Image by Bishnu Sarangi
The Earth and all beings
are always moving towards healing.
-- Joy Harjo
As a youngster I had an ongoing visualization, an interior story, you might say, complete with characters, dialogue, and action. It was my private, internalized, bedtime ritual.
The central plot involved the dynamic between illness and health. Someone, usually me, was nearly at death’s door and needed help. Physicians of all kinds would arrive, with miraculous abilities to dissolve suffering. What the illness was and how the healing unfolded was the action, and this changed from night to night. The healing could include incantations, ceremonies, potions, and whispered secrets. My pillows played roles along with the stars I could see outside my window.
There was no one with whom to share this unfolding screenplay, and without critics, editors, or commentators, it proliferated itself with extravagant beauty and detail. Nothing was uttered so as not to draw attention to myself; all the activity was within me.
In this inner theater of my childhood, I was always readily healed of terror and anxiety. My lungs would ease their grief-laden hauntings so that I could sleep. With my vision directed inward, strabismus disappeared, along with loneliness. Who is to say I was not actually visited by kind, compassionate physicians from another dimension who, recognizing my embryonic being, were teaching me about Regenerative Health?
Lessening Affliction: Assured Outcomes of Well-Being
I had within me, in my shadowy nighttime, an entire hospital for the afflicted with assured outcomes of well-being, calmness, integration, inspiration and, best of all, play. There was a stage in this clinic with delightful performances in which pillow animals, tree limb shadows, and star beings relieved suffering through song, dance, and stories.
What a remarkable embryo and child I was and still am. She is the one who found purpose and joy in meeting and lessening affliction. The characters in my visualized dramas modeled the art of attunement, deep listening, and prioritizing the lives of children.
It is only recently that I recalled the clinic visions of my childhood and saw that they were precursors to what I consider to be my most significant legacy, the implementation of Regenerative Health for a Climate-Changing World. This is what I refer to at the beginning of this book when I say that I remembered my future when I remembered my embryonic existence.
My prenatal self knew I would eventually manifest, at exactly the right moment in time, what she, as a daughter of Gaia, perceived as the greatest need for humanity—a design for Regenerative Health. It is my premise that such oracular remembering is available to everyone. We can remember our future by reclaiming our Original Brilliance.
Regenerative Health: Health as a Birthright
Regenerative Health for a Climate-Changing World is a systemic shift in our understanding of health and health care as well as how health care is delivered. It restores authority for health and vitality to the individual and to communities and families. It confidently stands on the foundation of the relational, compassionate health care that is everyone’s birthright.
As Rupa Marya and Raj Patel say in their book Inflamed: Deep Medicine and the Anatomy of Injustice:
“Studying the ways in which systems interact to create health or illness is the leading edge of a revolution in the understanding of medicine. The reductionist understanding of disease in singular terms, such as one gene encoding one faulty protein or one drug targeting one receptor, can get us only so far. We evolved as systems within systems: There is nothing singular about us.”
I developed Regenerative Health for a Climate-Changing World to meet this Code Red moment because I refuse to accept the death sentence proclaimed by corporations and political and government leaders. Instead, I listen to the voice of my oracular, prenatal self and remember my destiny.
Resiliehnce: We Are Biologically Programmed for Evolution
I have spent my entire life preparing for this moment. I know we are biologically programmed for evolution. Despite evidence of an abdication of this physiological truth, I continue to have faith in humanity and its resilient potential.
I reference Uncle Angaangaq Angakkorsuaq of Greenland, who has been on a lifetime mission to melt the ice in the heart of man. He told us at the Climate Change and Consciousness conference I organized in 2019 that it was too late, and no one was coming.
Yes, it is too late, and no one is coming. This is the mantra I have lived with as a child, and here I am fighting for the future of humanity even after decades of it being too late and no one coming to meet the urgency of our climate crisis.
It is because of my own life and what I have seen that leads me to the conclusion that trauma survivors are some of our best, first responders. Our lives have prepared us for these times when it is too late, and no one is coming. Our accumulated wisdom is now of the highest value.
I stand with others like Rebecca Solnit, whose book A Paradise Built in Hell speaks to why and how we can trust a groundswell to prioritize the physical and mental health of our families and our communities. I have seen this over and over in my service to the families of veterans and the families of neurodiverse children.
I know what it means to fight with nothing. That is exactly how I have survived. And that is the wisdom that will stand me, and all other trauma survivors, in good stead as we build this groundswell to meet accelerating climate disruption. In many regards I have written this book to mobilize this awareness and to finally realize the dream of my young self.
When hidden populations step forward—like the parteras and curanderas of Puerto Rico when Hurricane Maria struck and no one came to help their people—we mobilize the powers of regeneration despite the data. That is the mystery we invoke.
Committed to a Vision That Is Within Reach
I am committed to a vision of Regenerative Health for a Climate-Changing World that is within reach. This is my response to the failure of so-called leaders, the powers that were. We can do this by becoming Regenerative Health practitioners ourselves.
We are meant to meet this threat with the innovative intelligence that is innate in our nervous systems. We are, in this very moment, moving beyond trauma, even while it seems we are in the thick of it. We are, as a collective, breaking through to the wholeness of connection with the wisdom of the Earth. We are doing this at the grassroots level. That is what gives me hope.
"One must banish oneself from an empire of institutionalized medicine built on injustice and build a better way of healing, along with others committed to the same vision." -- Rupa Marya and Raj Patel
Humanized Medicine: Uprooting the Origins of Suffering
Real-life stories of Regenerative Health in action in families and communities go unreported even though they surpass in value and drama what media reports and films portray. No movie star romance, no prince or princess anywhere in the world has a story greater in beauty and significance than the stories of how people, with their own hands, voices, and intelligence, turn affliction, pain, and suffering upside down.
These breakthroughs to wholeness do not discount the benefits of medical technology for critical care. They do, however, frequently make that technology unnecessary.
Though governments systemically betray and dumb down human potential, humans defy that manipulation, particularly when faced with health challenges. Those with the courage to look within rather than be pulled out of themselves discover what humanized medicine means.
As Angela Davis says, “Decolonizing is training our gaze on the origins of suffering and grasping it at the root.” That is what Regenerative Health is designed to do.
What does all this have to do with embryogenesis and the secret of resilience? Everything.
Healing in Community: Innate Resilience
The art of telling and listening to our stories
reinforces our humanity.
-- Fuifuilupe Niumeitolu
The oral tradition has always been the central medium for the transmission of human culture and knowledge. To bring back storytelling as a form of essential knowledge is in itself a deep medicine. -- Rupa Marya and Raj Patel
We are all meant to be leaders. I have the great blessing of witnessing human transformation. I participate in the lives of people who feel challenged, threatened, confused to the point of complete disorientation, hopeless and destitute, bombarded and demoralized by overwhelming events and experiences.
My observations and my own journey teach me that the innate capacity for resilience can be thwarted, but it cannot be destroyed.
Copyright 2023. All Rights Reserved.
Adapted with permission of the publisher,
Healing Arts Press, an imprint of Inner Traditions Intl.
Article Source:
BOOK: The Secret of Resilience
The Secret of Resilience: Healing Personal and Planetary Trauma through Morphogenesis
by Stephanie Mines
After the Art of Compassion helped Stephanie Mines resolve her own trauma and awaken her innate resilience, she began to incorporate it into her clinical research. She discovered that the map of the body she learned from Burmeister sites correlated with the Chinese Extraordinary Meridians or Rivers of Splendor, which develop prenatally. She found that subtle touch on these sites in combination with trauma resolution amplifies neuroresilience, enhances creativity, restores motivation, and heals the fragmentation and disconnection associated with trauma and shock.
Sharing her personal journey as a Wounded Healer, Stephanie reveals not only how to unlock the secrets of resilience for individual healing but also how embodied resilience will help us heal our wounded planet.
For more info and/or to order this book, click here. Also available as an Audiobook and as a Kindle edition.
https://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/1644116081/innerselfcom
About the Author
Stephanie Mines, Ph.D., earned her doctorate in neuropsychology at the Union Institute. She is the founder of The TARA Approach, a nonprofit dedicated to providing sustainable health options to individuals and communities, and the founder of Climate Change and Consciousness (CCC), a global network to accelerate regenerative responses to the climate crisis. She is the author of 5 books, including We Are All in Shock.
Visit the author's Websites: Tara-Approach.org/ and: cccearth.org/
