Several months after his passing, my father visited me to make amends for some difficulties in our relationship (Traveling Light, p.144–152). One of the things he said was, ” I am free from my body but not the patterns I created while I was in my body….I guess it’s one reason why you take care of stuff before you go….it just can’t go with me to the lighter place.” He went on to tell me some things about his life that I never knew. I ended up stepping into a larger space with him, one where I could recognize the connectedness of all humanity, see my father as a person, and forgive him.  Coming to this place together was a healing moment.

My father and I experienced healing through forgiveness, but that did not mean that I was finished with the process. I still needed to address my own behavior––patterns that I created over my lifetime. Human consciousness is a giant interconnected web of energy threads weaving together our past, present and future. Although other peoples’ behavior helps to create our behavior patterns, we are always responsible for our own.

The healing process has many paths. The field of psychology, for example, has begun to acknowledge that there is a limit to the effectiveness of “talk therapy.” We are not just our brains. We are also our bodies. We can begin healing by uncovering the mental and emotional roots of trauma, but we must also address the storage of their energy in our physical being. In her book The Wisdom of Your Body, Finding Healing, Wholeness and Connections Through Embodied Living, Hillary L. McBride, PhD uses research, personal narratives, prompts and questions to help individuals reclaim their bodies.

A book that addresses healing from cultural wounding is My Grandmother’s Hands, Racialized Trauma And The Pathway To Mending Our Hearts And Bodies, by Resmaa Menaken. We are living in a racialized society. That means that every one of us––both the oppressed and the oppressors––is carrying historical trauma. As the oppressors, white people are uncomfortable hearing that. But avoiding our PTSD does not heal it. Mencken gently illuminates these histories going back thousands of years, demonstrates how they present in our lives today, and offers numerous activities for recognizing and releasing that energy from our physical being.

Community can assist in healing. In her book A Child Of The Indian Race, A Story Of Return, Sandy White Hawk describes the personal journey to regain her self, her identity, and her community after being removed from her tribe as a child. After receiving a vision, she developed a ceremony for adoptees and people fostered out to be welcomed back into their tribe. While words of support and guidance are used, an immediate source of healing is the dancing circle and the drum. “The drum can go to a place in your heart that words cannot.” I have often experienced this at pow-wow––when the drum starts and reverberates through my body, my tears are freed.

All healing, whether it is mental, emotional, and/or physical, eventually requires that we re-enter a space broader than our own small lives. As Ronnie Wall says in Grandmother Dreams (p. 17-20):  It helps no one to be stuck there. That’s when you have worry and angst and that adds up to stress….It’s about gathering the common threads into a quilt that covers everyone. It’s about understanding that we all stand on common ground. And that’s the Earth.” The Earth is a ball of energy spinning through the Universe, moving in the same place where all of our ancestors past, present and future are singing us Home.