence that at the same time, traditional women healers, the people who knew about women's bodies and fertility, were persecuted as witches. Tens of thousands of women were hung and burned.
Cut women off from knowledge of their own bodies, and the power of the state grows.
As the medical profession became codified, healing became even more denigrated. Medical schools were established, and only men, of course, could be doctors. Men with a certain amount of education were the holders of knowledge, and the individual needed to forgo her own understanding of herself and yield to the greater knowledge of the authority figure.
By the way, what happened in the immediate wake of the systematization of the medical practice? Child mortality, infant mortality, women's mortality giving birth—all shot up enormously. Now, of course, those numbers have gone way down, and I am deeply thankful for modern medicine—more on that later! But the more unequal a society is, the more the health indices become unequal. So now in America, because of growing inequality, life expectancy has recently gone down, especially for people in less privileged positions. There is more infant and maternal mortality...
And what does this have to do with you?
Even those of us who are comfortable with the idea of healing, even those of us who work as healers ourselves are working against this long history and in a system that itself is reluctant to see things in terms of egalitarian wholeness.
You might be thinking about your own healing—your healing from a personal trauma, your healing from illness. How does understanding this history help you?
Am I suggesting that you shouldn’t go to the doctor? Absolutely not!
There is now a polarity between those who talk about healing and those who have faith in our scientific medical establishment. But that polarity itself is born from this same history, this history that pits self vs other.
We need science, we need experts. But we also need to know and understand ourselves, our own stories, our own bodies and histories and wholeness. We need to move beyond this polarity and remember that all the fingers of our hands, all the branches of our expertise are important, both self and other.
I want to make space where we can honor the work that has been done in that scientific tradition, but also bring back the much older human understanding of healing as wholeness that goes beyond gender, beyond culture, beyond this historic moment.
I want to go to experts for their expertise, but I don't want to hand over my authority to them. Each of us remains the keeper, the holder of our own stories, our own wisdom, our own body, our own healing, our own wholeness. We can gather the information that experts, scientists, and doctors offer, while also tapping into this ancient wisdom of deep listening to our own essential connectedness, wholeness of body and spirit.
And when we do this, we are not only healing ourselves, but also healing whole systems, whole ways of thinking and being.
Healing: Ourselves, Others, Democracy, and the Earth
We are coming out of hierarchical systems that are threatening to destroy democracy, to destroy human rights, to destroy our ecosystem. We are putting the power back in a circle of understanding—within our own bodies and spirits, within men and women, within those who have a lot of money and material goods and those who have very little.
We are remembering ways to care for the earth that do not depend only upon the blade. We are remembering ways to care for our bodies that do not depend solely on the knife and the poison, and ways to care for our grief, our stories, our traumas—ways to care for ourselves as we care for others that bring us into a circle of understanding and connection.
How we see ourselves in relation to others, in relation to our body, matters; whether we see a hierarchical relationship with the head on top and the body subservient; whether we believe in leaders who believe that force is more powerful than human rights; whether we believe that the body and the earth are separate or connected—all of this is essential for our healing. Whether we see our healing as isolated or connected to the healing of others matters.
There is so much to explore on this topic.
Join Me In My Upcoming Writing to Heal Class
I’m excited to delve into this and so much more in my upcoming Writing to Heal class. In the class, you will have the tools to understand your own story, to take your healing into your hands, even as you learn from experts.
You will be given practices and be part of a community that believes in the power of wholeness, even if we have experienced loss and trauma, illness and disappointment. Even as we still sit inside of that pain, we will see ourselves with compassion and understanding. We will tell new stories even as we honor the old and explore where we come from and what we have experienced. We will explore and practice how to heal and grow, and also how we can help others heal and grow.
We’ll start together in mid-January. I'll send more information before then. Click here to join the waitlist and be the first to know when enrollment opens (and get an exclusive bonus. 
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with much love,
Nadia