Doorways Towards Healing: Mending Our Wounds 

Creating space for healing—personally and collectively—within systems never built with healing in mind can feel impossible. But as daunting as it may seem, the roadmap is within us. And the benefits are profound, rippling into every area of our lives.

• How does the emotional toll of this work show up in our bodies, hearts, relationships, pedagogy, and practice when we’re giving from empty cups?
• What happens within an ecosystem when the work asks more of us than we can sustainably give?
• This moment is begging for collective healing. Where are we finding that space?
• Why did the “business of schooling” so quickly return to “normal” amid the pandemic, when everyone was yearning for something different? Something healing?

We launched the School Crisis Recovery and Renewal project in 2020, during a global pandemic and white America’s collective reckoning with racial injustice. We were amid a crisis that would leave no one untouched. 

Five years later, the global majority still has not found solid ground. In this ongoing moment of global and social disruption, our roles as educators and mental health providers call us into a new kind of work—work that demands courage and begins within. We are needed now, more than ever, to show up whole- for our students, families, and communities amid the uncertainty and trauma. 

But if we hope to show up in ways that truly birth transformation, we must first ask: How are we showing up for ourselves?

The SCRR programming I have been grateful to lead and steward, “Mending Our Wounds,” supports this powerful inquiry, exploration, and work. In the spirit of Audre Lorde: Tending to ourselves is not selfish. It is an act of service and so deeply connected to the work of renewal. 

“Mending Our Wounds” is anchored in the understanding that unprocessed trauma has the potential to trap us in cycles of fight, flight, freeze, or fawn, and that too often, we respond to crisis aftermath while in these very states. Without intentional space and support to tend to our pain, our well-intentioned care becomes compromised. 

For this reason, we must slow down.

Personally speaking, when I reflect on my renewal journey, I must acknowledge my decades of resistance to the notion of slowing down.  What a way I’ve come to now, centering my work around its importance. That shift didn’t happen easily or intentionally; it happened because I was forced into it through the pandemic, like many of us, and as a new mother. Both personally and in community, guided and on my own, I discovered deep healing, meaning-making, and integration when I finally did the painstaking work of slowing down.

In that stillness, I began to notice what had accumulated: the grief of student loss, the weight of persistent job insecurity, and the constant exposure to conflict and crisis, whether between students, families, or the larger system. Day in and day out, I worked hard to be a steady anchor in the storm. For a long time, that way of working seemed to serve me in my role as teacher, advocate, provider, and administrator. It helped keep my pain and unmet needs at bay as well.

In addition to navigating all that the pandemic surfaced for me and us collectively, I was also stepping into my work as a newly trained and practicing therapist. 

Sitting with people during some of the most painful and vulnerable moments of their lives offered me profound insight into the lasting impacts of trauma—and the essential ingredients for healing. I was especially struck when I heard Dr. Patrick Camangian speak about the phenomenon of educators using their students to work through unaddressed trauma. There’s a certain inevitability and beauty in that—after all, we are human, and healing often happens in community. The desire to rewrite the wrongs done to us through acts of service can be a powerful force. But, as Dr. Camangian reminds us, this dynamic carries real risks: oversights, unintended harm, and overextension. When trauma goes unaddressed, it can blur our sense of self, erode boundaries, and foster patterns of codependency. He put into words something I had been observing within myself and others for quite some time, I felt witnessed.  Something really powerful about finding a witness.  

I think the convergence of my three doorways (becoming a new mother, the Pandemic, and the invitation to explore my own and our own unaddressed trauma)—none of them singular events—thrust me into a clearer knowing and deeper curiosity about the healing power of slowing down.

As a founding team member of SCRR,  I finally had the head and heart space to feel into what we might need most in this moment of collective and unimaginable crisis. Together, we imagined a project that offered more than a training or framework. I dreamed and we dreamed of “a tending to,”  a space to arrive as you are, a space to co-regulate, a space to be witnessed, a practice in reclaiming and reconnecting to what schools are so notorious for disconnecting us from, our humanity. 

I wanted to create spaces that, no matter the title, time, or Zoom link, you experienced a humanizing pace that allowed for feeling and healing. 

Together over five years, we have done just that: we created programs that made the insurmountable work of slowing down more tangible.

Perhaps you are like me and yearn for ways to bring the tenets of Mending Our Wounds to your work. Here, I offer entry points -doorways- for personal reflection, small-group connection, and full-staff engagement that have provided spaces for tending to our own mending.

Doorway One: Self-Attuning To Our Emotional Activation

“The expectation that we can be immersed in suffering and loss daily and not be touched by it is as unrealistic as expecting to be able to walk through water without getting wet. This sort of denial is no small matter. – Rachel Remen, The Cost of Caring

Drawing back to my experience as a school-based counselor, navigating the school’s academic program on a macro and micro level while also developing the socio-emotional capacity of our school and students,  felt unsupported and very isolating. The principal was my direct supervisor, which I appreciated for so many reasons, especially because systems change is my jam. But what about the emotional experiences in counseling sessions that kept me up at night? The ones that felt gray, that didn’t have a clear or prescribed approach or solution? What about interactions with teachers who didn’t understand my role or the purpose of counseling interventions in school?  Where was I building my capacity to grow and give in those moments?  How was I ensuring that I metabolized those experiences and the emotions that were generated alongside them?  To be honest, I had to create those opportunities for myself in addition to all the other things I was doing, and more often than not, what needed to be created for me, by me, was often never created.

Again, in the stillness of shelter-in-place, in the settling of my thoughts and the steadying of my breath, Self-Attuning to Our Emotional Activation was imagined. Rooted in the understanding that many school counselors experience their work in ways similar to my own, we recognized the need for a space to build skills, process the emotional activations of the day, and explore the intersection of our professional roles and inner lived experiences.

In 2023, we launched Self-Attuning to Our Emotional Activation, a program grounded in the belief that if we don’t tend to our inner lives, we risk leading from emotional reactivity rather than self- awareness and intentionality. This offering introduces both theoretical frameworks and practical tools designed to strengthen our capacity to show up for ourselves—and, in turn, for others.

Each session of the Self-Attuning series coupled psychoeducation with an experiential practice, uplifting a powerful therapeutic orientation with a self-attuning practice to support our ability to bear a compassionate witness to our internal landscape as practitioners. 

Together, we explored the theories of integral psychology, internal family systems, polyvagal theory, healing justice frameworks, radical harm reduction, relational therapy, and generative somatics. 

Together, we explored how remaining present to the rich complexities of our emotional and somatic experiences invites us to explore the physical sensations and feelings that arise with curiosity and care. By asking, What might this feeling want from me? What might it be here to teach me? We open the door to insight, healing, and integration.  

Throughout our sessions, we cultivated Introspection through journaling:

• What emotions do you experience most frequently?
• What factors have shaped your relationship to these emotions?
• What did you learn about different emotions from your family of origin? Your culture? Your community? Your many identities and environments? 
• What signals does your body offer when you’re operating from your conditioned responses? When are you emotionally overwhelmed?
• How can you honor those signals without trying to fix or override them?

“This series assisted me in answering questions I started asking years ago. These seeds shared with me will grow flowers for others.”– Self-Attuning Participant

Being part of this beautiful Self-Attuning community has offered me more than words can fully capture. 

Beyond strengthening my self-awareness and body-mind practice, the opportunity to engage in conversation, learning, and witnessing alongside others has been both healing and joyful. It has deepened my capacity to hold space for others.

Doorway Two: Mourning is the Work

“We find the bodies of forgotten ancestors, ancient remnants of trees and animals, those that have come before and lead us back to where we have come from. This descent is a passage into what we are, creatures of the earth. I have come to have a deep faith in grief; have come to see the way its moods call us back to soul…Grieving, by its very nature, confirms worth. I am worth crying over; my losses matter.” –Francis Weller, The Wild Edge of Sorrow: Rituals of Renewal and the Sacred Work of Grief

In 2023, amid overwhelming feelings of rage, despair, and grief caused by the escalating attacks on Gaza, I found myself searching for community—a place to catch my breath and be held. I came across a live meditation led by Lama Rod Owens that felt like balm to my spirit. As he guided us through meditation—a slow and steady settling of the breath, a homecoming to our bodies, a deepening connection to the earth—he offered words that gave shape to what I had been feeling for weeks but couldn’t yet articulate:

“Grief is our experience of despair, anger, sadness, rage or numbness. Grief is our experience, as we witness innocent life lost… Grief is a natural and very human response to the brutality that we are witnessing.  Only through acknowledging our helplessness are we able to get to our grief.” —Lama Rod Owens

Though I had already been working to build a more honest and steady relationship with my grief, the work felt heavy, and my grief felt either overflowing or hard to access.   Lama Rod introduced a distinction between grief and mourning that felt like a profound paradigm shift:

“Mourning is the work.  Mourning is the inquiry into how we might begin to develop a relationship to the things we cannot change.   In our mourning, we can actively move through something we cannot physically change. Mourning opens our heart, keeps it soft.  Mourning is an invitation back into our body.  A way to work in honor of our deep aspiration for the wellbeing, happiness ,and safety of others.” —Lama Rod Owens

I felt this to my core.  Sometimes words do not suffice. Sometimes, stillness and silence is not the right pathway or access point.  How affirming it was to hear that sometimes, what we need is action, ritual, art, and movement.  

And so, we created Mourning Is the Work —a monthly space for educators and providers (anyone!) to drop in and engage in the active practice of mourning.  This series uplifted the powerful work of Francis Weller and soul-centered psychotherapy as well as cultural practices held by communities who’ve centered the integration of grief and grief work for centuries; the practices we explored are rooted in culture and communities that have a lot to teach us about living healing centered lives.

Through art and ritual-based activities, we honored the full spectrum of our losses—personal, collective, new and old, ancestral, and unspoken. This space offered us a much-needed pause from the relentless pace of work and life, inviting us into creativity, play, embodiment, and reflection beyond the linear or analytical mind.

We asked ourselves, how are we making space for ourselves and our students to process and heal from the emotional toll of grief in our lives?  How might we integrate rituals, practices, and structures into our daily lives and school year to ensure we have a place where our grief is seen, held tenderly and processed?  

It was a space of intentional mourning, where introspection met collective witnessing. In gathering together, we were reminded that we are not alone in our grief—or in our healing. And that reminder, in itself, is a powerful intervention.Below you will find an outline of the program’s design: Every session was aligned with one of Francis Weller’s Five Gates of Grief (2015) and matched with a “mourning practice.” The Five Gates of Grief offers a framework for understanding the diverse sources of loss we carry—from the death of loved ones to unrealized personal potential, allowing us to develop a more nuanced relationship to loss that supports our ability to metabolize and integrate it.

These practices encourage safety, witnessing, and meaningful connection as powerful antidotes to crisis and rupture (which happen to be foundations of recovery and renewal). Being part of this work has made it incredibly clear to me that healing is not an individual task. My ongoing hope is that we think creatively about how we can acknowledge and move through our strong emotions in ways that not only support our healing but also model for young people what wholeness can look, feel, and sound like.

“Grief and love are sisters, woven together from the beginning. Their kinship reminds us that there is no love that does not contain loss and no loss that is not a reminder of the love we carry for what we once held close.” – Francis Weller

Mourning is a deliberate effort towards healing. Mourning is love in action. Mourning is honoring our individual and collective holistic need to feel into all that we have lost or might lose and make room for something more. 

Mending Our Wounds: A Vision For Our Future Transformative Recovery & Renewal

As a project, we’ve remained committed to uplifting practices and creating spaces for educators to attend to their own activation and strong emotions, including grief, as part of their healing. We see this as a critical step in school systems’ healing and student wellness.

Because the truth is: building transformative school systems, environments, and learning experiences from a place of overwhelm and collective exhaustion is nearly impossible. 

And yet, that’s often the very place we’re operating from. To create space to process what we have carried, are carrying, and will inevitably carry, is necessary—for our renewal, for our resilience, and the future we are trying to build.

What do we need—from ourselves, from one another, and from the systems that hold us—to move beyond what currently exists and toward ways of being and becoming that allow us to be whole, rooted, and fully human?

How might we interrupt the fractionating nature of grind culture that permeates so many of our school spaces? How might we forge pathways to renewal amidst and after crisis?

We know that it is only with a regulated nervous system that we can truly respond to the chaos and crisis that arises in our work, daily. 

So let’s remain curious about how we might slow down—not as a luxury, but as a radical act of imagination that allows us to solution-find and envision something entirely different from the world in which we are currently existing.