What Does it Take to Heal?
By Evie Toland
To heal: to become sound or healthy again.
In the winter of 2019, I got really sick. I couldn't keep any food down for weeks. It was a stomach bug, the doctors at urgent care told me, exacerbated by my long-term IBS condition. Another yeast infection cropped up for the sixth time in a year. I lay in bed, weak, anxious and tired to my bones, as the sun rose bright and orange on the new year of 2020. I vowed to keep only one resolution: to heal.
The first few months of 2020 were no better. I tried different diets - low sugar, low carbs, low FODMAP, more smoothies, then less smoothies - but my commitment was new and fragile, and I broke easily whenever a chocolate bar would eye me from its place on the racks near the register. At the same time, I was moving to Southwest Colorado with no plan in mind - no job, no place to live, and no idea what was next. I remember sitting on a stump overlooking a small lake covered in snow, ravens circling overhead, ponderosa pines shaking dust onto my hat, and the San Juan mountain range striking my eyes with their quiet yet fierce white-tipped peaks. I barely had enough energy to walk the quarter mile back to my car, and sobs gripped my shaking chest. I had no idea how to heal my body, or my heart. But the mountains looked at me kindly, and the junipers whispered, "Stay. Trust." So I did.
A month later, the COVID-19 pandemic began in earnest and the world slowed to a screeching halt. My body sighed in relief. This, ironically enough, was the moment my healing truly began. Slowness - radical slowness - was the medicine I needed. Because it wasn't just that my body was sick and failing me, my whole lifestyle was sick and failing my body. My body was the canary in the coal mine begging for me to stop, look, listen, and to do something different. I am a hard worker, anxious with ambition and a drive that never satisfied, and rest - well, that was something that only came with collapse. In the slowing down and sinking in, while the rest of the world erupted into a panic about getting sick, I finally felt a faint hope of getting better.
I found a naturopath who could finally diagnose me with the right conditions, and therefore, get me started on a more directed treatment plan. I found a diet that allowed for my gut to take a rest too, and feel supported by simpler, easier-to-digest foods. I spent more time doing a lot of nothing; lying under the shade of juniper, listening to the solitaires and jays take turns filling the void with their voices, watching the sun move across the sky. I sang. I cried. I surrendered.
The summer passed and, slowly, my body got stronger. I could go days without any discomfort or pain. My anxiety had lessened its grip, becoming only a passing wave, a friend I could acknowledge and then move beyond. But, after 4 months of expensive treatment and concerted effort, I still didn't feel like myself. I wasn't healed. Sitting next to the drying creekbed, watching crawfish crawl towards my toes, and dizzy from heat and exhaustion after a morning spent weeding in the vegetable fields, I suddenly realized why. I wasn't actually changing anything, and my body knew it. All spring I was waiting for the chance to dive back into my busy life and when summer rounded the curve, I spent all day farming and all night bartending. I went right back to my pre-pandemic pace, only to slip right back into stagnant sickness.
I decided then, to make the commitment that felt absurd, scary, and truly impossible to undertake: every decision would be based on the question, "Does this help heal my body?" If the answer was yes, I would do it. If the answer was no, I wouldn't. It seemed simple enough for things like food or the appropriate bedtime, but what about when I applied it to my romantic relationship? My job? My house? Every aspect of my life - big or small, simple or complex - could be looked at through this lens and suddenly, the work felt really clear. If I wanted to heal, to truly heal, I had to get committed to radically changing my life.
I ended my relationship. I quit my job. I found a new home to live in. I backed out of all previous social commitments and I re-committed to my diet and treatment plan. I practiced trusting that, in the process of following the yes's to my sacred question, everything else would fall into place. It was terrifying. It was lonely. The grief came quickly in the silence of surrendering, and I let myself feel all of it. In hopes that I could share this grief with community, I participated in the Rite of Passage Journeys online grief ritual in November. As the drumming began for the ritual portion, and I began dancing around the flickering candle of my altar, I felt an intense rage towards all that had happened to me push through the walls of my disassociation and fly through the room. I punched pillows wildly. I screamed and yelled. I sobbed and cursed the doctors who had misdiagnosed me and, worse, disregarded my pain, the partners, friends and family members who stood by and said nothing as I grew sicker and weaker, the culture that pushed me to work harder than I was capable of, rewarding me only with shame for all that I had not done. But most of all, I cursed myself - for ignoring all the signs that in fact, this sick version of myself wasn't normal and for refusing the power and responsibility to change it. As the Journeys facilitator, Randy Morris, described in the ritual, the angel of grief had come to hold me, only so that at the end, she could release me into brighter clarity of the way forward.
As the drumming died down, and I held my shaking chest, I asked whoever might be listening: "Why? Why give me this path of pain and prolonged illness? What are you here to teach me?" A thought rose up from the emptiness of my gut and it said, clearly, and with relief, "Because now you know what it takes."
Images flooded in from the year - overflowing hospitals, raging wildfires and hurricanes, police shootings and white supremacist marches, families separated, oil spilling, rivers roaring with polluted rage. The Earth is sick, I realized, just like I was. Its pain is ignored and dismissed, its body used up, and its yelling for somebody to listen. What does it take to truly heal the Earth body? To heal our collective human society, which grows out of this Earth like branches to a single trunk?
It is a question so many beings are living into, fighting for, and dying for. This sickness, which had held my body tightly for 8 years, and the grief that followed and flowed after, provided a few railings to hold onto while walking my path to answer this question: It requires radical, commitment to change rooted in a single, sacred value of embodied health. It requires slowing down enough to listen to the innate intelligence in our own bodies, and in the Earth, on how to provide the conditions for this healing. It requires allowing grief to guide us towards a collective reckoning of all the trauma and pain that has happened to the land and our human communities, so that we may see the way forward more clearly.
Healing ourselves, our communities, and our ecosystems is interconnected, complex work. It is not easy or comfortable, but it is possible, and the way forward can be quite simple. We can ask, with each decision, "Does this help heal my body, others' bodies, and the ecosystem body?" If it is a yes, follow it. If it is a no, then let the hard work begin. Let us live into and embody this question in all that we do. Let us shed, break down, and grieve together, stepping into the unknown to create a collective path of radical committed change towards healing.
Evie Toland is a writer, farmer, teacher and naturalist. She loves wandering through woods in search of tracks, bird feathers, and the right words to share the beauty of this world with others. She currently resides in Southwest Colorado, on Ancestral Puebloan, Dine, and Ute land.
This is What Healing Looks Like
Snake bites in feverish dreams.
Long months of staring at sky
feeling only wisps of tenderness.
Red, hot, boiling anger erupting
in fits and spurts,
truly just like lava.
Welling eyes as flocks migrate south,
then north,
then south again.
Realizing another month has passed and feeling all the same.
Circling, spiraling, swirling, sinking.
Short, sharp dreams shatter me awake.
Finding friends in sun and moon,
river and rain.
Searching for my face in old photographs
of my parents
and finding, instead,
forgiveness.
Lying down,
arms open to sky,
eyes closed to breeze,
learning how to
breathe.
Intermittent days of surprising lightness,
perhaps, lighter than before.
Feet that walk in clarity.
Pain that sings in brilliant, fluorescent colors.
Humility.
Head bowed humility.
Knees bent humility.
Sitting with stones long enough
to hear the patient sound of a heart healing.
Strength of ancient roots reborn.
Constant confusion,
an impenetrable fog,
then, briefly,
bright, blinding sun.
by Evie Toland
