Some insight! The How-To's of Approaching Global Healing
Me:
After having lived for 95 years, and my childhood under a totalitarian government/Hitler, I have finally arrived at what I consider my global responsibility. Yes, technology, fast-moving medical infusions, and the global pandemic have shifted my orientation toward the need for Global Healing! Whether friends, family members, teachers, or therapists, ask, “What is this? Please explain what you have in mind.” So here it goes!
My beliefs:
I am reviewing my own life cycle and examining my own healing process. I have been “classified” with the name “a Holocaust victim.” Naming things suddenly become a short cut to classification. i.e., “Oh, you are a Jew” or “Yes, you are a teacher, a baker, a father…” These classifications give the other person access to what they have learned about my roles.
When I think of Global Healing, it brings memories from all my senses, acquired beliefs, and the location of when and where I first encountered the expression of Global Healing. Images move forward within my mind. It is not a simple concept, such as what time is it? I am struggling with the idea, but here is what I currently believe: Global Healing should be reflected in the total environment in which we live, play, work, and learn, in the family, community, and workplace. It also includes how we govern ourselves in our homes, schools, and country. Of course, global Healing could be a component of everything in which we participate. (I feel I cannot escape the healing process although sometimes I require a particular ‘step-back’ environment, rest area, or ways to invent new forms and spaces for my own reflection.) I think of global Healing as a low hanging cloud overhead with a unique rain of re-generativity. The more we believe together, tap our creative resources, and the gifts that surround us, the more we can focus on this goal of global Healing and the more treasures we will uncover.
How shall we get there?
Initially, we need to uncover the many models globally that already exist or are on the road to being created. Let us start with the success stories that are already in existence. We can all help to tell and illustrate examples of global Healing through Zoom, iPads, and the many Silicon Valley initiatives, which can help us to circulate, teach about global Healing. I am beginning to feel that we need a NEW DISCIPLINE CALLED GLOBAL HEALING! Global Healing can take place for the moment, in the existing structure of communities. Some of us are also working in smaller groups. To brainstorm ideas about how to create new lenses and structures within our local community. We are discussing with people in the existing system how their role(s)might change. I think of these beginning conversations as informing people about the basic global healing knowledge, like the three R’s (reading, writing, and arithmetic). I am working to find ways we have communicated about global Healing in the past, present, and future. Please feel free to add your knowledge to this ‘Blog Pot!” I would love to hear your thoughts.
Comments
You are the greatest model for global healing I know of! Thank you for all you have taught me and all you continue to model and teach me. I love you!!
Thank you for sharing your Global Healing Project blog with me.
I can see that this is a courageous personal journey for you.
I remember my Freshman year at Wheelock (1973) when you had us keep personal journals of our experiences working with children. They were old-school blogs!
The trip to Portugal with your family sounds wonderful. You wrote that you “discovered Tamera.” Did you actually stumble upon it or had you planned to go there?
I was interested in your plan below to create Global Healing.
How shall we get there?
Initially, we need to uncover the many models globally that already exist or are on the road to being created. Let us start with the success stories that are already in existence. We can all help to tell and illustrate examples of global Healing through Zoom, iPads, and the many Silicon Valley initiatives, which can help us to circulate, teach about global Healing. I am beginning to feel that we need a NEW DISCIPLINE CALLED GLOBAL HEALING! Global Healing can take place for the moment, in the existing structure of communities. Some of us are also working in smaller groups. To brainstorm ideas about how to create new lenses and structures within our local community. We are discussing with people in the existing system how their role(s)might change. I think of these beginning conversations as informing people about the basic global healing knowledge, like the three R’s (reading, writing, and arithmetic). I am working to find ways we have communicated about global Healing in the past, present, and future. Please feel free to add your knowledge to this ‘Blog Pot!” I would love to hear your thoughts.
Locally, I am working with the New Hanover County (NC) NAACP Parent’s Council to help them advocate for the end of school suspensions and systemic racism in the New Hanover County Public Schools. (Two years ago, in one of the elementary schools, 82 K - 5 children were suspended. It is shameful!)
I believe through an anti-racist curriculum, abolitionist teaching, historically responsive literacy, the end of zero-tolerance discipline policies, and the implementation of restorative justice practices the local schools, children and their families, educators, and staff can begin to heal.
Peace,
Peter Rawitsch
Wheelock College, Class of 1977
Thank you for all of the many ways in which you have worked towards healing on a global scale. My whole life i
I have witnessed you work in a huge variety of ways to promote peace and healing, and to uplift others whose work is "Tikkun". Thank you for the legacy you have spent your life creating. I am bery inspired by you!!
Love your grandaughter
Takara Lee
Is it the same concept as "Tikkun Olam?" I would like to subscribe to your blog but wasn't able to. Let me know if there is a way. I am Kerri's friend, Tobi
I have been delighted to hear about “Global Healing” from you and Kerri. After reading your blog, I am happy to see that you have taken steps to manifest it in our world. I am in lockstep with your goals and intentions of “Global Healing.” It is an audacious but a much needed one, especially when we consider the vicissitudes of our lives. I believe your inquiry is capacious for knowledge to flow from all disciplines and to make your cause – I dare say, our cause – a reality for all the inhabitants of our world.
If I may be permitted to add to your contemplation, I wonder about the ingredients that make up “Global Healing.” You may agree with me that one such ingredient is kindness. It is one of the first messages that my parents inculcated in me. Indeed, it is not uncommon to hear parents wishing their kids to be kind or to practice kindness. However, I feel as if kindness is viewed as a burden, devoid of harmony between a heart and mind. It feels as if one needs to go out of the way to practice kindness, that is, it is over and above a transaction between two persons. If it is not in the job description, then I am not responsible for it.
My lens informs me otherwise. I see kindness as the glue of our humanity. A stranger’s ephemeral act of kindness can very well be a permanent source of hope for another. A government’s considerate policies which respect the quality of life will find its citizens off the streets, away from protests, and in consultation with each other. Fascinatingly, while I address kindness, engagement, and conversation, we are actually advancing “Global Healing” in our world.
We can speak in length about ways to engender kindness as well as other ingredients that make up “Global Healing.” For now, I would like to commend you on your life’s journey and look forward to your thoughts.
Wishing you health and safety,
Akbar
What a wonderful addition! Thank you!
Thank you for your thoughtful and sensitive message. Of course I agree with you that kindness goes a long way and is one of the underlying ingredients that gives you positive feedback. And, kindness has to exist in totality for plant life, for animal life, in human interaction, in our care for the young and the old and in their interactions. It should not be a burden or glue! It should be a common theme that begins the day and follows all through the day and ends with a hug at night. The quarantine that we must practice now ignores the five senses so often. We must find new ways for the time being to including all of our senses, like a song, a hand shake (or elbow bump), an exchange of flowers and beauty, little thoughtful actions we can do, creating a poem together and having the fingers dance to it. These are all ways that I have found to keep the kindness and beauty in my life. Human interactions (even on zoom) are accompanied with kindness when you exchange from your heart such things as mentioned above or even play a game and invent new ways!
So great to be able to connect with YOU in this blog. Please continue to communicate on here! Perhaps we can have a kindness column in this blog? Would you like to start it? We can fill it with our discoveries! Thank you Akbar for all you are!
In peace, kindness and global healing
Ed
This blog really changed my perspective on the project and topic for global healing. It not only told me, but showed me in words that this is really a lot broader and widespread than just one event or happening. This should be known every as you said in your blog as, "A NEW DISCIPLINE CALLED GLOBAL HEALING!" Your blog really changed the way I saw this and I hope it changes other people too.