It is tempting, even for the lovers of vulnerability and podcast-length voice notes, to reserve their healing for the behind-the-scenes moments. My friend (an Aries, and so independent and high-reaching) often repeats the proverb, “Many hands make light work.” She usually reminds me of this when my sneaky hyper-independence tendencies kick in. Whenever she offers it into the space, we almost immediately surrender to it, letting ourselves witness the village mentality at work, even though London raised us. It is proof that what many of us are actually calling in is support, witness, and a togetherness that isn’t connected to status or profit — a necessary exhale from the age of self-reliance.
“What many of us are actually calling in is support, witness, and a togetherness that isn’t connected to status or profit — a necessary exhale from the age of self-reliance.”
Healing has become a word thrown around in online spaces, often with good intention, but still often hyper-fixated on the individual load of this mammoth task. There are many avenues to cater to our wellbeing and more people are open to the balm that is finding community spaces that nourish not just our social life, but also bring the nervous system out of fight or flight mode altogether and into ease.
In a world where online communities are commodified and the word itself has become overused or equated to the labor of having to fill your cup first, it’s important to rediscover what community can be and what it can offer towards our collective healing. We reached out to experts to get to the heart of what healing in community looks like and the effect it can have when meaningful intentions are explored and maintained together.
What does healing in community mean — and what are the benefits?
Our healing potential is expanded when we join our personal efforts with collective ones. Nahid de Belgeonne, author of “Soothe: Restoring Your Nervous System from Stress, Anxiety, Burnout, and Trauma” and somatic movement educator, tells us that the nervous system is designed for connection — while we can regulate alone, deeper repatterning happens when we join together.
“Our healing potential is expanded when we join our personal efforts with collective ones.”
“Being in community gives the body new evidence: that you don’t have to hold it all yourself, that you can be both vulnerable and safe, that you can rest without the world collapsing. The benefit isn’t just support, it’s nervous system expansion, your capacity grows because you’re not doing it in isolation,” explains Nahid.
Antoinette Cooper, MFA, founder of Black Exhale, collective trauma facilitator, and author of “UNRULY,” also sees the importance of healing in community as a way to remember safety within the body at both an individual and collective level. Cooper’s work with her non-profit encourages her to affirm that “healing in community is an indigenous practice. We have always needed one another, not just for parties, funerals, or cookouts, but for the vulnerable work of healing.” In creating these community spaces, Cooper holds compassionate space to be seen and participate in healing without the risk of being retraumatized.
“While we can regulate alone, deeper repatterning happens when we join together.”
A 2021 study focused on urban American neighborhoods facing economic hardship found that community resources contributed to minimizing stress and facilitating healing. In the study, social support through extended family or wider networks proved to offer a path to coping and healing. In fact, having access to social cohesion in a neighborhood proved to lower the effects of PTSD in comparison to neighborhoods that lacked it. For Cooper, personal and collective healing are deeply intertwined: “When we heal in community, we remember that individual healing also serves collective liberation.”
It’s important to consider that healing in community invites an awareness of the many different aspects of healing that may need to occur in a community — the generational, societal, environmental, systemic triggers that may impact members of a community differently based on historical violences or events are all a part of the journey. Cooper suggests that coming together to embrace healing is an interruption to isolation and serves as a step back to indigenous practices and a step away from pervasive individualism.
What can healing in community look like?
There are several ways to participate in and prioritize community healing. Whether it’s joining a journal club or attending somatic release classes like yoga or meditation, you can find an option to suit your personality, local environment and availability, and daily routine.
Other activities to consider for collective healing are:
- Support groups
- Group therapy
- Art therapy
- Dance therapy
- Sports and martial arts
- Spending time in community gardens, walks, or hikes
Experimenting with gathering spaces until you find one that feels right is always a good idea. Nahid says that you’ll know if a space feels aligned when there is no need for performance, but instead safety is the dominant feeling.
“You’ll know if a space feels aligned when there is no need for performance.”
“From a somatic perspective, healing in community isn’t about fixing each other, it’s about co-regulation. When we sit with others whose nervous systems are steady, our own system gets to soften,” adds Nahid. And so, our bodies will know it has found its safe place by the way it responds to the environment and nervous systems within it.
This is how we participate in the healing of ourselves and others, just by being in aligned spaces. “The community then becomes a nurturing mirror where someone can access something they perhaps cannot see in themselves, or cannot articulate, or cannot feel except in the presence of another beautiful being on the journey with them,” adds Cooper. In this way, finding healing space is less about everyone being on the exact same page or path to healing, but more about a shared commitment to the same outcome of feeling comfortable, safe, and entitled to showing up and sharing what feels right into the space.
How to ensure that your community space is genuine
Some of the most important aspects of communal healing are spaces that are inclusive, intentional, and genuine. Without this, we risk superficial attempts that undermine the purpose of joining a healthy, healing space or community, which may potentially harm individual ideas about what is possible in community, or their place within it. To avoid this, Cooper suggests that spaces should be “trauma-informed, culturally grounded, ancestrally and historically sensitive, and understand that healing isn’t linear.”
“Some of the most important aspects of communal healing are spaces that are inclusive, intentional, and genuine.”
Aadya B., LMSW, an oncology & palliative care social worker, expands on this idea, highlighting that genuine collective healing is possible when we embrace three things: empathy, discomfort, and inconvenience. For Aadya B.’s work in holding support groups for cancer patients through grief and healing, these aspects are crucial for arriving at the level of depth that gives rise to transformative healing.
“I have observed in more recent conversations about healing, that when we try to stay safe, we avoid subjects that could potentially cause some kind of conflict or discomfort within each other, not realizing that conflict is the pathway to deepen intimacy and connection — especially in a group setting,” explains Aadya B.
Aadya B.’s time working with patients from a range of backgrounds and generations has shown her that often, as facilitators holding space for community healing, conflict is needed as much as comfort is. Her sessions prove that there is a necessity to be as brave as we are soft in community healing spaces — especially as healers and facilitators — in order to reach a place of depth, ask the tough questions, and face discomfort head-on. “We can be containers for each other, if we are open to it,” she adds.
No matter how challenging healing may feel, the benefits of healing in community are abundant and allow a deeper understanding of self and role in the wider community. It can be a path towards spaces that are genuine, open to the many nuances of healing, and offer the nervous system wider avenues to co-regulate and settle.
“No matter how challenging healing may feel, the benefits of healing in community are abundant.”
Healing in community is possible, as long as we remember and practise what Aadya B. senses is a forgotten truth, that “genuine community can be created anywhere, as long as one is determined enough.” 💖
Online platforms like Substack have provided virtual spaces for authors, activists, and organizers to create healing communities that invite us to consider the topic further. Here are a couple resources I recommend:
- You don’t need to “fill your cup first” to seek or be in community by Ayesha Khan, PhD of Cosmic Anarchy
- Kazu Haga: Building “Beloved Community” and becoming healers of collective trauma. Episode 451 from the Green Dreamer podcast by Kaméa Chayne
Where have you found communities for collective healing? Do you have any resources to share? We’d love to see in the comments!
Amara Amaryah is a Jamaican essayist, author, and wellness and travel writer born in London. Her life writings are interested in voice — often voicelessness — and reclamations of identity through definitions of home. Her freelance journalism explores health, joy, self-knowing, and more. Amara now travels and lives slowly in her favorite places around the world. She writes the “Life Is In Love With Me” newsletter.
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