AN ENVIRONMENT FOR ALL TO FLOURISH
“Indigenous groups have long linked an individual’s health to the health of their interconnected relationships–both with their neighbors and the natural world. African villages have long used community rituals to help heal and prevent stress and pain. Traditional Chinese medicine and Ayurveda in India have long emphasized the relationship between a person’s body and their surrounding environment. Long before academics coined theories about the social determinants of health, people around the world were practicing its central tenet: our environments can make or break us” (Hotz, 2024, p.6).
As I’m thinking and witnessing in real time, I’m living into the question of where psychotherapy fits in this moment. How do I interweave the political and ancestral when I know, as those that have come before me, that healing, growth, and flourishing are interconnected. This gallery is a living altar of movement and my questions. Here, I document (a bit) the beauty, grief, rage, as honoring the lineages of resistance that have shaped us all. May this sanctuary remind me, hold my questions, and honor the ancient knowing that individual health has always been inseparable from collective wellbeing.
beauty in the streets
Call me cheesy. Call me what you want. I sat. I meditated. I prayed. I laid my worries, fears, and tears at my altar asking for guidance in these times. I was reminded of a book on my shelf that I bought about four years ago, a Choice of Weapons by Gordon Parks. I’m following my heart, my curiosity, and the unseen that guides me. Here’s a bit on this experiment of being present with life.
I’m constantly learning and re-learning that there are many ways to show up. As the quote above (from Julia Hotz’ The Connection Cure: The Prescriptive Power of Movement, Nature, Art, Service, and Belonging) reminds us, an individual’s health cannot be separated from their environment.
While I recognize the terror, fear, rage, and more people are experiencing in these moments, that week via group chats and witnessing so many people galvanize whether through protesting, running errands for communities impacted, checking in one another, it just showed me not to forget the power, beauty, and importance of community.
Mi mamá me enseñó a luchar.
My mom taught me to fight.
home
for the sensitive revolutionaries
Remember, remember, remember, remember…
Today, I see again that storytelling can be a form of resistance,
that beauty can be a way of fighting back.
The ones still holding on to beauty aren’t escapists.
They’re also the ones in the streets,
creating beauty through resistance in many shapes, textures, and flavors,
finding it in collective action.
This sanctuary I’m building is not a retreat from the world,
it’s a place to resource our engagement with it.
If you think beauty is frivolous,
please look again.
Beauty is protest.
Beauty is solidarity.
Beauty is showing up for one another.
