What if we’ve been getting it backward all this time? What if the upheaval we’re witnessing across our world isn’t chaos but clarion—a clear call to finally metabolize what generations before us could not?
I’ve been sitting with this question lately: What if we are being invited to ritualize healing rather than continuing to commemorate trauma?
Our bodies hold memories that don’t belong to our lifetime. The tightness in your chest when authority figures speak. The inexplicable grief that visits in quiet moments. The ambient anxiety that follows you like a shadow. These may not be solely yours—they may be the unprocessed residue of injustices experienced by those who came before us, still seeking resolution through your nervous system.
The dominant narrative tells us to focus on our individual healing journeys. It celebrates personal resilience and private transformation. But what if our most profound healing can only happen collectively? What if the emptiness we feel—that persistent sense that something essential is missing—is actually our souls longing for the “We” underneath the “I”?
Consider this: Perhaps the rage bubbling up across our world isn’t random. Perhaps the grief emerging isn’t misplaced. Perhaps these emotions are exactly what need metabolizing—not just for our wellness but for the liberation of entire lineages trapped in cycles of unresolved trauma.
What if we stopped pathologizing our collective emotions and instead created sacred containers to alchemize them?
Imagine gatherings where grief is honored as the necessary compost for new growth. Where rage is respected as the fierce energy needed for boundaries and change. Where resentment is witnessed as the signal that justice remains incomplete.
This moment may be asking us to commune differently—to come together not just for comfort or distraction, but for the purposeful work of transmutation. To sit in circles and speak the unspeakable. To move our bodies until the stories trapped in our tissues can finally complete themselves. To weave new patterns of relationship that our ancestors couldn’t access but desperately needed.
In this light, our current challenges reveal themselves not as random suffering but as invitations to course-correct generations of disconnection. Each time we choose to face what’s uncomfortable rather than numb it, we’re helping liberate not just ourselves, but those who came before us and those who will follow.
The world of unity, balance, and harmony that we yearn for isn’t some unreachable utopia. It’s the natural state that emerges when enough of us have done the work of metabolizing what stands in its way. It’s what becomes possible when we reclaim the dream our ancestors held before trauma fragmented their vision.
So how do we show up for this invitation?
Perhaps we begin by recognizing that our personal healing work has collective significance. Perhaps we create more intentional spaces for communal processing of grief and rage. Perhaps we honor the wisdom of traditions that never separated individual wellness from collective harmony.
Who might we become for one another if we approached each interaction as an opportunity for mutual liberation? What if every conflict became a doorway to healing something carried for generations?
The sense that something is missing in our modern lives isn’t a personal failing—it’s a collective calling. It’s ancestral wisdom whispering that we were never meant to heal alone, to live alone, to transform alone.
The longing you feel is holy. It’s the future reaching back through you, inviting you to remember what we’ve always known beneath our forgetting: We belong to each other. And in that belonging lies our most profound healing.
What collective ritual of healing is asking to be born through you today?
