Healing is Effortless

It takes effort to deny, repress, and ignore unpleasant feelings. In colonial society, we’re not used to understanding feelings as guidance. On the contrary, we might be over the “boys don’t cry” thing but we still have internal voices telling us to: “compartmentalize”, “don’t cry, get angry”, ‘suck it up”, “don’t show your belly”, etc. There’s also pressure, thanks to the self-care industry, to stay relentlessly positive in order to manifest your life desires and avoid unpleasant experiences like illness. Yet our inner wisdom persists in offering up the full range of human emotions for us to experience, whether we like it or not. And every one of us knows the release that a good cry, scream, or exhaustive workout brings. We demonstrate to ourselves all the time that the first effortless component of healing is feeling.

Tsalagi Knowledge Keeper Denise Linn differentiates between feelings and emotions. A feeling that lasts for more than 20 minutes is an emotion, she teaches. It’s a significant point, even though a 20-minute cutoff might not apply to every feeling for every person in every situation. But it’s important to understand that in a healthy emotional life, feelings are in flow. They come and go, rise and fall, in a spontaneous, healthy response to life events, including when they activate ancestral memories.

Even if you have no literal memory of traumas suffered by Ancestors or injuries acquired in other lifetimes, you can still feel the charge of a triggered wound. In his latest book, The Message, Ta-Nehesi Coates talks about the grief he felt and the crying he did on his trip to Senegal where he toured dungeons built by slave traders to imprison, rape, starve, torture, and break the spirit of Africans bound for the grueling, and often fatal, Middle Passage. His description of this grief serves as a perfect example of how ancestral experiences can still be physically felt in our bodies. Even though we’ve all experienced some degree of our ancestor’s joys and agonies, we don’t necessarily appreciate the power that unhealed ancestral traumas have over our lives. And even when we do, colonization, through one process or another, has either obliterated our cultural and spiritual healing knowledges or made them difficult to access.

Nevertheless, our ability to empathize with the suffering of each other across the room, around the globe, or across millennia is evidence of one of the many ways we are all connected. Entangled across space and time, we have the capacity to feel each other’s’ joys and sorrows (unless we are numbing ourselves to avoid our own pain). Remarkably, through feeling our pain together, we can catalyze its collective release in the way that drawing curtains allows the light in.

Katsitsawaks Diane Hill (Kanien'kehá:ka, Six Nations of the Grand River) is the founder and Director of Ka'nikonhriyohtshera Learning Center & Healing Lodge. I’ve attended several of her multi-day healing sessions, one of them about a year after the passing of my eldest son from congenital issues. In circle on day two, my co-worker, a young man with visible disabilities, spoke about sensing his Somalian mother’s shame and guilt at the idea that her son’s physical limitations were somehow her fault. My co-worker also felt his mom’s resentment that the needs of her son were so great. And above it all, mom lived in fear that her son’s physical vulnerability would make him a target for cruelty and violence. The mother’s pain was the son’s guilt and shame, as he felt like a never-ending burden. His tears streamed.

I readily identified with all the thoughts and feelings my co-worker ascribed to his mom. His story activated my shame, resentment, and guilt as they related to my deceased son. My tears flowed.

In sharing my story, I triggered a 20-something Latindigenous woman who had been recently diagnosed with a debilitating illness and wasn’t likely to survive past age thirty. She wondered how her mother, who had overturned their lives in Bolivia and left a supportive family to seek medical miracles in Canada, would bear the death of her daughter. This young woman’s story triggered another in our circle, who triggered another, and on and on. Despite the uniqueness of our stories, all eight of us were eventually in tears, feeling each other’s pain along with our own. Katsitsawaks has often observed how every circle, regardless of how it is initiated, where it is located, or the purpose for which it is convened, attracts those people who are perfectly positioned in their life journeys to trigger each other’s wounds. Spirit at work?

In my teachings from a variety of nations, my curanderismo studies, as well as my own research and experience, I have learned that feeling is the language Spirit speaks. Luckily, Spirit knows our stories are interpretations, perspectives of experiences, shards of memory often sewn together by assumptions, inaccuracies and imagination. Hence, Spirit is more interested in feelings evoked by experience than the stories we tell ourselves. Whether the story is true, imagined, or a combination of both, the feelings evoked are always, inevitably true.

Inside or outside of a healing circle, the stories we tell might be different but the collective energy field of shared grief, shame, guilt, resentment and sadness, is so much larger and more intense than our individual fields. It becomes the sacred space in which collective consciousness undergoes spiritual transformation. Personal healing certainly contributes to human evolution but collective healing accelerates the process exponentially.

When we empathize together, we attune in measurable ways. Our heart rates, brain waves, skin conductivity, photonic output, etc. harmonize within and without. In syncopation, discordant noise drops away and the crisp, complicated rhythms of which we are comprised emerge. We may start out in the circle crying together but end up laughing in a spontaneous and simultaneous emotional release. This is a path we have all walked in our unique ALP journeys.

As happens, Knowledge Keepers across cultures have understood for millennia that the sharing of painful feelings speeds up the healing process for all. Hence, the variety of community-centered healing ceremonies and practices of cultures around the globe. Healthcare professionals with new technologies are now attempting to quantify the effortless syncopation process, thereby validating timeless wisdom and Indigenous knowledges. Hopefully, the research will challenge colonial culture’s insistence on exceptionalism, White supremacy and the illusion of separation. It may even grow trust in humanity’s capacity to hold space for healing our relationship with the planet.

With the restoration of natural rhythms (which we feel as release), an expansion of consciousness occurs. A new realization lands. Initially, it might be that we find a gift encoded in our challenging experience. My son’s very existence certainly taught me more about myself than I otherwise would have learned. Or the post-release realization may give us new insights into our inter-beingness and expand our awareness of the nature of reality.

Every feeling, when felt, invokes a revelation that expands our awareness of reality and it is effortless. We feel it to heal it, and the process happens faster when we feel it together.

Have I made my case?