How To Holistically Heal... How To Be With Oneself Amid Collective Stress
A reflection on the hidden weight of collective stress, how it shapes our health, & why meeting it is part of the healing.
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In this edition…
HEALING: How To Be With Oneself Amid Collective Stress
REVERENCE: The Collective & The Individual
EXPLORING: Isms (belief systems, ideologies, or frameworks that shape how power, identity, value, and belonging operate in society)
1. HEALING: How to Be With Oneself Amid Collective stress
This post is for those suffering with persistent, chronic symptoms and the feeling that your nervous system is ready to heal, but somehow can’t. That stuckness doesn’t mean you can’t make choices that support your healing process. But it does mean that what’s happening around you, inside you, needs to be named, met, and tended to. Healing requires a meeting of all the things that create dis-ease, and conversely, all the things that invite health.
Perhaps this post is also to gently make you aware: the collective stress is affecting your health. Even if you can’t trace it to a single event or symptom, it lives in the body, in the fatigue, the sleeplessness, the ache, the flare-up, the flatness. It isn’t separate from your healing.
And part of that healing, perhaps the deepest part, is learning how to be with oneself in the midst of it all. To sit with awareness, presence, and vulnerability… even when the world around you feels fractured and overwhelming. Especially then.
At first, it can feel like we’re watching from the outside in. Observing. Holding space. Bearing witness. But at some point, something shifts. A quiet realisation emerges:
I am not separate from the stress. I am a part of it.
I am you. You are me. We are everyone. There is no outside.
Some of us feel this more acutely than others, hypersensitive, hyper-attuned, vigilantly aware. For some, it’s a nervous system wired that way. For others, it’s a coping strategy. A way of surviving, of adapting by merging into others, their pain, their energy, their world, often at the cost of knowing ourselves.
Whatever your pathway here, I know many of you feel this too. How? Because I sit with you, one-on-one, in my clinic, every week. You share your hearts with me, your stories, your overwhelm, your fatigue. You are part of my community. And I want you to know: me too.
When I say I’m feeling the collective stress, I don’t mean I’m personally in crisis. I am not fleeing for my life. I am not starving. I am not in a war zone. My home is not under siege. My family and friends are safe. Most of my community is well.
And still, I feel it. I feel the pain, the weight, the unbearable heaviness of it all. I carry it deeply.
Many of you have told me: You’re struggling to live. Struggling to go to work. Struggling to tend to your families. Struggling to tend to what is urgent, because the collective grief, fear, and helplessness have become too heavy to carry.
Perhaps that’s the real reason I’m writing this post. To name this as a barrier to healing. As an underlying layer of stress that lives beneath all the local, personal, daily stressors. It’s in our bodies, in our nervous systems, in our sense of time and safety and meaning.
We each come to this moment from different places, shaped by different stories. For me, it began with fear, fear passed down through generations.
When my family migrated to this country, my father was just 11. My mother was 18. That fear was felt and carried through them and through me.
Fear of not belonging.
Fear of standing out.
Fear of causing trouble.
Fear of not being welcome in a land that wasn’t always welcoming.
The message was: Stay low. Fit in. Don’t make noise.
But tell a child to suppress themselves, and they often ask: But why? That question, that small, quiet resistance, never left me.
Now, with time and perspective, I understand: my parents and grandparents were carrying unprocessed trauma. War. Survival. Silence was protection. I honour that.
But silence is not the whole story.
Look at people like Gabor Maté, himself a child of war. When trauma is acknowledged, felt, and integrated, it can give rise to clarity. To compassion. To truth-speaking. To action that serves the collective.
Fear can either silence us and uphold the status quo or it can awaken us. And what got us here, this accumulation of silencing, othering, separating, is not what will get us out.
So when I say I feel the collective stress, I mean all of this.
The heartbreak. The knowing. The questioning. The longing.
The layered inheritance.
The trembling and the truth.
The deep ache to live in alignment with something better.
And I want to tell you something else, something I’ve felt reluctant to say out loud.
There are times I feel stuck. Locked. Afraid to speak.
Not because I lack clarity, but because I fear the backlash.
The digital attacks. The shaming. The subtle (and not-so-subtle) punishments that come with voicing something counter to the dominant narrative, whatever that narrative happens to be.
This isn’t just discomfort.
It’s fear.
And it’s a fear I know many of you carry too.
And fear contributes to dis-ease.
At times it feels like we’re living in a storyline written by an empire built to silence its people. A place where questioning is seen as dangerous. Where the illusion of choice is offered, but conformity is rewarded.
I remember doing a school presentation in high school on conformity. Even then, I was eager to break free from a world that asked me to live one way on the outside, while my inner world told a very different story.
As a child of migrants, I carried not just my culture, but their trauma. Their ways of being. Their longing to belong. It’s a hard starting point, to integrate into a culture so vastly different from the one you inherited. I didn’t want to conform to my ancestry, but I also didn’t know how to belong anywhere else.
As a teenager, I just wanted to fit in.
As an adult, I want to be free.
What I was taught, stay low, fit in, don’t make noise, was simply another version of what many of us inherit.
But the work of healing asks us to untangle those stories.
To become aware. To question. To stay awake.
To process what was unprocessable. To sift through the noise.
To attune to what’s true for us, and for the collective.
And this, I’ve come to understand, is where healing begins.
Not in overriding these patterns, but in naming them.
Not in pushing through, but in pausing long enough to feel what’s really here.
This awareness - the speaking of it, the staying with it, is what helps us meet what we carry.
When I’ve shared my views, on my own platforms, in my own spaces, I’ve come under attack. Not questioned. Attacked.
And the more you feel, the more deeply you care, the more willing you are to speak especially for the collective good, the more vulnerable you become.
It’s not about one issue.
It’s the powers behind all the -isms - racism, sexism, capitalism, colonialism, authoritarianism.
It’s the illusion of separation.
It’s the fatigue of truth-telling in a world that rewards silence.
It’s the longing to live in integrity in a world that so often punishes it.
And yet, I choose this path.
I chose a career outside the dominant paradigm. A path that questioned one kind of medicine. One kind of science. One kind of way of thinking about health, healing, life, and living.
So when I say I feel the collective stress, I mean all of this.
And still... I remain here.
In service. In relationship. In truth.
Sitting with it. Speaking it. And gently asking:
Are you feeling this too?
2. REVERENCE: The Collective & The Individual
We often speak about healing as an individual journey. And yes, tending to the self, your body, your symptoms, your boundaries, your nourishment is vital. But we do not heal in isolation. We are part of families, communities, ecosystems, cultures. What affects the whole inevitably affects each of us.
The collective is the invisible web we’re woven into. It holds the shared grief, hope, memory, trauma, and resilience of a people, a planet. Collective stress is real. So is collective care. When one person suffers, it echoes outward. And when one person softens, becomes more aware, more open, that too ripples out.
It takes great strength to hold space for the collective. To feel into the world without turning away. To advocate. To care. To organise. To witness. Some people are called to this work. Others find themselves in it simply because of who they are. Their nervous systems attuned. Their hearts wide open. Their awareness stretched across borders and generations.
This is a reverent bow to them, to you, if this is you. Your presence matters. Your capacity to sense and stay with the whole is a sacred gift. May we care for those who care for the collective, even as we care for ourselves. This is not a binary, individual or collective, it is a dance between both.
3. EXPLORING: Isms (belief systems, ideologies, or frameworks that shape how power, identity, value, and belonging operate in society)
The weight we carry isn’t just personal or inherited, it’s structural. It’s the result of systems that have shaped the world we live in. Racism, sexism, capitalism, colonialism, authoritarianism, these -isms are not abstract ideas. They are legacies of power, control, and separation that have been built into our laws, institutions, and even our inner narratives.
They didn’t arise out of nowhere. Most of them were born from conquest, fear, and the desire to dominate. Racism was institutionalised to justify slavery and segregation. Colonialism claimed land through force and rewrote whole histories. Sexism embedded itself through religious texts and political systems that valued men over women. Capitalism, unchecked, turned human beings and nature into commodities. Authoritarianism silences dissent and rewards obedience.
Over time, these structures became so normalised that many of us couldn’t see them, they just became “the way things are.” But these forces still shape our nervous systems. They tell us who belongs and who doesn’t. Who gets rest. Who gets heard. Who gets punished for speaking up. These -isms aren't just “out there”, they live inside us, in the form of anxiety, disconnection, survival mode, and chronic dis-ease.
To heal, we don’t just tend to the individual body, we tend to the body within the system. And we start by seeing clearly. Not with shame, but with awareness. Awareness gives us language. Language gives us choice. And choice makes room for something new.