Conversations on Healing

Welcome to the Conversations on Healing podcast, where host Shay Beider speaks with renowned healthcare leaders, practitioners, and thought leaders to explore the world of wellness, the incredible powers of self-care, and what it truly means to heal today. Join us on this journey to become more whole, healed, and connected.

Shay Beider Welcome to another enlightening episode of Conversations on Healing. I’m your host, Shay Beider. Today we’re honored to have Hala Khouri joining us. Hala is a highly sought after speaker and trainer, specializing in trauma-informed care, embodied social justice, healing-centered education, and resilience. With over 25 years of experience teaching yoga and movement and 15 years dedicated to clinical work and training, Hala brings a wealth of knowledge to her practice. Originally from Beirut, Lebanon, Hala has devoted her life to studying trauma and justice while building resilience in individuals and communities. She holds a BA in psychology from Columbia University, and both an MA in counseling psychology and an MA in community psychology from Pacifica Graduate Institute. Hala is trained in somatic experiencing, a body-based therapy designed to effectively address trauma and its symptoms. In today’s episode, we discuss Hala’s latest book as an editor and author of “Practicing Liberation: Transformative Strategies for Collective Healing and Systems Change”.

We discuss what it takes to create change within communities, to heal systems, and to create liberatory strategies for organizations. Hala talks about her personal experience and how that has driven her to focus on organizational well-being and the creation of healing-centered cultures. We also discuss asset framing, that defines people by their assets, and aspirations, and contributions rather than their challenges. Hala shares what she has come to learn about healing and the capacity to experience discomfort as a pathway to positive change. I am truly looking forward to sharing some of these ideas and practicing liberation with you. So let’s dive in. Alright, well, Hala, it’s so nice to have you on the Conversations on Healing podcast. Thanks for joining me today.

Hala Khouri I’m so delighted to be here. Thank you for having me.

Shay So I was thinking about our conversation, and I was just reflecting on what’s the deepest place I want to go with you? And I was like you know, really, what the essence of it is, is we have these beautiful visions and ideas of things that we want to create in the world. They involve, sometimes, liberation, and transformation, and change, and addressing injustice, and all the things that you see- like, oh, this life that we live, it could continue to evolve and grow and change in all these positive ways. But when it actually comes down to it, when you’re creating organizations, when you’re teaching workshops, when you’re serving real-life humans and individuals, and being a real-life human, an individual yourself, how do you actually do it? And I think with the release of your recent book that we’re going to talk about in the interview, which I’ll mention the title of that, it’s called “Practicing Liberation: Transformative Strategies for Collective Healing and Systems Change: Reflections on Burnout, Trauma, and Building Communities of Care in Social Justice Work- so, it’s like, there it is. And it’s a wonderful read, cause it’s also from different voices and perspectives because different people are writing different chapters. And so, to me, what I really want to dive into, and we’re going to talk about the book, but I also really just want to talk about: how do you create social change in real life, in ways that are sustainable and that don’t continue to perpetuate the suffering that you’re trying to address in the first place?

Hala I mean, the thing that I’ve been thinking about a lot lately is how do we get together to collaborate on a vision of the world that doesn’t yet exist, while living inside this sort of traumatic way that the world is onto so many people? And I think what happens inside of our organizations is we have this dream that, well, we’ll all get together and we will just have this bubble of inspiration and culture while we do the work. But really, what happens is we’ve also internalized those systems, and we’re working inside of them. And so, oftentimes, inside of our organizations, it gets really messy. It gets messy, it gets confusing. We confuse our own traumas with the systems. We project the systems onto each other. And I think that the hardest part and the biggest opportunity in building coalitions, organizations, movements- whatever folks are doing that are about liberation and healing- is finding a way to build a culture together that invites us to hold the both.

And the idea of, “I want healing. I want freedom for everybody,” and we are in a system that does not provide that for most people, and we’re going to bump up against it with each other because we also don’t know what it feels like to really be together outside of systems of hierarchy and discrimination and colonization and power and all. Most of us don’t, right? There might be folks listening who are in super intentional communities or connected to their indigeneity in a way that they have those spheres, but it’s just not the broader culture, just because of the way that globalization worked, colonization has worked. And so, I think that’s the hardest part.

Shay And the other piece is so many of us that are drawn into doing this type of work have our own trauma histories that drew us into it in the first place. Right? Why do you even choose to spend a lifetime dedicated to this type of what is very often service-based work if you didn’t have a personal calling on some level? Those personal callings often came out of our stories, which often had a lot of their own struggles, challenges, oppression, violence, et cetera, et cetera, on. And so, it’s always a “healer, heal thyself” model, because without that, everything’s upside down and unhealthy and imbalanced. And so, in my own work, what I’ve noticed is there’s this intentionality around the constant recognition that it’s a circular healing system, where it’s never a top-down healing system, that we’re all learning, giving, and receiving and healing at times- receiving at times, giving at times, supporting at times, to being supported- that it’s this circular nature that’s actually the most safe and protected because it also keeps you out of those ego spheres of, like, “Oh, I am the healer who will heal you,” or “I am the one who’s somehow in a more privileged position who will help you, who doesn’t have assets,” which then diminishes all the assets that are contained within each individual.

And so it’s like how you, to me, dismantle those hierarchical structures is through a framework of a circular relationship, where you’re sometimes in one positionality and sometimes in another. And that’s how, within the organization that I lead, Integrative Touch, we’ve tried to flip it around, where you can’t tell much of the time who’s healing or being healed. The rules are always changing. They’re dynamic, and it’s on purpose. I don’t want to create a system of like, “Oh, we got it. You don’t. We’re going to help you. You need it.” It’s like, ah, we gotta dismantle that too.

Hala Yeah, absolutely. I mean, the way that I talk about it, especially with when we’re talking- when I’m training clinicians or therapists or healers- is that healing’s a collaboration between you and your client. And so we are in collaboration, and it’s not because you’re broken, we’re collaborating, and there isn’t this hierarchy where there’s pressure for you to know everything either. So I think I’m curious, I think when I think about when people are collaborating in an organization, what you’re saying really resonates, where we are all healing and being healed at the same time. And then I think when we’re talking about providers that are working with clients, there’s slightly a different boundary, even though I think we get healed by the folks we’re working with. I think of it as this collaboration. And that’s a way to disrupt the hierarchy of, “I’m not the expert on your nervous system or your soul. We are here to do this work together.”

And then the other thing that I think about with what you’re talking about is I think about it as this tapestry. So when we’re working with folks, there might be days where you’re falling apart because the world is breaking your heart, and if somebody else isn’t falling apart, they can hold certain pieces that day, and then we switch out, as long as it’s kind of balanced. Collaborations work that way. And sometimes when they get disrupted, if there’s so much too much trauma, unresolved trauma in the system- and I think this is where it gets a little complex- because I think people are at different stages in their healing journey. And so when we’re also building collaborations and we’re all coming in with our traumas and our relationship with our traumas, some of us have had an opportunity to do a lot of work on that. We’ve had more years on the planet, we’ve had the privilege of therapy or whatever, and then other folks might be younger, they might be impacted in a way that’s more immediate for them. And so how are we also collaborating across our traumas skillfully? So we recognize, sometimes, one person needs a lot more care. They’re in a lot more of a vulnerable state. That’s that complexity, right?

Shay Yes. And the other piece- so two things that, just again, in the work that I do through Integrative Touch that we’ve built- is a collective healing experience. So the therapeutic approach that I designed, Integrative Touch Therapy, it’s only done in a group setting. So you have an individual who’s choosing to go through the therapeutic process on a given day, and it’s like a three-to-four-hour-long experience, and they’re with a team of people that can be four or five, and that team of people is supporting them. But what they’re supporting, in collaboration in the same way you’re describing, is really their inner intelligence. So the person who’s going through the therapeutic process, it’s their inner intelligence that’s guiding it, and that team of people is working with their inner intelligence in collaboration. But the other thing I noticed with that, Hala, is to your point of, well, what if someone’s younger or they’re more in an immediate kind of need because maybe their trauma is more recent or maybe they’re not as resourced, they don’t have as much community, all the things.

What I also started to see is if you can surround their nervous system with four or five other nervous systems, or more, that are actually, in that day, in that moment, fairly coherent, well-regulated, feeling reasonably stable and strong, that what happens is- I call it a nervous system contagion in the best sense. We also call it co-regulation, right? But there’s this experience of those systems communicating to this other system not only all the messages of “you’re safe and you’re welcome here, and we’re genuinely going to listen and care for and support you,” but also, “we are regulated enough in this moment to be able to do that effectively. And it’s just interesting to me what if what we actually create are these spaces where, as we recognize someone is in a less regulated state, had a recent event or episode or challenge or hardship, that then we invite them into these kind of well-developed, kind of cultivated regulated spaces that aren’t perfect- they’re totally imperfect- but that they have a sense of awareness around the creation of a stable, regulated space that you’re invited into, so that becomes the healing home.

And so that’s much of, I feel like, the creation of safe space in which to heal is that creation of a space in which nervous systems are regulated. And in the best sense, it’s more people. I call it being positively outnumbered- that, in the best sense, you’re positively outnumbered by a group of well-regulated systems that when you drop into that, your system is like, you want to like, “Ooh, okay, that feels pretty good. I want to start to align with that a little bit more.”

Hala Yeah, I love that image. Absolutely. And I feel like sometimes I think about it as our nervous system annexes onto theirs, and we help hold all that energy. So if you have these extra regulated nervous systems around you, then they help to hold, and it’s like diluting something in water. The trauma energy is diluted, it has a bigger container, it’s less overwhelming.

Shay And you talk about that in the book. And one of the chapters, a piece around this that I thought was really interesting, it’s like when we have a trauma, one way of looking at it is that it wasn’t able to be processed in that moment. And so our systems kind of hang on to it until we have a later moment in which it can be processed. And then that’s the opportunity to heal and resolve in a different- now, a different time, a different space- where the imminent danger or harm isn’t taking place, and now it’s a new moment. And in that space, from that place, we can actually find a new level of freedom and liberation, which is so much about what you’re really getting at in this book- is liberation, because freedom from trauma, freedom from suffering is a form of liberation. It’s an inner liberation. And I’m curious, how do you understand the achievement of that experience of inner liberation as we’re working through the hardest things that have happened to us in our lives?

Hala Yeah. Well, I think I feel like liberation is something we practice with each other, and that we can’t be liberated inside ourselves if we’re not liberated together. So there’s not one liberated person if somebody else is not liberated. And I feel like COVID sort of brought that to life in a literal way- until our most vulnerable are able to be healthy, nobody can be healthy. Nobody is going to avoid it. So to me, I use that word “liberation” as a collective sense, and it has an individual component. So I think that there’s folks, activists and organizers, who are all about this collective liberation piece, yet they haven’t done the nervous system, the looking at their own personal traumas piece. And so it’s hard to be in collective liberation if we’re not also looking at our individual. So it’s all those layers of our individual, our interpersonal, and our collective.

And yeah, I think that liberation is, it’s freedom from suffering. I mean, I think suffering is always part of life, but it’s like there’s suffering and then there’s resources to deal with suffering. And that when we think about liberation on a collective level, if we were to completely get rid of racism, and sexism, and ableism, and capitalism- all the things that treat our bodies as transactional or disposable or create a hierarchy around human worth- if we got rid of all of that, then we just have the regular traumas of loss and death and accidents. And so we wouldn’t have to wonder, “Is it also this bigger thing?” So liberation is like, let’s get rid of collective trauma and oppression and hierarchy enough in life- pain and suffering- for us to deal with. And then if we have resources and we have rituals and we have community and we have safety, then that’s going to build our capacity to be with our suffering and to transform our suffering into something really meaningful.

So that’s kind of how I understand it. And it does take individual work for sure. And I think I see folks at both ends of the extreme: the folks that are just doing the individual work, so they think about, “I’m just going to do a bunch of therapy. I’m going to take care of my nervous system and I’ll get myself regulated just by myself.” That’s not liberation. Liberation is about our healthy relationships, our connection to the world as well. And then I see folks on the other end who are super dysregulated and not attending to their own individual nervous system and healing, and they’re trying to do it for the world. Yet what happens is we project our trauma onto the world as well, and we can’t tell the difference. So I think we have to find that middle ground.

Shay And there’s some good stories in the book about that, about how easy it is to project what it’s actually your own woundedness onto others if you haven’t attended to your own woundedness.

And I know your own story- it’s kind of interesting. We all get into this type of work in different ways. And I know in your own story, it is super interesting to me because it seems like some of the foundation of your early life, really in the zero to three years, the first three years of life- which is such an early and precious time- but ultimately ended up having a directional impact on what you’ve chosen to do. So I didn’t know if you want to share a little bit about how you see within the formulation of your own self, what has drawn you into this kind of social change work?

Hala Yeah, yeah. So I was born in Beirut, Lebanon, and in 1973, and in ’75, the civil war broke out. So, I mean, there’s been so much war and violence right now. It’s awful over there. So we lived there for a year. We left in ’76. So for one year, we lived there, and I don’t have a lot of active memories. I’ve been told stories, and now they kind of live as memories in my head, but I don’t know if they’re my own memories, if that makes sense. But we had to hide down in the basement. We heard bombs going off. My father was a physician, and so the army trucks would come and pick ’em up, and we’d watch them go up the hill to the hospital and hope that they didn’t get bombed on the way up. So that lives in my body somehow, even if I don’t remember the memory.

We were able to leave, so that’s a big privilege. My father was educated in the United States. He was able to get a job and a visa and all that, so we were able to leave. But I always say that there’s a little girl inside of me that wants everybody to heal their trauma, so they stop fighting with each other. And I mean right now, with what’s happening in Gaza and Israel, and it’s really- I’m examining that so much- the complexity of trauma, beginning trauma, beginning trauma as being my own roots of why this is my work in the world. So it’s both the trauma I experienced, and my own desire to heal from that trauma.

Shay And I mean, there’s so many deep places we could go just with what’s happening right now, right there as you were describing it, in terms of collective trauma and then the legacy of that impact- in my mind and in my body, and in my understanding of how trauma is intergenerational and is passed down- you cannot separate from what happened during the Holocaust, from what is happening right now. Right? There’s an interconnectedness to all of this, and it is through that legacy of trauma and collective trauma that there’s a continuation, that it has impacted on all sides, just with deep, deep legacies of pain. And I think all of us are looking with horror at what’s happening. I mean, it is.

It’s horrible in every direction that you look at it. And at the same time, for those of us that are focused on doing work that is healing- centered foundationally, there’s a process that you always begin with, which is the recognition of what’s created the dynamics in the first place. It’s always this deeper understanding of how did we even get here? How did we, even in my own life, I look at that when something has gone awry- whether that’s on a social large-scale, war level, or just on a personal relationship level, where something goes awry and you’re like, “Wow, what’s happened here?” There’s always that initial sort of observational process of, ‘Wait a minute, how did I get here?” What was the fertile ground that led me to this? And then how do I attend to that first?

And it’s much easier when you haven’t already gotten to the level that we are now, in this international crisis. Now we are, like, the stakes are at the highest that they can possibly be. And so now you’ve got so much to do to just unwind that. And I think also, for those of us that are in trauma work, it’s like, “Oh my goodness gracious.” Just again, another legacy of collective trauma that’s going to affect another generation. Holy camoly.

Hala It’s just too much. It’s too much. Yeah. And I think that understanding sort of the legacy and the history of the trauma of our culture and our people, and then also looking back again at colonization and white supremacy and the ways that those larger things also play into perpetuating traumatic dynamics.

And then, everybody has their own narrative about it. And I think the complexity- and I think one of the biggest things for me- and I know we’re not going to dive into the Middle East, that would be a whole other really hard conversation- but there’s not one narrative. And really understanding that there’s so many threads of different traumatic narratives in the region, and if we’re trying to pull out one, we’re always going to be fighting with each other.

And so how are we looking at all the different trauma narratives and also all the different healing narratives? There are folks on the ground doing really deep solidarity work. And so that’s the thing is: trauma has to see things as a binary- there’s good and there’s bad. And that actually pulling apart and trying to see the… I mean, there’s no nuance about the moment. Let me be clear, there’s a lot of nuance about how we got here right now. It’s very clear, I will say. And how are we unwinding those narratives to create a new narrative together?

Shay Mhm, yeah. And I think that’s a very important piece of understanding trauma that you just described. I think really well, Hala, which is that there isn’t a single narrative with any trauma that happens. There just isn’t. That isn’t the nature of trauma because there is the individual experience, then there’s a collective experience. So there’s going to be these different threads.

And some of the wisdom and compassion and how you actually work through it is with the maturity to be able to see and recognize that it isn’t binary, that it isn’t what happened in the imprint of your nervous system isn’t universal, that it’s not necessarily how the person next to you experienced the event. I remember one time many years ago, I was in a store- just K-Mart, actually, a K-Mart store- and there was an event where someone came in and it was terrible. He stabbed someone, and it was a whole thing, and it happened right in front of me. And then I played a role in how to negotiate and navigate things in the moment. And I will never forget, afterwards, when the police were questioning me and asking what I remembered about it all. What was so fascinating was what my brain did remember and what it didn’t remember, that selective process when we’re going through a big scary experience.

I remembered so many details about how things felt and what all the processes that my brain was going through. How could I help this woman? What could I do? How could I alert someone? Should I intervene? Would that actually help or would then we both end up getting stabbed? How could I intervene safely? All the balances that your brain, so fast, is processing, like, okay, which choice do we make here? And you’re like, but really interesting basic stuff. What color shirt or pattern was the man wearing? Exactly what did he look like, wasn’t really that important to my brain in that moment. It was more like the action of what he was doing. And so I noticed when I was talking to the police, and there like asking very basic stuff, what was the clothes and everything? And ultimately none of that mattered. He was related to the woman as it turns out, and it was resolved.

Interestingly, a lot of those details my brain just didn’t care about in that moment. I was focused on other stuff. And so that I’m sharing this story because I think it’s a fascinating illustration of how there could have been someone next to me, and there were people right around me, and what they perceived, what their brain chose to pay attention to in order to keep their systems safe, given who they were and their story, and whether they had a different color skin than me, or whether they were a man or a woman, or a different gender. All of that probably played into how their brain was processing and what they remembered and what stood out for them. And when you really think about it, you’re like, oh my gosh, of course then we end up with different threads.

Hala Exactly, different narratives, absolutely. And then I think understanding that, because I think when folks don’t understand that, they think the other people are lying, right? “That’s not what happened. This is what happened,” right? It’s like actually no one’s lying. Nobody sees the full picture. Everybody is seeing a portion or what their trauma is allowing them to see, or what their society, the narratives that they were sold, that may or may not be true. So everybody’s having such a different experience, and it’s less useful to have a conversation about what the truth is and more useful to get curious about the different perspectives and then what it might mean, again, to collaborate, to create a new narrative together. But I think folks, which I understand get caught in the fighting of, ‘No, this is what’s real.” And I also don’t want to minimize it. There are some things that are very real, and this isn’t about like, “Oh, it’s all nuance.” And there are, especially when you look at power dynamics, this is where we want to think about power differences. So whether we’re talking about the Middle East or we’re talking about our relationships with clients, or parents and children, or white people and black people, looking at power can pull out parts of these traumatic dynamics that need to be acknowledged.

Shay Your work, Hala, it’s been really multifaceted. So you’ve studied and worked as a somatic psychologist. You’ve worked also in embodied ways as a yoga teacher and instructor. You’re an activist, you’re a parent. You bring all of these different facets of your life and experience and into all the different parts of your work. And then, even in the work that you’ve done, you’ve worked in domestic violence shelters, you’ve worked with individuals who’ve been incarcerated, you’ve taught workshops that are off the mat and into the world, things like that. So, a big diversity of the ways you’ve used these different somatic aspects of healing and transformation across different populations. I’m curious about what some of that diversity, both within yourself, within the systems that you’re utilizing and the techniques and approaches that you’ve studied and learned, and then also the different sort of audiences that you are engaging with. What kinds of noticings have you made as you bring both a divergent self and divergent communities together? What has that taught you about how we heal and transform?

Hala Yeah, I mean, I think I’ve learned about some foundational things that feel fairly universal. So whether I’m working with somebody in a maximum security prison or the CEO of a huge corporation, I feel like I’ve had the privilege of interacting with so many different kinds of people and seeing the threads of our humanity that are so similar. Our nervous systems are really similar. We get impacted in similar ways, even though our experience of events might be different- experiencing hypervigilance or shutdown or being overactivated, relational dynamics, fear of abandonment- there is a core to our humanity that is not that different. And depending on your social location, like you were saying, gender or race or sexual orientation, the way that we are, there’s an alchemy with dominant culture and how dominant culture sees us. And so that’s something that has really stood out to me as I think about my work.

Even though, as you name it, I’m like, “Oh my God, I do so many different things,” but I’m like, I kind of feel like I just do one thing and it’s applied in a lot of different settings.

And I feel a little bit like I have a manual for the nervous system, and it’s not the only one. My own understanding of how the body and the mind and the heart work, and I think if I’m skillful, it can make sense to lots of different kinds of people, and it can make sense in a lot of different settings. So whether, again, I got to do some work at a maximum security prison in the Inland Empire, and it was a healing workshop, and it was so moving to see these men who’d had unimaginable trauma, having insights about compassion for themselves, for the awful things they did, because I remember one guy said, it never occurred to him, and I don’t know what he was charged with, but that was a result of the fact that his father beat him severely. He was able to have compassion for that little boy in him. So this understanding of the things that shape us and how that shapes how we are in the world as being foundational to everything we do, whether it’s foundational to coping inside of a prison system or managing a crew of people, a team of people with compassion and empathy or organizing against systemic oppression, understanding ourselves in relationship to the world is such a vital tool. And so I love getting to translate the work to different communities. It’s been really, really powerful. Yeah.

Shay Yeah, it is. I had the pleasure recently, Hala, of interviewing one of probably the most seminal thinkers- I’ll put it that way- on the science of actually how we change. And his name’s Richard Boyatzis, and he’s the author of a new book that looks at the science of change, and it’s looking at massive amounts of research and what do we actually know about sustained, desired change. And something that fascinates me, in relationship to your work and some of the work that I do through Integrative Touch, is that ultimately, what he has been able to recognize is that, if we actually want to create sustained, desired change, how we do that is involving moving your system into a parasympathetic state- essentially, into a parasympathetic nervous system state- and taking into account all, essentially, community, all the relationships around you that we are discussing. We heal through relationship, and we heal and change as our system feels safe, which we feel safe when we’re in a parasympathetic state.

And so it’s so fascinating to me that even the fundamental science behind this is seeing the same stuff that many of us, that have been working this kind of from the embodiment lens or angle or therapeutic kind of side, we’ve felt and noticed and valued for years. That in order to shift some really significant pain events in our lives, how they really start to shift is when we can connect with resource, and safety, and security, and a parasympathetic co-regulated state that’s relational and bigger than an individual self, but has a collective imprint. And so, it’s fascinating that the science is seeing the same thing that the somatic people are seeing, and they’re closer and closer together.

Hala Yeah. Well, look, it makes me think about a couple things. So about a year and a half ago, I think this, my husband passed away, and so it was sudden, I mean, he had had health issues, but it was still sudden and a surprise to us. But my two boys and I were immediately held by our community in the most profound, most profound way. I mean, our house was filled with flowers, and food, and community, that understood… “Do you need to be alone? We’ll just be downstairs in the living room.” Not community that was pressuring us to be connected. And we were held for a month. I mean, we’re always held, I mean, I lived deeply in community, so this wasn’t brand new, but there was a level of holding that allowed us to move through this massive trauma with so much more grace. And people have said to me after that, “Oh my God, you’re so strong.”

I’m like, “Im not.” I didn’t have to be, I didn’t have to be strong. I had everybody around me. We had a safety net of relationships to hold us, and I think that my kids got to see that. They got to see even… you know and I remember I was talking to my older son’s therapist, because I wanted him to process more. And my older son, he was getting good grades, and he got a girlfriend, and he was so happy. But I was like, “But he needs to process this.” And his therapist said, “I don’t think he’s going to be traumatized by this event. I mean, the loss of a parent is a trauma, but to hear and say, because there’s so much holding and support, even something like this, they are moving through it. I mean, it’s going to be a lifetime when you lose a parent.” But to me, that was one of the most embodied experiences of being held in community.

And I still remember, my sister-in-law would just go and sit in my younger son’s bedroom and just read a book. He didn’t want to talk. I would go up and be like, “How are you feeling today?” She would literally just go and not even talk to him. And I remember he took part in a grief group, and when they asked him, ‘Who’s one person that really supported you?” he named her. She just sat in the room. She didn’t make him talk about his feelings; she just was there with her regulated nervous system. So, it was really, really profound. And then I also think about… there’s a really great book, and it’s called, it’s just called “Healing”, and I’m forgetting the author, but he was the mental health czar under Obama. And I was skeptical when I picked up the book of like, “Oh, who’s this white man who’s in mainstream psychology culture talking about healing?”

And essentially what he says is, the reason we have a mental health crisis is because people are not in community. He’s like, we have the therapies that work. We have the medications that work- that’s 10% of healing. And because our society does not know how to hold, and he’s specifically talking about people with serious mental health issues, right, what do we do? We institutionalize them; we separate them. And he talked about a town in, I think it’s in Portugal, where folks that have serious mental health issues, they just live in this town, and the folks around them understand how to deal with folks with these serious issues, and they just get to be there. And we don’t have the resources in our communities to do that. And so I really appreciated that. It really came down to, when we’re not held in community, we cannot be. Well, and this comes back to this idea of liberation. Liberation is something we practice together.

Shay And you talk a little bit in the book about this idea of resilience, which often we’ve kind of placed on an individual, but even in what the story that you just described, in terms of the wording that you used, was strength, which you can also tie and connect to resilience. You said something that I think is actually much deeper in terms of how it actually works, is that it’s not just this concept of individual strength or resilience, but actually, in my own life, I feel like my greatest strength has come through community. It’s come through this extension of… it seems silly to say “extension of self”, but it’s like the broadening of self within the context of a larger community and these other selves that then interact with you. And so something in those interdynamics and the fluidity amongst, and between, and within that community is actually your true strength.

Hala Absolutely. Absolutely.

Shay Like you said from that book on healing, that if that is the real deficit of our age and our moment, that we’re lacking in many cases, a deepened experience- like a visceral experience- of community, then that is exactly the remedy that’s needed: is the establishment of a true experience of community. What you shared, you experienced after your husband passed, where you were held.

Hala And I think that those… it’s been eroded. I think that we used to have community centers, and clubs, and all these different ways that people were locally gathering with each other, and that’s been slowly eroding. And then COVID froze all of that, and then a lot of folks have not found their way back into that community. I think some people are finding online communities that are really supportive. And I think that, in general, folks are more isolated than ever before, and our lives are… we’re just so just siloed in our little individual lives. And it’s heartbreaking. And even me, I have amazing community around me, and we all work hard to maintain it, to make sure we’re not just slipping back into our little individualism.

Shay And I think that’s a theme, actually, that I felt like came up quite a bit in the book: is this idea that, because there’s dominant culture that we have all been indoctrinated into and born into and raised in through, that there’s a way in which it’s… for all of us, it’s the water in which we swim. And so, it’s super easy to just re-pivot right back into those old ways of knowing and being, and that it takes so much conscious intention and energy to realize and recognize, “Wait, what just happened there? Where did I just come from?” And if I don’t want that, then how do I pivot and shift into something new and different?

Hala And how do I be intentional about it? Because it might not happen naturally. How do I be intentional about connecting myself with people in my community in really meaningful ways? Mia Birdsong has a beautiful book called, “How We Show Up”, and she talks about queering our relationships, and that queer folks never had relationships that fit into dominant culture norms. And so, they would create their own paradigms, whether it’s polyamory or relationships with people that are not necessarily your romantic partner, but you’re in deep friendship together and letting their lives be more interconnected. Sometimes you’ll see that poor and working-class folks have their lives more interconnected because they have to. The systems aren’t serving them, so they don’t have childcare accessible or even sometimes medical care. They’re having to be each other’s doctors and nurses and babysitters. And so, there is sometimes… you’ll see in these poor and working-class communities that there is a deeper sense of interconnection out of necessity. And then affluent folks can just hire out for everything and get a lot more isolated. And so, everybody, I think, has different relationships to that. And we all have different challenges in figuring out, “What does healthy community look like?”

Shay And another piece that comes up in the book is this idea of really asset framing and how even the shift in language you hear now still quite a bit, right? This idea of trauma-informed, trauma-informed care. And yet, some people have said that language could actually be modified to frame the assets more deeply, to, for example, say something like “healing-centered care”. And so, even the way we’re constructing the language… and I feel like what often happens as you’re identifying a problem is you first give it problem language. You have to first say the word trauma to understand trauma’s a thing, but then as you say, “trauma, trauma, trauma,” at some point you start to say, “Okay, but that’s a part of the story.” And actually, there is a way that that could be framed differently, which, in this case, some people are saying we can talk about it more as healing-centered care. So, I’m curious about what you see and understand about this idea of asset framing- about how we communicate and define and language- and then how that impacts how we work with and through these things within systems and communities.

Hala I think you named it- that you kind of potentially have to start by naming the deficit and look for people that are going for grants or want to change laws. You have to emphasize the problem, trying to find a solution. And I think that it becomes problematic, though, if for those communities, they start to internalize that and be like, “Oh, I’m an at-risk youth,” or “I’m traumatized.” And so, where is that balance between being strategic about when we need to identify the problem, because that’s how we’re going to pull in resources, and then being really strategic about when we’re uplifting resilience and existing solutions. So, you might go into a community that’s super underserved, and underfunded, and impacted by violence and poverty, and we could say, “Oh, look how terrible things are.” But often, inside those communities are incredible healers and activists and artists- folks that are working to change things, folks that are supporting each other.

And so this term “healing-centered”, I first heard from Sean Genwright, who did a lot of work with- does a lot of work with young people- and he doesn’t want young people to identify as having trauma. And so we want folks to identify as having possibility. And so, I do love this reframe about healing-centered paradigms. And I also know that going for an NIH grant and being like, “We want to do a workshop on healing,” sometimes it’s not going to get the funds you need or the attention you need. And so, I think we want to be really strategic about it and hold the both-and and that’s how we can sort of shift the culture around it. And especially with the directly impacted folks, we don’t want this internalization of, “We are people who need things from other people. We are people that have been disproportionately negatively impacted by these systems,” and it’s part of justice to pour resources into here, but it’s not because something is deficient with you.

Shay Yeah, it’s interesting. We are developing, through Integrative Touch, this workplace wellness program that we’ve been doing for a little bit. And part of it, we’ve been doing research and just reading and learning about different workplace wellness programs that exist on a broader national scale. And one of the things we looked at was this Harvard Business Review article that looked at, what are the flaws of the existing workplace wellness programs. And the primary flaw they identified- and it was kind of like a meta-analysis, was a compilation of data across a number of different studies- and one of the things that they said was, the biggest flaw is that we tend to center workplace wellness programs on the individual and say, “Okay, as an individual, you need to do this better. So we’ll give you an app or we’ll give you a counselor, or we’ll give you a thing and solve it as an individual.” But that actually, most of the issues that people are struggling with in the workplace are systemic issues that have to do with the way the whole workplace culture is designed and all the isms- all the stuff that infiltrates every part of our culture, including the workplace.

Hala Yeah. Yeah. It’s like we’re asking people to cope with the bad, just meditate. Just meditate towards you, take a deep breath.

Shay It’s like, well, wait a minute. Maybe we actually need to address the systems-level change. Doesn’t mean you can’t do individual practices, but it’s like if you’re not looking at- if there’s not that total awareness, eyes wide open to what in the system is contributing to illness or dysfunction or anything that we really don’t want to keep in place- if you’re not looking at that piece and you’re not looking in a holistic or comprehensive way…

Hala And also, so when I go and work with organizations now- and I learn this the hard way- I tell them, I won’t work with your staff unless I’m also working with senior leadership. Because I remember once I got brought in to do all these workshops on resilience and self-care for the staff, and I was brought in by another agency, so I wasn’t the one who sort of negotiated the contractor spoke to senior leadership. So, I just came in and did my thing, and it went well, but I felt like a certain amount of resistance. And I heard later on that people had been really trying to push back against workloads and schedules and a lot of HR policies. And instead of them changing those things, they sent me in to teach them self-regulation techniques. And I think for some people, they’re like, “I don’t want to learn to self-regulate inside of this system unless it’s changing.” And so, I tell folks now, I’m like, if you are going to ask me to come in and do this work, but you’re not doing this work on a senior level, there’s going to be a revolt. People are going to start to find their voice and ask for what they need. And so, how are we looking at, throughout the entire organization, what does care look like for your people?

Shay It’s critical, because otherwise you become the bandaid that nobody really wants. I want to actually change the real root of this, the root cause. I feel like, too, there’s this piece- I have dealt with this in some of the work that we’ve done as well- of how do you actually get that communication to go all the way through the system? So you’re discussing what often happens because we’ve created these hierarchical systems where you have executive leadership teams, and then you’ve got the staff that are day-to-day operations. And you talk about this in the book, too. It’s in one of the chapters. It’s like you get these kind of siloed perspectives, and you even talk about an embodied exercise that you do that positionally allows… and you can even describe that exercise if you want, Hala. I think it’s really cool how you can actually get people to see that in the design of this system, your body is going to feel differently based on the position that you’re in, but yet in that same position, most people have a really similar experience.

Hala Yes, yes, yes. So we did this thing. This was a domestic violence shelter, and there was a lot of conflict between senior leaderships and staff. And so, you had the senior leaders that are doing all the grant writing, and they’re sort of overseeing everything. And then you’ve got the managers and the caseworkers, then you’ve got the staff who are inside the shelter with the families. And so, the staff felt really overworked and underappreciated. They resented the senior leaders. Things were changing. Senior leadership felt so stressed, and they were hustling to try to keep the whole organization aboard, and they felt like the staff was ungrateful. So, I did this exercise, which I learned from “Theater of the Oppressed” from August Boal, where you have one person stand, and behind them are two people. So, each person has a hand on one of your shoulder blades, and behind each of those people are two people.

So, you can imagine a triangle of people. And so, I have that front-row person moving around, and everybody else has to keep contact. And so, I’ll go and stand like 20 feet away from the front person, and I’ll say, ‘Get here in five seconds, and you get a grant for $10,000.” And they run, and everybody’s falling and running. And as you can imagine, the people in the back are getting whipped around. And sometimes, I would have the person in the front be a staff member, and I’d put the executive director in the back row and vice versa. And what I found was, even when a “quote-unquote” back-row person, a staff member, was a front-row person, they did the same things because their position required them to get the grant so they could pay for everybody. So, they’re running and they don’t have time to look back and communicate.

And it was so great in the debrief for folks to see that the problem isn’t the individuals that it’s actually the structure. And until we can figure out how to change the structure, how can we have some empathy? How can staff go, “All right, they’re trying to pay the bills up there, but we need to let them know they need to communicate better and slow down.” And then how does senior leadership go, “All right, even though we think we’ve got to get to that goal, it can’t be at the cost of our staff wellbeing.” So there’s so much learning. And then, when people aren’t taking things personally, they can collaborate better. And the other thing we see is, often in places like this, you have a different racial makeup. Senior leadership is usually white folks, white-passing folks, different class. So then, there’s also that added layer. Ironically, at this particular place, the executive director- formally a participant- was a person of color who had been dealing with domestic violence herself. And even so, she still was dealing with it. When we can understand the ways that the structures impact us, we can have more empathy for one another and even think about how to change those structures so that they’re not so confusing or overwhelming.

Shay Well, I appreciate how much passion and creativity has gone into this book and all the different voices. It’s also, the book itself is a reflection of community because even though you and another author have helped to edit and kind of go through the composition of the whole, and you’ve contributed to it directly as a writer, there’s also all of these other voices. And each chapter has sometimes one individual or multiple individuals that are contributing. And so, it also, it’s alive in that way, and that it’s a multitude of perspectives around how we practice liberation. And also, I’ll mention, there is a workbook that accompanies it. So for those listeners who might be tuning in that are also thinking about, well, okay, I’m interested in the book. Great. Yeah. And here, Hala is actually showing as well the copy of the workbook. Like, okay, I want to create more systems change in my community and culture and workplace and all the possibilities. You have an accompanying workbook that people can utilize as a tool. So if there’s anything more you want to add on that as well, feel free.

Hala Yeah. I mean, yeah, the workbook really came out of folks saying, “Look, we love the book, but some of us really don’t even have time to sit and read a book. Can you just give us the tools?” And so we found a way to responsibly give the tools with just a shorter background and information, so something that can really be applied inside of people’s organizations. We wanted to give out something really practical as well, so yeah.

Shay And I want to say too, to that point of literally what you just said about, “We don’t even have time to,” you also discuss in the book that idea of productivity, and “I don’t have time.” That’s part of the dominant culture that we’ve created. It’s not reality. It’s a construct within the system that we’ve designed that benefits some more than others. And so, a deepened understanding anytime within an organization that intensity around, “I don’t have time,” that there is a driving impulse there that’s actually structural and that is benefiting some and not helping others, and harming others.

Hala Yeah. I love, and Nkem Ndefo use the term “urgentocracy”, that we get so stuck in urgency. And look, I think that when you’re dealing with people who are so deeply impacted, it is urgent. Lives are on the line, and it can be really hard to figure out how to not feel that urgency when you are dealing with crisis after crisis after crisis. And there’s ways that that also gets amplified and manufactured inside of our organizations, and we need to find ways to challenge it.

Shay Yeah. Well, just a few things to think about, but I want to ask you, as we begin to pull our conversation to a close, what have you learned about what healing is? Since this is a conversation on healing podcast, what do you think you’ve come to learn and understand through your work about what it means to heal?

Hala You know, the thing that’s… I mean, there’s so much that I’ve learned, but the thing that’s really top of mind for me right now is that healing is about not being afraid of discomfort. Whether it’s discomfort in my own nervous system in life or my discomfort with somebody else. So a healthy relationship can have conflict and then recover. We can be imperfect. We don’t need the other person to be a projection of who we are. So there’s this being able to be in our fullest humanity, which is messy. So, I think that that relationship, and I think I came to healing with a desire to remove discomfort. So I was wanting to try to figure out how to never be uncomfortable. So this is what got me on the path, and now I’m realizing, no, it’s actually about not being afraid of that discomfort- internally, externally, relationally. And when we think about it systemically, when people are not dealing with oppression and marginalization and disposability, then they don’t have to be afraid of discomfort. Everything will be within the realm of reason. So I think that’s what I’ll leave us with.

Shay That’s great. Well, I really appreciate your book “Practicing Liberation” and all the contributing authors who help to make it so, because I feel like it’s a great gift for community organizers, and activists, and people that are just working within all this, these varied- sort of- change agent systems that are out there, wanting to do better, but at the same time needing resource support, intelligence, and understanding for themselves. And I think in the book, you strike a really interesting balance of building cultural self-awareness and then also tying that and the importance of that into the engagement and the activism and the work that you’re employed in sort of delivering. And so, I think it’s a great read and probably fun to check out the workbook too. I’ll have to look at that next. I haven’t gotten to see that yet.

Hala Yeah. Well, thank you so much. I’m really proud of the collaboration and the book, and I really hope that folks find it useful in the work that they’re doing.

Shay Great. Well, thank you so much for being on the show, Hala.

Hala My pleasure.

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