We Heal for All

Collective healing is a practice for me.

I use myself as guinea pig to figure out what collective healing is: how to heal collectively-shared wounds that are alive in me. How to be in relationship with the world’s pain and changes. What this all looks like in practice.

Six years into this work, I’m reflecting on how this personal practice of mine has changed. What’s different about the way I go about doing things these days? What has evolved?

Four things stick out to me in particular. Here's a link to my essay about them:
https://open.substack.com/pub/wehealforall/p/how-has-my-collective-healing-practice?r=3zh3l&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web&showWelcomeOnShare=true

Sorting through where I end and another begins has been a lifelong school of practice for me as an empath. Add in being in relationship with a highly complicated, multifaceted, multidimensional world and this task is taken to the next level.

Do you have tea in hand? Perrrfect. ☕️

Because today’s piece is a journal entry I wrote some morning some amount of time ago. Working with the energy I had woken up with.

Hope you enjoy

Finished my manuscript away on retreat this past weekend! 🙌✍️ grateful to the for being such a perfect place to do so. Off to my editor!

What say you, oh dear potato? 🥔 🚢 🙃
Mindful eating is a practice that invites forward a gentle attentiveness to the act of eating itself—the texture of your food, how it feels in your mouth, what shifts happen in your body as you take it in.

It can also be an invitation to tune into the food itself. Can you sense the soil where this green bean sprouted from? Or the hands who picked it? Or, more likely, the machine that plucked it?
Read the full piece of Substack ➤ www.wehealforall.substack.com
Feeling this? Thank you!🙏 It'd mean a lot if you could like or share the post so more people can find it.

Systems thinking can feel so secular and reflections on the web of life so sacred. But really they’re one in the same.

Writing this post gave me an opportunity to reflect on that interconnectedness. Finding ways to be in relationship with the industrialization-ness of our times in life-giving ways

Check it out on Substack ➤ www.wehealforall.substack.com 🌿
Feeling this? Thanks! 🙏 It'd mean a lot if you could like or share the post so more people can find it.

What do you think? This is my take on the different types of healing out there. A high-level framework.

I like stuff like this because it offers form to something that can sometimes feel formless or murky. That something being healing.

It's a work in progress, no doubt, but I like it as a first stab at things. What do you think?

Healing comes in many forms. Often, a lot of us have a felt sense of what healing is, more than a working definition. We know it when we see it.

And then when it comes to collective healing, this felt-sense-knowing is taken to a whole new level.

In the latest blog on my website, I share a high-level map that charts out the wider terrain of healing that’s out there.

Check it out to see what I offer!

It's my hope that it can serve as a starting point for putting form to something that can sometimes feel a bit formless.
Check out the full piece on my website → www.wehealforall.com/writing

Or my Substack to chime in → www.wehealforall.com/substack

We need tools that help us to stabilize the new forms of consciousness that are emerging amongst us within society. Consciousness shifts due to our age of awareness. The type of collective healing work I’m advocating for here helps with this.

It is about providing ourselves and our communities with support to work with the normal emotional energy that we all feel during these times of change. To see ourselves as conduits of the system we are co-creating together, and empower ourselves as change makers, helpers and healers to use our own personal lived experiences as entry points to support the larger transformational process we are in as a collective.
yes, yes, yesss! I see collective healing as a social theory that helps make sense of the times, and as a set of tools (or practices) that help us put that theory into action.

This is a clip from my latest piece on Substack ➤ www.wehealforall.substack.com ch-ch-check it out!

It's part of a series of articles that asks: Why is the world in so much pain? What narratives help me make sense of it?
Feeling this? Thanks!🙏 It'd mean a lot if you could like or share the post so more people can find it.

Wanna go in on this? I'd love to hear what's alive for you. So do by commenting here or subscribing to my Substack to do it in a more intimate environment ☕️

With love for you and our collective healing, ~Liz

So, what do I make of all of this? Why is the world in so much pain? What does it say about the state of things?

As I zoom-out from my sense-making journey, I see the world’s pain being here for a reason and signaling to us that we have an opportunity to heal, and ultimately, transform. We just need the right tools to do so.
This is the closing piece in a series I did about the world's pain--seeking to understand it better, and try on different narratives to do so (namely narratives of progress and collapse).

I ultimately arrive at the need for collective healing. Which--surprise, surprise--for anyone who knows me or who has been following this work could have guessed.

Check out the article and full series on Substack ➤➤➤ www.wehealforall.substack.com Let me know what you think!
Feeling this? Thanks!🙏 It'd mean a lot if you could like or share the post so more people can find it.

Would love to hear your thoughts. What's resonating for you. Do so in the comments or in a more intimate setting by subscribing to my Substack ☕️ ❤️

with love, Liz

Lila celebrating different parts of her heritage! Traditional Berber clothes from her Algerian + Moroccan roots and an Easter egg hunt from her Irish-Polish-German Christian roots (Jesus was into egg hunts, right?! 😛😉)

🍄 From the mountains of 🗻

I'll be back. I'll be back. I'll be back 😆 🤞

But it’s not really the end; in some ways it’s actually a beginning.

Instead the times we live in are part of a larger creative cycle that all systems go through. Cycles filled with generative growth and abundance, followed by degradation and death. We can look to our forest friends for insight, seeing this same pattern amongst them. Uninhabited forests go through blooms in which they flourish, and then go through natural periods of decay in which they decline. This decomposition process, led by mushrooms and bacteria and bugs, helps return essential nutrients to the soil, setting up the conditions for the literal seeds of the next generation of tress to begin.

Is it possible for us to hold the times we live in, and the world’s pain, within this frame? Can we use our awareness to sense into what within the collective is no longer of service and therefore is falling away? Can we do so abstractly as we read news reports and witness suffering on the streets and in the world around us? And can we also do so directly, by exploring how this process, this dance is showing up within our personal lives as individuals?
This is what Turchin's work is inspiring in me. What about you? Anything here ring or ding for you in a way that is interesting?

If so, I'd seriously love to go in on it.

Leave a comment or subscribe to my Substack for a more intimate conversation ☕️ ➤➤➤ www.wehealforall.substack.com

Feeling this? Thanks!🙏 It'd mean a lot if you could like or share the post so more people can find it.

With love for you and our collective healing, ~Liz

In Turchin's book “End Times” he goes on to describe, “Historians have long noted that there is a rhythm in history. “Golden ages” of internal order, cultural brilliance, and social optimism are followed by “times of trouble” of recurrent internecine fighting, declining high culture, and social gloom.” He lays out how cliodynamics is the first to quantitatively confirm that this rhythm exists.. and that yes, we (America) are currently in a phase of political disintegration. But, optimistically, there are things we can do to soften the fall.
Such interesting work, esp for the macro-view, sociologically-minded amongst us. Check out my full piece to get a recap of Turchin's findings + my reflections on the cool parts of knowing that some things are dying (seriously, it's not all doom and gloom).

➤ Substack! www.wehealforall.substack.com

Feeling this? Thanks!🙏 It'd mean a lot if you could like or share the post so more people can find it.

Wanna go in on this? Hit me up to discuss what you're feeling-seeing-sensing by commenting here or subscribing to my Substack to do it in a more intimate environment ☕️

With love for you and our collective healing, ~Liz

It is helpful to see the ways that the world is not falling apart. There is a part of me that needs this. To, as Max Roser puts it, know that change is possible.

As a development practitioner I see this firsthand in the programs and projects I am part of. People making their way out of poverty. Less babies dying from basic things like diarrhea. UN leaders shifting their leadership styles to be more conscious and relational. Not to mention, digging into data grounds me. It helps me orient my sense of things into concrete findings. With data science tools I can have a discerning eye towards the slant of a news article and how it presents data. I can unpack the methodology used behind a statistic to see how credible it is.

But it still does not add up to me… how can we live at a time of such supposedly great global progress, as well as a time of such collective pain? If we are in an age of global prosperity—or, at the very least, global progress—then why does it not feel like we live in one? Roser’s and Rosling’s critiques of media literacy and education are helpful, but do not strike me as complete. I do not think it is as simple as people being ignorant or needing more data tools. I think there is something deeper happening here.

Not to mention for every statistic that shows that we’re doing better as world, I can find one that shows the exact opposite. We are doing better in maternal health, but seriously failing in terms of global inequality. Air pollution is getting better but waste production is getting worse.

Which takes me down a rabbit hole of researchers and thinkers who argue that the reason why the world is in so much pain (my words, not theirs) is because we live in a time of societal collapse.
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Read on and chime in here ➤ www.wehealforall.substack.com

just another day at the office

happy spring, y'all ❤️

Mmm.. [no caption needed] 😛

When thinking about this in terms of awareness, and that we as conscious individuals can shift our awareness to be in tune with different things, I hear here this divergence between what people feel within their own personal spheres—their home, family life, financial health—and what they feel outside of their little mushroom—how the outer world feels, what is happening in their city, neighborhood, surrounding communities; what is happening in the world at large. One would think that the aggregate of so many individual experiences of well-being would result in a similar outcome: a sense of collective well-being. But instead it seems to be the opposite. While individual bodies, so to speak, are doing well, the collective body is clearly not.
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Join me on my Substack to keep reading, www.wehealforall.substack.com

Upon re-reading the heading that I just wrote, a voice within me immediately pipes up, “Hell no the world isn’t better off than we think! How can you even say that?” This part of me—the fiery activist— gets right up in my face. Her hands are on her hips, head cocked to the side. She is clearly confused and offended.

As she does so, I am reminded of the breathtaking number of issues that need our attention—human trafficking, runaway climate change, Indigenous self determination, extreme inequality, nuclear threats… It also brings to mind questions from a decolonized lens like “from whose view is it “better”?” and “according to what timeline?”

But then there is this other voice within me that steps forward too. I see her wearing glasses with her hair tied back. She is a bit more tempered. This other voice—the social scientist—says, “Yes, that is true. And yet look at these numbers…” This part of me invites me into an exploration of the world from the lens that things aren’t that bad. Or, aren’t as bad as some of the feelings I have about things make me think, anyways. So I begin my sense-making journey here, from the proposition that the world is doing better than I think.
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Keep reading on Substack www.wehealforall.substack.com

Go ahead, it's okay 😛 🌳

Celebrated this little love's first birthday last month. So much fun being her mom and all being together. She had been ready to come Earth side for quite a bit, so now that she's here it just feels so good! Relishing these slow, full days ❤️❤️ definitely an endurance game, but so very worth it

Excited about this one…🔥🙌✍️ re-purposed parts of my manuscript for this series, excited to share w you guys. Link in my bio to my Substack!

oooohh 😃 🌱

🔥💫 www.wehealforall.substack.com

caring for the world like she's my baby 🌎 😆 safety first!

visualize.visualize.visualize 🤩 📚 🙌⁠
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This is a lil mockup book cover design. So cool to start to see my beautiful baby-of-a-book come to life! 🌿🙌⁠
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On this super special today, I'm calling on my loved ones and community to help me raise money to bring her to life 🙏⁠
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I would be so touched and deeply grateful if you considered supporting me.⁠
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All funds will go towards the nuts and bolts of the self-publishing process -- like hiring a pro to design the actual book cover 😎⁠
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Thank you so much in advance for considering donating ❤️ I'm really feeling the community spirit within all of this, and would be so honored if you joined me in this chapter of bringing We Heal For All to life. ⁠
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Donate and learn more here https://www.wehealforall.com/book-fundraiser
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