Creator’s Note: I immediately regretted making the commitment I declared yesterday as I navigated my way through an immensely full, Regenera-typical day: morning meditation and Brazilian jiu-jitsu, house cleaning, group time, several relating spaces, calls, and dinner clean up. So here I sit, facing 9 PM CET, and reminding myself that there is no barrier to me sharing - that what I publish here can be an unfinished, in the moment, mess.
In the organizing documentation for Regenera, one of our principles for engagement is that we take our triggers (pick your language: trauma, parts, emotions, reactivities, wounds) to healing processes.
We have had many internal discussions about the sensitivity of “requiring” healing (that healing can imply that there is a problem that needs to be solved; that a person is not perfect as they are, in any minute, in every way; that a person cannot be in community until they are fully “healed”; that healing something means that it disappears forever), which I’m sure I will come back to in a further piece (I’m already eagerly anticipating a collaboration with Emma about the middle ground between healing and integration).
But what continues to emerge is a group-wide commitment to healing and integrating the parts of ourselves and the experiences that live within us that stand in the way of being fully ourselves, present in the moment, and available to and for the gifts we bring into the world.
There is so much more to come here about our healing work, as we hold different forms of healing processes for each other on a near-daily basis, and I am sharing here two things we are experimenting with to directly support the healing process itself.
Both of these experiments emerged from the following: after a particularly vulnerable and revealing healing process, one Regenera collaborator went to the person who had held space for her, and shared that she was scared of the impact that knowing all of the big, messy, potentially dark things she had shared during the process would have on their relationship. As we discussed how to be with this in the group, these two possibilities/experiments emerged:
Healing Aftercare
Before entering a healing process, the person who will go through it can share with their spaceholder a “menu” of aftercare, aka the things that they might want to receive after the healing process in order to integrate. These could include wanting to be physically held for some amount of time, to have a verbal or written review of what happened during the process, to put their feet in the grass outside, to have a check in the following morning. Creating this type of menu allows for the endless unpredictable paths that a healing process could take, and creates a defined set of options from which the person can choose without exerting too much energy or decision-making power.
Defined Containers
In traditional healing/therapeutic contexts, there is a clearly set container. I enter a therapist’s office, I receive their support/services for a set amount of time, I complete my side of the exchange (generally financial), and then our interaction is complete. Living in community, I may take on multiple roles for and with someone else within the span of a couple of minutes, potentially toggling between being their friend, collaborator, healer, and taskmaster at rapid speed. In order to create the safety through which another community member can bare their deepest wounds, and also trust in the power of my bond with them, we are experimenting with the possibility of declaring at different intervals: “I am now with you in a healing capacity,” and then upon the completion of a process, to take off that identity, and re-declare that I am with them in my capacity as their friend or community member.