When sitting down to write this essay, I can’t help but recall the lyrics from rapper Eminem, [insert a disclaimer about why he’s problematic]— “I’m Sorry Mama.” I was ten years old when the song was released, and terrifyingly fascinated by his account of his mother. What struck me most was his mention of Münchausen Syndrome by proxy. He raps, “Goin’ through public housing systems, victim of Münchausen’s Syndrome. My whole life, I was made to believe I was sick when I wasn’t. Til I grew up, now I blew up, it makes you sick to your stomach, doesn’t it?” In my youth, that line was like a live wire; I could feel his rage, and I believed it was justified despite not knowing what the hell he was talking about. I couldn’t conceptualize how someone could be “made to believe” they were sick. I assumed one’s body was either sick or not sick, never accounting for mental illness. Now, as an adult, it’s clear the many ways we’ve been made to believe certain things: the psychological warfare; the intentional poisoning of the water, food, and air we consume; and the exploitative, greedy sociopolitical systems that keep us unwell, often without us even knowing. Over time, we slowly merge with the disease, adopting a new identity that not only continues to spread the illness but stifles our potential to heal, to become whole, holy, and sovereign beings. If we are to seek out any type of medicine to remedy our pain, we must first become aware of that which keeps us sick.
The Annals of Family Medicine published “The Meaning of Healing: Transcending Suffering,” a study meant to define healing in a way that would help physicians promote holistic modalities of healing. The study defined the word heal as “to make sound or whole,” stemming from the root, haelan, the condition or state of being hal, whole. Hal is also the root of “holy,” defined as “spiritually pure.” Derivation from the same medieval root indicates a centuries-old association between healing and perceptions of wholeness and spirituality that challenges biomedical thinking. The study concluded that healing involves the physical, mental, emotional, social, and spiritual aspects of the human experience. It also suggests that the illness threatening healing erodes the integrity of personhood, isolates the patient, and engenders suffering. In order to transcend suffering, the threat must be removed, and the previous sense of personhood restated, which can only be facilitated through personal relationships that are marked through continuity. In our journey to heal or to transcend suffering, we are also transformed. The pain profoundly changes us; we become anew, never truly returning to who or what we were before.
If we are to go through the process of decolonization, let it be known that it’s not to return to some romanticized precolonial Golden Age. We have already become anew from merging, creating, and growing within colonial structures and ideologies. Decolonialism is not something frivolous nor merely colonialism’s theoretical opposite, because the world that colonialism created can’t come undone by flipping its terms. Rather, it is a revolutionary invitation for a complete and utter spiritual transformation in hopes of restoring broken aspects of our humanity. In Meditations on Frantz Fanon’s The Wretched of the Earth, author Owusu Yaki Yakubu further elaborates on this: “Decolonization influences individuals and modifies them fundamentally. It brings a natural rhythm into existence introduced by new people, and with it a new language and a new humanity. Decolonization is the veritable creation of new people… the ‘thing’ which has been colonized becomes human during the same process by which it frees itself” (1.3, p. 10). Those who were colonized are not the same people as they were prior to colonization. Liberation requires one to become something they’ve never quite known before, beyond the bandages of assimilation, integration, and inclusion within the colonizer’s world. This is also applicable to those who were born into generations of aggressors, who perpetuated the violence– it’s a spiritual inheritance worthy of treating.
It is transparent to those of us who are marginalized and fall on the spectrum of oppression, the various ways we’ve been dehumanized. Though this does not make our healing easier, it does assist in our awareness. “Since the racial drama is played out in the open, the Black man has no time to ‘make it unconscious.’ The white man, on the other hand, succeeds in doing so to a certain extent, because a new element appears: guilt. The Negro’s inferiority or superiority complex, or his feeling of equality, is conscious. These feelings forever chill him. They make his drama. In him, there is none of the affective amnesia characteristic of the typical neurotic.” Black Skin, White Masks, Frantz Fanon. In attempts to hold those who’ve aligned themselves with white supremacist, capitalist patriarchy accountable, one can easily slip into defense mode rather than seeing it as an invitation to become whole, supporting the forward movement of the collective. They may attempt to spiritually bypass, but an individual existing in a broken system is never truly untouched by its failures. To place yourself within the context of collective suffering is also a part of the spiritual work, which contains its own form of medicine.
In the fall of 2024, Mama Ayahuasca, a sacred Indigenous plant medicine from the Amazon and containing DMT, called me to sit with her again. I was more than familiar with the plutonic ways she speaks. So, when I stood before the cosmic mirror, I was reminded of the sneaky ways the subconscious tucks secrets to bed for nights, for years, for lifetimes. I was reminded of the dormant snake formed from centuries of terror, and how it slithers but never awakens in those who refuse accountability. Denial does not patch up a world full of cracks; something inevitably slips through…
As prayerful songs danced with copal smoke, I lay sprawled, eagle-like, on the cold floor, surrounded by the grueling sounds of others purging. Suddenly, an indescribable pain emerged, and a sensation thrust me into worlds and dimensions of suffering inseparable from me. The weight of wounds from neglected identities pierced through the center of my abdomen, right where I was experiencing hernia complications. What was revealed to me in that moment can best be described as an unclosed loop of atrocities, perpetuated in the name of gender and race superiority. What had been confirmed by the Shaman who was performing psychic surgery on me during the ceremony was the effort she put into removing shackles chained around my ankles. When I emerged from the spiritual trenches, I wondered who else had released the residue of colonial violence, and whether that would ever be someone’s intention upon entering a ceremonial space—heal me from the death grip of white supremacy? Liberate me from any agreement I’ve consciously or unconsciously made to uphold male dominance and violence! Aid me in assisting my evil white ancestors in writing their wrongs.
Perhaps those were the intentions of those I sat with; healing is so uniquely personal, and it’s said that Ayahuasca gives you what you need. Nonetheless, I needed the reminder that this work is soul deep, not skin deep. So who are you underneath it all? For those who’ve been conditioned under individualism, racialized capitalism, and patriarchal societies, the idea that these interconnected systems of violence should be of your personal concern and responsibility might sound ridiculous. Here’s a tough pill to swallow: our healing does not happen in a vacuum, and neither did the thing that made us sick. Our individual path to become whole must take into account the ways in which we’ve been deceived into thinking that we already are.
When discussing the commitment to the revolution, Che Guevara brilliantly executes the necessity to bring the personal into the collective. On August 19, 1960 Guevara spoke to the Cuban Militia, and in his address “On Revolutionary Medicine,” he articulates how the new role for medical workers must serve the revolution. Guevara notes that, “We are at the end of an era, and not only here in Cuba. No matter what is hoped or said to the contrary, the form of capitalism we have known, in which we were raised, and under which we have suffered, is being defeated all over the world. The monopolies are being overthrown; collective science is coring new and important triumphs daily. In the Americas we have had the proud and devoted duty to be the vanguard of a movement of liberation which began a long time ago on the other subjugated continents, Africa and Asia. Such a profound social change demands equally profound changes in the mental structure of the people. Individualism, in the form of the individual action of a person alone in a social milieu, must disappear in Cuba. In the future individualism ought to be the efficient utilization of the whole individual for the absolute benefit of a collectivity. It is not enough that this idea is understood today, that you all comprehend the things I am saying and are ready to think a little about the present and the past and what the future ought to be. In order to change a way of thinking, it is necessary to undergo profound internal changes and to witness profound external changes, especially in the performance of our duties and obligations to society.” Who are you responsible for? How are your actions, your talents, your thoughts in service to humanity? Guevara alludes to the mental transformation, or even a psychological liberation that must occur from any previous conditioning that inherently disconnects the individual from the people. He continues, “The doctor, the medical worker, must go to the core of his new work, which is the man within the mass, the man within the collectivity…find out what diseases they have, what their sufferings are, what have been their chronic miseries for years, and what has been the inheritance of centuries of repression and total submission.”
Through an Eastern medicine lens it is the organism not just the organs that gets treated, because the issue is viewed through the context of all the myriad aspects of the body because each part affects and interacts with all the other parts. Conservationist Aldo Leopold writes in The Round River: A Parable, “One of the penalties of an ecological education is that one lives alone in a world of wounds. Much of the damage inflicted on land is quite invisible to laymen. An ecologist must either harden his shell and make believe that the consequences of science are none of his business, or he must be the doctor who sees the marks of death in a community that believes itself well and does not want to be told otherwise. We don’t have to look far to see the symptom, but we do have to stretch our capacity to see why it is our concern. If not we will continue to be easily deceived, made to believe we aren’t sick.
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