What Does it Mean to Heal?

Interview with Structural Integration Practitioner, Tracy Dixon

This article is an interview I did with a dear friend and colleague, Tracy Dixon. Tracy and I have a conversation about healing, or rather, we undo the word, “healing”. This dialogue is part of a series of interviews I’ll be doing with other practitioners.

I ask Tracy, What does it mean to heal? 

Tracy practices Rolfing (Structural Integration). Along with Structural Integration, Tracy has a long-time meditation practice and is training in Somatic Experiencing and the Feldenkrias Method. I have personally experienced Tracy’s sessions to be deeply nourishing.  

I wanted to ask Tracy this question around healing because I think it’s a very complex and mysterious one. I worked as a bodywork practitioner for eleven years. I am also someone living with a chronic health condition that I’ve had for most of my life. Healing is something I’ve thought a lot about.

What is my responsibility as a practitioner when helping someone that comes to me to relieve their symptoms? What’s the responsibility of the client?

I used to think that healing meant that some part of myself as client, or my client’s “inner healer” could be awakened. I don’t believe this anymore, in part due to my re-education of how illness is often created and sustained from external factors, such as racial oppression and poverty. It’s too much to ask the individual to heal themselves.

When I google search the word “healing”, the first description I find for the word “healing” is, 

“The process of making or becoming sound or healthy again.” 

I am unsatisfied with the word “healing”. It seems to suggest we get somewhere. We become “whole” and “complete”. Healing is often a non-linear process with many layers of complexity to it. I’m looking for a word that can hold a larger container of experiences. A word that doesn’t necessarily end with health. 

What if healing is not possible? What if your condition is relentlessly chronic or terminal? Where do you turn when the medical system and the healing and wellness industry fails you? 

I also wonder if healing may not even be a beneficiary goal. As someone who lives with pain, I seek ease from pain. Not to heal the pain. It’s become a practice of mine to release attachment to feeling better. Of course, I want to relieve pain and suffering in my body-mind, but that won’t always mean that I will feel “well”. 

Somatics, therapy and wellness paradigms have been developed inside a Colonial, Capitalist framework. Tracy and my conversation involves larger questions around dismantling white body supremacy, hetero-patriarchy and ableism. We only briefly touch on these deeper subjects. To learn more, I recommend the powerful writer Sonya Renee Taylor, who writes eloquently about body hierarchy, intersectionality and radical self-love.

This is only the beginning of a larger conversation that I hope to have with many practitioners - maybe with some of you reading this now! 

K: Tracy, what does it mean to heal? 

T: I’m right in the middle of asking that question and I don’t have any conclusive answers. I think I used to think of healing in a very ableist perspective and being able to do what you want to do with your body. Healing was very body based because I got into Rolfing and Yoga through injury. So healing was very much about if you can't do something, you got to figure out how to do it and not be in pain. I think back to those early days and I think I felt very successful because I was able to heal essentially a broken back through natural methods like yoga and moving and not be in pain. I was very proud of myself because allopathic medicine told me I was supposed to take pain killers and be in pain forever. And so that meant to me that I could heal myself. I used those words, you know? It was so very individualist and very ableist. 

In that process though, that whole experience I cut out the noise that was around me that was trying to tell me what healing was and listen to what that was for me. And follow that. I didn’t know what it was and what it was going to be but I followed my intuition and instinct. So, maybe that’s the jewel of that experience that I can carry in relation to what is healing and what is “wellness' '. Because that included having a big meltdown and holding myself with care and learning how to be really vulnerable and cut through my isolation enough to receive gifts of what people were bringing to me. I think a lot about healing and wellness on such a macro level - we can’t be well without other people. I mean the word “well”... I don't even know how I feel about that now and I’m not even comfortable with saying that word… 

K: It’s hard to find language isn’t it? 

T: Oh yeah. Like healing - I’ve never liked that word, actually. I love the word midwife. Like supporting someone to go through an experience, to one state to another state. And sometimes people and babies die in childbirth. So there’s some way that word holds the cycle in a more real way, in a way that is close to nature. 

K: It makes me think of witches and healers. Our healer ancestors used to do this work.

T: Why I wanted to study Structural Integration and why I really resonated with practices like osteopathy and homeopathy and love chinese medicine for my own body, is that they are process oriented. When I decided to study Structural Integration I was like,  it doesn’t matter if I never touch bodies. I’m so glad I’m in this training, because it was like going beyond knowing and going to the unknown and trusting process and the unfolding of things. And not having an end goal.

I think of Structural Integration as educating or a paradigm offering a shape or process more than a goal. And there’s a reference point for health or your body or a relationship - there is a line that we are helping people orient to - but it’s their line and how the client relates to themselves around that line. I feel like Homeopathy is like that as well. What you get to discover about yourself. Maybe wellness or health is being in integrity in yourself, your principals, your values intact together with whatever you are in relationship with like-minded communities.. 

I’m thinking a lot about community now. Like, I want sovereignty. I want to be actualized and I want happiness and joy and pleasure and I am deeply entangled with humans and more than humans, so wellness and health is much bigger. And it feels like there’s more of a burden to it but I’m lately really feeling the joy of that. Writer and poet Sophie Strand is always talking about critters that are living on you and feeding on you and going back into the air and I find so much delight in that. I love that quote from her, “Make my body good soil”. 

K: Yes. A quote I love from Sophie Strand is:

“I’m much more interested in ensoilment than ensoulment. I want to have actual roots. I want my spirituality to have fur, pheromones, funk. I want it to live in a specific place. I want it to teach me how to be dynamically present and useful to my ecosystem. And I want to tell people that healing isn’t about completion. It isn’t about lightness. It’s about the mixing bowl where nothing is rejected, everything is included. In order to grow a garden, you need manure. You need compost. In order to heal the soil, you don’t clean it, you add to it: Fungi, ferment, bacteria, woodchips.”

T: I love that so much. I’ve often thought about keeping my body healthy so it would not be so polluted, but then a lot of people need medicine to stay alive and thrive so I feel careful about that language, too. So yeah, what is health and wellness? I’m feeling stumped about how to speak to what I do in the greater context because I want to speak to that. I want be a place where people can have the conversations they need to have in my workspace. I want to somehow transmit my version of health which includes dismantling...You know I predominately work with White Settlers and I want the transmission of my own dismantling of White body supremacy to come into the room, and that be part of what is being in right relationship and right integrity and being on your line. So it is politicized too. 

K. Yeah. When you talk about a process, and part of that process is going to be uncomfortable. Because what I have noticed from many White spiritual and healing communities is that there’s this wanting to get to the healing and being “healthy” and “whole” and bypass being uncomfortable and being in pain. I’m sometimes surprised by people I meet that say they’ve done all this healing work, but as soon as they feel pain they want to run away from it. 

As someone who lives with chronic pain, the amount of times when I say, “I live with chronic pain”, I hear in reply, “What have you done for it?” There’s an assumption that I must be not doing enough. And that I must be doing something wrong for me to have pain. Especially for White-bodied people, I think learning how to be more uncomfortable is really important in dismantling white supremacy. It’s also important in dismantling ableism. And not making assumptions that people who are chronically ill are “wrong”. There’s something very individualist about that. This is not just my thinking of course. Many have said this before me. I live in a world that is really toxic and fucked up. That may be part of the reason why I deal with pain. Also, pain is terrible but it’s not necessarily a “bad” thing. Do we have to go to that there’s something wrong, there’s some imbalance that we have to fix? 

T: Yeah. I was listening to a talk and a couple people described the process around grieving and death and it was really beautiful. There was an inclusion of death and grieving in conversation. I’m thinking about people facing cancer treatments. It's implicit that treatment is needed to think about death. I am feeling myself wanting to hold it differently, like not going into urgency and classic White conscious community “Let’s do gratitude practice”! To learn to just be with this person in this relationship with this massive thing. Seeing this person be with this. And feel that. That feels different than this urgency around wanting to help someone heal. What is that, but my own fear of my own mortality.

K: Exactly!

T: In relation to chronic pain, my own fear that I may be in chronic pain. 

K: I literally wrote that in an article recently. I asked the question, what am I bringing up for you? So you think that if you do all the right things you wouldn’t be in pain like I am? Some people project their fears onto me. They think, there’s gotta be some way that I could figure out not to be in pain. Because it’s scary to be in pain. 

T: Right, because underneath that are the concerns of, what if I die, what if I’m in pain? Right next to that is, Oh my God. I’m so isolated. I’ve just been working in the grind of this individualism perspective and who am I going to be with? And who do I get to take care of? The isolation comes through so that’s underneath that. 

Realizing your mortality means that you need people. I am not separate from people. I attended a workshop with Dr. Bayo Akomolafe and someone talked about “growing our heart together”. This lined up with being in practice and being there with someone is in pain. Practitioner and Client are growing their heart together. And that’s what we are doing on the collective level when we are in presence together. If we were just to do that, that is revolutionary. Right? How many times have you been on the (meditation) cushion and you think, if only all these other people would do this they would just get it, right? Presencing together to me feels like healing. And maybe the most important thing. That feels like wellness. The more we can expand, resonate, attune - you know all these fancy words, but I love this “growing the heart together”. 

K: That’s amazing. I love that.  Thank you so much for your wisdom and thoughts on healing.