Resistance is Healing
Healing is a creative act. It transforms suffering through understanding its sources, and through arts of succor and spaciousness.
The legacies of slavery and colonialism conspired to make us all small and divided. Healing as resistance allows us to open back up, to gather what has been scattered, to form new connections, and to affirm our lives together.
Okwui Okpokwasili
Healing from past traumas
Creative ways of healing are spiraled. They involve working through ongoing harm in ways that are not limited to the terms of the harm itself.
Embodied practice
The body become the first site to reclaim our sovereignty.
Embodied practices, rhythmic practices, movement practices are ways of reawakening the imagination to stretch beyond the limits.
Rememory
Our mind also does not operate mechanically. It operates in ways that connect across the past, present, and future.
Toni Morrison calls this Rememory Work. It is a way to reclaim those who have been ghosted, silenced, disavowed, and bringing them back for our attention and recognition.
“I used to think to think it was my rememory. You know. Some things you forget. Other things you never do. But it's not.
Places, places are still there. If a house burns down, it's gone, but the place--the picture of it--stays, and not just in my rememory, but out there, in the world.
What I remember is a picture floating around out there outside my head. I mean, even if I don't think it, even if I die, the picture of what I did, or knew, or saw is still out there. Right in the place where it happened.”
Spaciousness
We suffer when we are starved of opportunities for loving, consensual, and compassionate connection, whether from other people or to ourselves.
Relationships, rooted in reciprocity and belovedness, are the condition that makes justice more than an idea, but also a feeling. They reform internally within ourselves—to our own bodies and our experiences—and allow for us to become more spacious beings.