Small, Big, Collective - Levels of Healing
Healing happens every day without us noticing, many times we don’t even have to think about it. We cut ourselves on a piece of glass and the skin heals itself, We go to bed exhausted from a stressful day and wake up energized. We loose a friend or a pet or a relative and we grief for some time and at one point this being will become a part of a sweet memory of our life. Healing happens all the time in small and unspectacular ways.
Then there are the bigger wounds: accidents, divorce, death of a spouse or child, physical, sexual or spiritual abuse, personal and family traumas. As holistic dance pedagogues we clearly define the area of clientele that we work with (no psychiatric diagnosis) and yet as we are all interconnected beings, we are directly and indirectly effected by these wounds. Unresolved pain is more often than not passed on from one generation to the next.
Even further: we are in a healing process with Mother Earth. There is and desperately needs to be a healing process as a species to physically, psychologically and spiritually clean up the mess we as human beings have caused this planet and its inhabitants. By separating ourselves from the natural world, claiming to be „above“ other beings, such as animals and plants we have abused and destroyed so much. As a single person, you might feel that you have not done that, at least not intentionally, and yet these collective woundings are imprinted in our collective unconscious. „Ecological amnesia“ is a term a psychiatrists use to describe the latent depression that we in this western world often experience.
The personal is always intertwined with the collective. Many of us experience levels of despair or depressive phases in our lives, where we feel hopeless, overwhelmed and in pain. These feelings might be triggered by a personal event in your life, but they often fall into resonance with a deeper pain or a longing for a more meaningful and healthy life. In a way we fear stillness and rest, because we might finally fear this pain and anxiety about our planet and the natural world, once we slow down. So as a culture, it has become clear, that we as a species need to heal the wounds of this earth just as much as we need to heal our own personal wounds.
How do we do this?
Where do we begin?
Will it be enough?
I don’t have answers to these questions. But what I can do is:
I can follow my path, I can follow my intuition and I can follow my heart and do the best I can.
„We cannot solve our problems with the same thinking we used when we created them.“
Albert Einstein
Photo: (c)He Shao Hui
(c)He Shao Hui
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