Building collective liberation: wondering about a protocol for healers
an astrocyte or a brain cell orchestrating neural connections….from medical xpress
(And by healers I mean manual therapists, energy healers, movement practitioners, movement healers, therapists especially somatic or narrative based, nurses, physicians, and anyone else doing care work for people’s hearts, minds, bodies that is grounded in a belief in the dignity and sovereignty of the individual as part of a larger collective community. If you identify with the word, then I am talking to you. The language I most like to use is ‘health and healing practitioners’ rather than healers, but that’s too long for a title.)
In 2013, a beloved friend and I were invited by local community acupuncture folks to design and then hold a workshop focused on collective ethics within an acupuncture practice. These brilliant friends wanted to find a way to support acupuncturists to get their necessary CEUs while also supporting folks to expand their idea of an individual practice to one that builds collective power. They wanted the idea of an ethical practice to move from primarily focusing on individual behavior to including practices of collective accountability. The question we asked in the workshop was this one: what is the relationship between your practice and the healthcare conditions of the town where you live? What is your ethical responsibility to those conditions?
Unsurprisingly, we started with asking the room to commit to two agreements before we began. The first was this: we know that racism, white supremacy, sexism, transphobia, ableism, poverty and other forms of oppression exist. We know that these things have impact. Therefore, we know that they have impact on the people who come to see us. We want our practices to be in relationship to the breadth of struggles, as well as the glorious breadth of resilience, that our clients experience. As an aside, I know/we knew that practitioners of color were far more likely to already be doing this in their work than white practitioners. I knew/we also knew that this wasn’t true for all practitioners of color and/or white practitioners.
The second was this: all healing traditions evolve as part of culture. When healing traditions shift from one cultural tradition to another, they continue to evolve and shift. Acupuncture evolved in China for thousands of years. US acupuncture is connected to that history but is also connected to the history of healthcare, both mainstream and not, within the US.
The workshop was powerful for me, as it was the first time I got to work with healers within a specific modality who were committed to a liberatory practice. It was also, like all things, only the beginning. It was informed by - and continues to inform - the work I have been doing, along with Cara Page and Anjali Taneja, on transforming the medical industrial complex. And it raised the question, which like many of you I continue to sit within, of how to teach practices, along with the specific techniques of acupuncture, massage, craniosacral therapy, chiropractic, polarity work, and so on, that build collective power, collective accountability, and help to heal our collective bodies as well as our individual ones.
Right relationship to the history of your practice. When I was part of the US Social Forum organizing in Detroit in 2009, we started doing - and asked all practitioners we worked with to do - something pretty simple. This was our protocol: when offering your practice to someone, start with these three things: describe your practice, name its cultural lineage, and name why you personally have felt drawn to this lineage. Tell it as a truth of what you know and what you don’t know.
And then we said: this is not something you do once, coming up with an easy answer that you just repeat at every session. Instead, this is something you live into. For the rest of our lives. Who are the people who lived lives that they then shaped into teachings that you have learned? What happened to them? Are their descendants still freely and easily practicing these traditions, on their own terms and supported by their own elders? Why did you feel drawn to this lineage? What about your life experience resonated with what you are learning? What are your people’s relationship to the people who created this practice? Was there harm there? Connection and mutual learning? Distance and not knowing? If there was harm, what are you doing to repair that harm? How are you working to make sure that, as you learn and are deepened by this cultural traditions and practices, the descendants of those who gave birth to this practice are also cared for and cared about, on their own terms and in their own ways?
What follows from this are about the kinds of questions you ask - and don’t ask - about the people who come to see you. This is a more tender and more nuanced conversation, so I am not going to offer suggestions here, but everything that shifts in changes in us in relationship to that first paragraph also impacts what we notice, see, can connect with when we are in a session with someone else.
Right relationship to all of the people where you live. This is a big one. Something I already referred to when talking about the ethics workshop in the beginning of this piece. When I first saw this visual of the Medical Industrial Complex, created by Cara Page, Mia Mingus and Patty Berne, there was a part of me that let loose with a large and happy sigh. Not happy because of the content: this is a visual of systemic violence and control. My parasympathetic response was about what this visual included, and how grateful I was to see it there. It matters that in the upper right hand corner, under the banner of “health,” is listed “alternative and natural medicines industry” and “Non-western and alternative healing.”
Every aspect of our wellness, our overall health, our experience of our own lives is also directly connected to historical and present-time violence and disregard. Again, how much you know this already or weave this awareness into your practice is directly related to how much your kin have been impacted by these histories and the present time. In the United States we have federal, state and local government bodies (if they not been defunded) focused solely on addressing racial and ethnic health disparities because they are that massive and that ongoing. There is more and more research coming out, proving what kin have been talking about around kitchen tables and meeting spaces for 500 years and more, that the impact of the smallest and largest forms of oppressive violence and structural inequality directly impacts our health and wellness. And that this impact, along with the resiliency and glory of our people, is passed forward from one generation to the next. The ACES study also shows, again what traditional knowledge has always known, that if we deeply and thoroughly love and care for our children, we will radically decrease the kinds of physical, social, emotional, mental and systemic struggles that many of us face as adults. This also means deeply and thoroughly caring for those who care for our children, from parents to teachers to everyone else in that circle around the youngest.
I know that folks reading this are not all from the US. Some of you live in places that have healthcare systems that are seen as part of the basic infrastructure of a community. Many of you who live in those spaces are watching as those systems erode into privatized systems. In the United States, there is a direct relationship between a person or family’s private wealth and their race. I am sure that for everyone reading this, US-based or not, there is some relationship between who holds wealth and who is part of the political or cultural or racial majority and who is not. In the US, it is very clear: Black and indigenous folks are the least likely to hold any “extra” wealth (or resources) and white folks are the most likely to have enough extra to buy things: like access to a bodywork session or any kind of care that is outside of health insurance coverage. This includes access to health insurance that actually covers the kind of care that they need.
As health and healing practitioners, we have a choice to make. If we are not attuning our work to this truth, in some way, then we are becoming part of the overall problem. Go to almost any bodywork or “alternative” medicine class or therapy program and, minus a few locations in the US, you will still see a sea of mostly white faces. The majority of health and healing practitioners and students and teachers in the US who are not part of multigenerationally community-based culturally-grounded lineages are folks with some amount (or lots of) social and economic privilege. It’s set up that way: the costs of training are often prohibitive and you need significant unpaid time to learn and then build a practice. Additionally, most of these programs are taught in a closed circle way: white euro-dominant curriculum, cultural frames, and learning styles are taught by white dominant teachers to largely white dominant student bodies.
Every single one of us deserves care that honors the dignity and sovereignty of our bodies and our kin. Every single one. When non-mainstream care practices are isolated into closed loops of student-teacher relationships and those student-teacher relationships are largely representative of those who have the most social and economic power in any given society, then we become part of the medical industrial complex. This is true even when we are doing our work because we believe in our practice’s ability to support someone in far deeper and/or holistic and/or respectful ways than what they can get through diagnostic-based and/or health insurance-covered care.
Questions to ask yourself as a health and healing practitioner: Where do you live? Who else lives there, in your local? What are the histories there? What are the economic or cultural differences among your geographic community? Where are the places where the garbage burners, dump sites, industrial zones, dumpsites into rivers and lakes, highways, and other polluting sites exist, either now or over the last two generations? Who lives there? Where are the gas lines being planned, the new mining contracts being set, the fracking zones being established? If you live on or near a reservation, how is this land being impacted by these industries, recognizing that in the present moment, a disproportionate amount of new environmentally hazardous technologies are being sited at traditional lands? What, as a result of this, are the healthcare conditions of the people, the neighborhoods, the communities that make up the interdependent web that is a village, town or city? Where is opiod use (and deaths), alcoholism and suicide most prevalent in your communities? Who are they impacting and why? Why? Why? How is stress related to displacement, poverty, state violence, relocation and more impacting the people and the communities where you live? How are YOU impacted by this, no matter who you are and who your people are? These are only a few questions. There are miles and miles more of them.
If you don’t know the answers to these questions, ask yourself why not. If you do, but your practice does not overlap with or is not in some way in relationship to these conditions, ask yourself why not? Notice where you are (or aren’t) protecting yourself. Again, this is dramatically different if your people are those impacted by these truths or if they are protected from them.
Who is doing what kind of work to shift these deep (and violent) inequities? Is there a way you can support them? Are you doing this work? Do you need support? Who are the healers and health practitioners who live near you, people you are already in relationship with or on the edge of relationship? If you are not already doing this work, can you organize a circle and be committed to sitting in these questions and looking for opportunities for right action for the next five, ten, twenty years, for the life of your practice and beyond? Who do you build relationship with to offer your services, making sure that those who you are supporting are determining how and when and why your support might matter? And again, if you are already doing this work, what additional support might be available for you?
Building collective power. This is a lot, right? It’s why we build movements, because complex systems are impossible to change individually. One of the things I used to hear in the movements I was a part of in the 1980s, by people of color and poor folks who were still fighting for their right to dignity and basic needs, was that in the 1970s, when the full extent of what it would take to change unequal power began to emerge, and when the full extent of what it looks like when systems fight back was visible and felt, a whole bunch of white folks who had been in those movements said, fine, I’m out of here. I’m going to go focus on helping (other white) people feel better about themselves - and thus were the human potential and alternative healing industries of the 1980s and on created. The folks who taught me this were also very clear that the world we want to live in needs us to do work on all of these fronts: within systems and communities and within the histories we carry at the cellular level.
So what does it mean to build collective power among health and healing practitioners? The work that Anjali, Cara and I are doing exists in relationship to these questions, not as the whole answer, ever, but as one part of it. There is no single answer, just as there are no single communities or set of conditions. I don’t know what the step by step strategy is; that is more than what a single person should ever envision. But I have some questions, some practices, some steps to offer, with the hopes that you reach out and offer back more. Some of these are about shifting our schools, their curriculum and who has access to the learning. Some are about who we imagine building relationships with in this work. Some are about a set of practices that we just do so that we are transformed within our work
I am taking this (and expanding it) from a piece that I wrote about bodywork as a trade. It’s something I keep thinking about. How do we become the practitioners who truly make another world possible? This is, of course, a conversation about organizing work, about strategies, about generations. These are only suggestions, only a start:
We understand that historical and generational trauma are real. We know that how systems (of race, of gender, of class, etc) operate on our bodies is part of what impacts our lives. We recognize as healers and healing practitioners that it is our responsibility to continue to learn and deepen our practice in attending to these truths with every person we work with. Our work is to support this knowing to deepen over time and to be part of what informs how practices emerge and deepen.
We recognize and lift up the cultural and historical lineages of many of the practices we use. We recognize and honor the many generations of individuals who have built these practices within their own cultural and historical contexts. We seek to be in right relationship to the ancestor-elders of the healing traditions we practice.
We recognize that there is no such thing as a “normal” body. We honor the right of each individual to name what healing or wellness or care means for them.
We advocate for apprentice-model learning for those interested in learning modalities. This might include working with schools and other training facilities to broaden their accessibility and cultural alignment. We do this in order to make learning more accessible and to make sure that when we are students, we are guided in a thoughtful and thorough process that is as much about who we are as practitioners as it is the techniques we use.
We advocate for, create and demand curriculum that can speak to the breadth of lives in our communities, that are articulate through word and experience about historical and generational and social and cultural and collective trauma and resilience, as well as individual and targeted trauma and resilience. We advocate for, create and demand teachers and teaching assistants able to teach these things.
We work to find ways, in the most concrete and local way possible, to ensure access to these classes by those who have not traditionally had access. And we also work to support those schools and classes that are traditional and culturally grounded for students for generations to come. This means we come up with economic and practical strategies around money and support and access that is about expanding who gets to be a practitioner, on their own terms and in right relationship to their own cultures and communities.
We work to collectively define sliding scale practices, practices around payment scales, and peer to peer collective learning networks. This includes being in conversations about wealth and the accumulation of wealth. Just as the body asks us, we ask each other in community: what is enough? And we ask, how do we ensure that all people in need of care have access to care that supports the dignity of their lives and beliefs?
We share an evolving code of ethics that is grounded in and aware of cultural and power differences on the role of health and healing practitioners within communities, on the impact of trauma in the practitioner-client relationship, and that center’s the client’s safety and liberation as well as the safety and liberation of the practitioner.
And finally, and most importantly, we build solidarity and common cause relationships with other people working in healthcare who might or might not identify in the same way that we do. This could include SEIU and the multiple nurses unions, with homecare workers through the National Domestic Workers Alliance, with UNITE and food service workers who provide nutritional care at hospitals and other care spaces, and with others.
I know that directly facing and being in relationship with the violence that exists in present time as well as the historical violence held within systems and bodies has its own impact on every one of us. The impact is different based on who are people are within these histories, but still, there is always impact. It’s why the things we have learned as healers and healing practitioners is vital to informing HOW this work rolls out. Slowly and, as much as possible, not in the over-ride pattern of retraumatization. This is a hard one: saying this also brings up conversations about white fragility, male fragility and so on. This is the process of discernment. The process of deep life long transformation.
I don’t know how to do this work without what is written above - and all of the things that I can’t imagine, haven’t thought of, and don’t know about. Just like with a bodywork session, I don’t know exactly where the work is building towards, although I hope it is a shift in pain levels, a greater sense of self, and an expanded capacity for life and connection. The work is the same when working with the collective body. I don’t know how to get to where we are going nor can I fully imagine it as my imagination is limited by what I have already experienced. But I do believe in practice; the steady accumulation of change over a period of time. That is how evolution works. That is how relationships are formed. And I deeply believe that that is how revolution happens.
And ps: if anyone wants me to come hold a workshop or convening on building collective ethics and accountability for practitioners, I would love to do that again.
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I am writing this piece as though it is to all healers and healing practitioners. This feels complex. For the last month I have been in a lot of conversations with craniosacral therapists - almost all of them white - as a result of the last piece I wrote about the origins of our field. In conversation, a lot of folks have asked what it is that we do to change things. A few people in particular asked about protocols. That is how this piece was born and, truthfully, I am writing it with part of my gaze on white and/or other forms of socially and economically protected folks since that makes up the large majority of these fields. I apologize to anyone reading this who does not feel included in the text or whose experience is not represented here. I think that building collective liberation as part of an ethical practice is deeply contextual to who our people are.
….If you liked this piece, feel free to buy me a cup of coffee.