I used the word empowerment in my company’s name because I believe that my life purpose is to be a healer.
The Oxford dictionary says,
empowerment as the process of becoming stronger and more confident especially in controlling one’s life and claiming one’s rights.
Through our history of trauma through no fault of our own, i.e. residential schools, epidemics, 60’s scoop, addictions many of us no longer have a voice. We have become so hurt that we do not feel we have the right to speak up or we are afraid to speak up. We go through the motions of survival sometimes barely eking out a living because to ask for anything more is something that we do not feel we have the right to do.
When I look around in our communities at the addictions, poverty and all the coping mechanisms that do not serve us, I cannot accept that this is the best that we can do.
When I am around our People I watch them closely, for glimpses of who they would have been if they were not beaten, abused or living and working in toxic situations filled with all the acting our behaviours of lateral violence. Wikipedia defines lateral violence as displaced violence directed against one’s peers rather than adversaries. You know, the gossiping, bullying and shunning that has become a norm in our communities.
There are times when I am speaking to people, I try to watch to see who they would have become if they were not so traumatized. Sometimes, it is hard to see but they may have become an outspoken advocate, an entrepreneur or leader with a clear vision for the future. But because they have so much trauma, they are living a life that may not be fulfilling their life purpose.
Our empowerment journey will always be shadowed by the trauma that we have experienced but we will also have a hard-won wisdom and compassion for people who are still very traumatized.
I have only recently embraced my own life purpose to be a healer. I study trauma. I study the effects of trauma so that I can better understand what happened to me, and to my People. It has led me to have a level of compassion for myself as well as for other People. Working with highly traumatized people is very specialized and has led me down paths that I may not have thought of. I never thought that I would have my own meditation practice or write meditations.
When I spoke to an elder about meditations their answer to me is, we always meditated but we never called it meditation. Our own practice of spending time in nature, vision questing and attending ceremony are ways that we meditated. We sat in silence, listening to our heartbeat and allowed the wisdom from Creator, our ancestors and Mother Earth flow into our heart.