Why I don't want to heal... I want to be alive.
I wanted to call this blog post ‘why I think healing is bullshit’ maybe I still will but let’s begin here for now. This feels big and has been sitting in my body as a tension for a long time. A friction in my bones. It’s been getting bigger and bigger since I finished training as a somatic therapist and started to market my services.
Market something I believe should be free and accessible to all, except I also have to survive this oppressive system. It’s more than that though, this has been a reckoning… what is healing? Who has defined the parameters for healing?
My simple answer to those questions that in the Global North or West whichever name you use healing is actually defined by conforming. Conforming so we can be good cogs in the capitalist machines. Conforming so we ignore the protests of our bodies often defined as symptoms of poor ‘mental health’ so we can do as we are told.
The word healing comes from the Germanic heilen meaning ‘to make whole’
Most of us believe that we are broken because we struggle to conform, to be ‘healed and whole’. We seek out therapists, medicine, books, thought leaders, the latest movement trend in a desperate bid to heal ourselves so we can be good little capitalists. Find a partner, buy a house, have babies, be successful at work perhaps even have a wider impact or create a legacy.
We are led to believe we are broken because our disobedient bodies and over sensitivities prevent us from achieving those capitalist survival goals. So we set out too ‘work’ on ourselves.
But what if we have it the wrong way round?
I write that question and I already know that we do. I know from my own journey through therapy, my desperate bid to collect up all of my broken self put it back together but without the difficult parts. The parts that makes others uncomfortable, the parts that apparently make me over sensitive or weird and often difficult.
‘We just want you to be happy’ my family says, ‘have you met someone yet? Why do you feel so responsible? You will want children when you meet the one. Sometimes you’re just too much, Ami.’
I had therapists who would also mirror my family, constantly trying to steer me back to the path that I needed to follow in order to be considered healthy, not difficult and a fully optimised human being.
If that is the definition of health, then why does my body actively resist?
Currently the definition of health is fitting into capitalism, a system that is based on extraction and harm of both planet, other human beings and our non-human kin. It’s based on individualism, apathy, disconnection and othering of anything and anyone who doesn’t conform. It’s based on a insidious fear of death.
The other day I saw on social media that the UK government is investing £50million on finding a way to deflect the sun to slow global warming. So I assume capitalism can continue business as usual… THE SUN they want to deflect the sun. The source of life on earth. Our fear of death, of contraction, of lack of progress is leading us towards extinction.
We have come so far away from our aliveness.
We can not heal without aliveness, we can not heal under capitalism, we can not heal in our apathy, we can not heal without connection, we can not heal while we harm ourselves, each other and our home.
And thats why after years of trying to heal, after becoming a therapist & facilitator I can not and will not promote healing (website overhaul incoming) instead I call in ALIVENESS.
What is aliveness?
It’s a widening, a fullness that is always in motion, it’s not conforming, it’s not making myself less sensitive, it’s becoming more sensitive but strengthening my resources so that I can widen enough to keep letting life and all it’s complexities and paradoxes move through me. It’s deep grief, deep love and deep joy.
It’s feeling the hum of the trees and the stones, it’s giving myself to the ocean, its dancing, its expansion and contraction, its presence and its trust in the unknown and the mystery.
It’s what if? (Thank you Libby’s dream circle) it’s the fool stepping off the edge without looking, fully alive and open to possibility, love and connection while knowing they will always be followed by suffering and loss.
It’s being difficult, it’s resisting, it’s becoming the divergent voice and embodying disobedience.
It’s saying ‘this is not it, let’s imagine something else?’
It’s remembering we are a part of a wider ecology of life, we are not the centre of anything but we are everything.
I wonder if people will want to work with me if I am promoting aliveness, disobedience and the unknown?
I wonder if people will book me if I refuse to violently align with their inner critic, the voice planted by oppression and capitalism?
I wonder if people will want therapy that doesn’t promise feeling better but instead feeling more alive?
Many many frictions are alive in my body as my values, embodied knowledge and aliveness call for me to be fluid and step into the unknown. I am experiencing a constant tension against the voice that wants me to conform so badly, so we can survive.
All I can do is seek vitality. Feet on the earth, back against a tree, leaning into connection, hands in soil. Painting, dancing, writing, grieving. Keeping my heart open. I wrote the below after a movement practice.
My heart isn’t big enough yet, my skin not wide enough to hold all the pain, all the joy, all the truths that are relentless paradoxes, that leave me in endless confusion. All I have is trust, trust in the unknown. And so I practice so my heart, my skin and all of me can keep breaking open, over and over so I can keep widening into the river of me that life moves through so that maybe one day my banks are wide enough for it all.
I will close with an invitation… What does aliveness mean to you? Where do you experience vitality?
Take time to let this sit and land, maybe reflect more on what you have been made to believe healing is.
Sending love and solidarity as we step into the unknown.