Integrative Healing
Integrity must be learned. We’re all only born with so much. Integrity, integration, integral, meaning whole. Integrative healing. Wholeheartedness.
Oftentimes, people of color, at least in the States I can say from direct experience, don’t have the most ideal role modeling, simply because we don’t always have the traditions set in place.
Much of this depends on family heritage, and where, indeed, we arrived from–and when.
It’s Obama time, ideas are being recycled, new rituals are taking place. We are becoming a nation of one, worldwide. You can, for the time being, type “how to” in any major search engine and get a ballpark idea of what and how to create things, from the ground up. Rites of passage in the form of bits and bytes.
Still, there is the idea of tribe. Real-time warmth. Family. Oftentimes our matriarchs and patriarchs, if indeed they figure into our lives at all, either accept or reject their babies into the fold. This, too, has a lot to do with upbringing, tradition, even habit.
If we’re not initiated into our tribes and we’re cast away, stolen, spurned, neglected, or even accepted into a fold that doesn’t have the right ideas in mind for caring ritual, doesn’t have the models, then what?
Personally I find solace in the idea of family of choice. The LGBT community has taken the idea and run with it, but you find it in various cultures over time. The Harlem Renaissance, even the expats in it. Pre-Civil Rights era and of course in the thick of it, when the idea was new. Feminist circles.
White, too, is a color. Statistically, a lot of folks on welfare are white. We don’t address this idea often enough. Lots of crack addicts are white. Substance abuse busts up tribes too, regardless of color, and with or without the role modeling.
Incest survivors, survivors of abuse, so many scattered tribes. A disapora of motherless and fatherless children who all the while have birth mothers and fathers.
The mama bird kicks the seedling out of the nest. The recreational drug abuser parties with her little ones in the clan in the interest of thinking she’s doing what’s good and best for them. The lioness chases her cub away and bans it to the other side of the plain. We all have to fend for ourselves eventually. A blessing of sorts awaits, in the banishment.
Solutions in mind? The first, of course, is to survive.
Taking oneself from surviving to thriving is an elegant and stately idea. An idea that can be stitched up, patched, band-aided, and healed, one day at a time.
This is truly integrative healing.
My symbols in mind, of this integrative healing, at this time have to do with self-expression. This is the best idea I know up to now. Truth heals. Love with good intentions heals, the best of all possible solutions is a restoration to wholeness. Finding your right tribe can heal. This can take a lifetime. You could also spend your whole life as a tribe of one.
Holistic Healing Practices also come to mind, a part of but not the whole of the integrative healing process.
Thoughts wash up, and heal, survivors all, we are. Everyone on this plane of consciousness is a survivor. We made it out of the warm womb into the brisk cool air of life, today, and made it, yes, another day above ground. Just because we can.
Hand-fashioning, stitching, embroidering the fine and intricate patterns and designs of a life beyond livelihood, a fine work of art that is called quality of life, what a brilliant and blessed journey. I am grateful for it–bruises and bleeding and all.
And healing. I find the process of healing to be a beautiful one. Our bodies do it naturally, a million forces inside us run to rescue when there’s a ding, a scrape, an “anti-antibody” invader. The process of healing, and of support, is an innate one, from the inside on out.
How we make it look is a lifelong lesson. What doesn’t manifest naturally takes time to make itself known, and takes some learning. That is why mistakes, too, are gorgeous and delicious.
Revel in your mistakes, and integrate them. Relishing in that is a joyful and ever-new ritual.
What a beautifully-designed sight you, and your process, and I, and my process are, and will become.
