15 Sep Healing Our House
Dear Beloved Community,
This is a time. It has never been more clear to me that in order to heal the outside, we must heal the inside. In order to heal our planet, we must pause, come inside, and heal the hurt and broken places we find there.
I come from a Caribbean island country. One that suffered the genocide of its indigenous peoples – the Arawaks – long before it became ground for English plantations and communities of West Africans forced to labor in them. My own people – farmers and fishermen from islands in Greece – fled civil war, German occupation during World War II, and 400 years of Turkish colonization before that, settling (clumsily, warily, feverishly, in that way that fleeing migrants do) in The Bahamas, on top of land that had already felt the pain of slavery and the disappearance of its first peoples. Layers of trauma lie skin to skin, vibrating in every moment. This is the history that lives inside my cells. That gave birth to me and raised me up. Next to the trauma there is laughter, the growing of roses and basil, the tending of vegetables in dark soil, and hands that willed themselves and their families to live, to grow, to love. Even so.
Still, the older I get, the more I know that trauma doesn’t just go away. No matter how much you talk it, write it, act it out. No matter how much you pretend or numb or forget. You can lock the door, but the room is still there, inside your house, waiting for you to shine a light on the mess, all the better to see it and begin the work of cleaning up. Reclaiming the room. Liberating it, if you will, and the whole house can breathe in freedom.
I began to breathe in freedom when I found my way to healing the inside. A neighbor gave me an energy medicine session in the tradition of Barbara Brennan. I wept on her table, and went home and purged. I was only 22. It was a beginning. The body tells you. I found other healers, in Nassau, massage therapists, reiki masters, energy medicine practitioners, who laid hands on my skin and held space for me as I shivered and cried, releasing pain that was mine and more than mine. I found them too when I left Nassau, and came to California’s East Bay years later. Energy medicine healers, shamanic practitioners, plant medicine curanderos and curanderas. I thought I was coming to write, to get an MFA, to teach. But really, it was my body urging me on to find the keys I needed to open up the locked doors inside my house, to reclaim them, to clear away the mess and let in fresh air. So that my whole house could begin to breathe in freedom.
There is a long line of hands and healers behind me and beside me who brought me to the work I do now. They remembered me to a healing technology that is old, that trusts Spirit and the energy of our own bodies to co-create healing and liberation for the soul.
This October I begin the second year of The Soul Healing Way Program with The Earthseed Group. One class at a time, we’ll begin the healing. We’ll start at the beginning and bring in the medicine to whole up parts that need wholing up and holding. Parts that keep us up at night, like babies that still need arms to rock them, a voice to whisper, “You are safe, you are welcome here, you belong, you are so very loved.” One class at a time, we’ll open a sacred doorway and move through it to seek out and bring back parts of us that got lost, that forgot the way home. One class at a time, we’ll walk an ancient spiral path towards our power and purpose – what we came here to learn; what we came here to say and be and do, slowly gathering up more of ourselves along the way.
Wherever you are, whoever you may be, I welcome you. Join me in a healing journey to open up the locked doors and liberate the house inside. Your house. That is so very connected to all our houses, the inside ones and the outside ones too, including this incredible planet we all call home. This is the time; we are the people.
Bless,
Helen Klonaris
September 2nd, 2021
Mendocino, California