Healing
“The work of the healer is a work of love. The healer reaches into these painful areas of the soul and gently reawakens hope. S/he gently reawakens the ancient memory of who the soul is.” – Mary Farrell Bednarowski
This chapter on healing struck home for me. As I read this chapter sitting on the counter in Nummit, tears began to fill my eyes. This chapter is about women healing women. What else have I learned from experience at Dove’s Nest but the sometimes paradoxical beauty and torture of that.
Dove’s Nest is a facility solely for women. Unlike some other facilities, all of the staff are also women. Working there, I became a part of this picture. Women are hard to work with; emotions can run rampant. But the structure that Dove’s Nest used to heal was remarkable, and worth learning about.
As a staff member, I started every day with a staff prayer. We’d all gather at 8:30 in a small freezing-cold dining room. There, each staff member would have the chance to voice concerns about the coming day, about hurting family and friends, and any and everything that could affect the outlook for the day. That gave us each a chance to get anything off our chests, and start the day prepared for anything that would come with us. It allowed each member of the staff to feel important in the role that we held. It brought us together as a community of healers.
Each staff member was a healer in a different way, and so was each resident. I believe that any positive interaction makes a person a healer. It didn’t matter if a person was a councilor, was the volunteer the coordinator, was a resident or was the intern. We all were in this healing place, so we all had the capacity to heal. One of the most affective methods that I observed was just being present to a hurting individual. I would sit and crochet, or sit and journal if the person really didn’t want to chat. Just physically sitting there was sometimes enough.
I also had the pleasure of watching more experienced residents help heal the newcomers. We’d have a resident who’d been through the ropes become a buddy to one of the newer ones, and I’d get to watch as through the days the older resident would share bits and pieces of techniques and other advice to help the other person work through what they were dealing with. It was amazing to watch two hurting people heal each other.
Women have the capacity to heal in beautiful ways. 100 women in one building have the capacity for beauty beyond none other. Not going to lie, sometimes things got a bit emotionally heated, especially during that time of the month when it hit everyone at once. But we were also able to teach them how to use the emotions to create positives in their lives. They were our healers, and we were there’s.
