Looking back, looking forward, and being right where you are…

Happy almost-New Year!

As I stand at the edge of 2026, enjoying time with family and also working on my upcoming Writing to Heal Class, I’ve been reflecting on how much healing itself depends on an ability to look back, look forward, and be right where you are.

What do I mean by this?

When we are ill, when we are grieving, when we experience trauma, something in our narrative breaks. The path we are on swerves. To come back together, we need to create coherent narratives, and to do that, we need to look both back and forward from a perspective that itself is centered.

In traditional Western medicine, it looks like this: you develop symptoms or you have an accident. In order to be diagnosed, you need to understand where you are now and how that is a manifestation of something that happened to you. Once the symptoms (what is happening now) are understood, the cause (what happened in the past and perhaps is ongoing) is diagnosed. And then with that diagnosis, a remedy (a map for action for the future) is prescribed.

In Western medicine, this diagnosis is seen as primarily mechanical, biological, or chemical.

But there are other layers to the process of diagnosis and healing.

In his wonderful book, Coyote Medicine, Lewis Mehl-Madrona, a Stanford-trained medical doctor and Native American healer, writes:

Before a person can be healed, one medicine man told me…, he or she must answer three simple questions: “Who are you?”; “Where did you come from?”; and “Why are you here?” 

"Who are you?" is asking about the present. But we can only understand who and where we are now if we also look back at the past, where we come from. And the question "Why are you here?" brings together past, present, and future: what brought you here, what is your purpose, and what will you do next.

When our sense of self breaks in illness, grief, or trauma, coming back into a coherent story is essential for healing.

Scientific studies show that writing and understanding our story actually leads to a better-functioning immune system.

Writing into our story gives us a space to experience the full range of emotion so that emotions don’t get stuck.

And for those with trauma, it helps us go into those stony, silent places and begin to bring back language and the possibility of change.

Not all writing is inherently healing—some just repeats old patterns. But with the right methods, we can break through those patterns and come into something new.

In my own healing from chronic illness and from trauma, I’ve become more aligned with myself and the world–not despite the challenges but because of the path I've made through them.

This work asks us not only to examine ourselves, but also to get outside of ourselves, to see ourselves from a larger perspective and to enter into new relationship with others, the world, history, and spirit.

Understanding and healing our story can be difficult, but it's also some of the most rewarding work we can do, and is largely what makes us human.

Join me for the upcoming Writing to Heal Class.

We start in mid-January and will go through the material together; students will also get lifetime access to all the teachings and practices!

The class is designed both for those healing and for therapists, doctors, teachers, caregivers and those who are helping others to heal.

I'll be opening enrollment for my Writing to Heal Class next week **only to people on the waitlist**– and there will also be a special bonus only for people who sign up from the waitlist 🙂 Join the waitlist here or via the button below.

These are precarious times we're living in, but it’s all the more essential that we believe in and practice the human act of listening, caring, meaning making, and healing. We do this for ourselves, and we bring this work to others.

I wish you good last days of 2025 🙂

with love and appreciation!
Nadia