I’ll get to some inspirational talk in a minute, but I want to begin by acknowledging that this year brought personal, professional, and global challenges that left me raw and depleted. 

This video resonates with how I’m feeling. 🤣

I wanted to quit. I wanted to turn away. 

On more days that I can count, I could hear a small chorus of voices repeating: “Give up. Give in.”

Some days the voices were so loud, I allowed the words to escape my lips. 

It was tempting. Believe me. 

Everything felt bigger than me. Overwhelming. 

“Give up. Give in.”

I could’ve justified it. I could have presented it to myself and others, like a good idea. (I could have turned you into a “Colluder.” IYKYK😅) Maybe even like I was doing a version of “self-care.” 

But I couldn’t pretend to myself that’s what it was. Because I know what it was.

This year was an opportunity to turn toward the feelings: a chance to heal rather than believe them. 

I let myself be raw. 

I touched the loss, the outrage, and, yes, the overwhelm.

And I didn’t drown, I didn’t go under. 

Grief has shown itself in all its complicated and unpredictable yet familiar ways. 

I gave her space when I could and when I couldn’t, I knew there would be a future time for her that I had carved out with intention. A time for healing. 

Over the last 30 years, countless people have asked me, “What do you do to take care of yourself?” 

I do a healing practice.

A simple yet powerful practice. A practice so profound that I wished for everyone to have access to it. And so began LJIST.

As I prepare to turn the page on the Gregorian calendar, I move into marking the 30th year of this organization.

When I was 26 years old, I built LJIST around this healing practice.

I can tell this inner work has never been more relevant, more vital, more fundamental for justice.

In 1994, when I went to my first workshop with Lillian, no one was using “healing” language in social justice and movement spaces. Healing happened as personal growth if it happened at all. Healing certainly wasn’t part of what I or others considered necessary for social change.

At best it was “extra,” at worst “indulgent.”

Thirty years ago, I recognized how essential healing is to social change that I decided to make it my life’s purpose.

Healing is the process of restoring. 

We aren’t broken but we have been harmed. 

The feelings that come with hurt—interpersonal and institutional—need to be heard, felt, and acknowledged.

They cannot become the reason we do our movement work. They cannot be mistaken for our motivation for justice. They cannot be confused with our thinking. 

Feelings are to be felt, not acted on or justified.

Feelings are real—you came by them honestly—but they aren’t facts to be believed.

Healing allows us to differentiate feelings from thinking.

Healing unbraids that which appears so bound, so inseparable, as to be seamlessly one. They are not.

The pulling apart is the work. Work made easier and accessible in community.

Healing means restoring your connections, to yourself and each other, to place, and your ancestors.

Healing means reclaiming your power and an unwavering belief in your significance.

Healing means recovering the resiliency and belief in your goodness that you came into the world with. 

Healing means relaxedly and flexibly bringing your best mind to meet the moment, each and every present moment.

Healing means reminding yourself—and believing—that you are enough. 

Healing means rebecoming who you’ve always, already been—before oppression got in there and confused the heck out of you and me and all of us. 

This year I’d like to return to the foundations which are still revolutionary three decades later.

I want to sharpen our focus to the role of healing in social justice, which is to say in every aspect of your life. 

I’m recommitting to writing, talking, being visible in healing ways as a practice—and being accountable when I cannot.

Are you looking for support to take the next (or first) step? Do you want to join me? Do you want to do this healing in your workplace? With and in community?

Click here to schedule a conversation with me to discover what that might look like.

As Lillian would often remind me: “When where you are is harder than where you fear to go, you’ll move.” 

If you want to face those fears, whether it be a peak or a good, long look, because staying where you are no longer serves you, I would be honored to join you.

I’m committed to this journey—my own, yours, and the collective healing of us all.