Trauma, Recovery, & Collective Care

An Eco-Exploration of Liberatory Healing with Alex Soran

Dear reader, today’s issue of The Pomegranate & the Rose is quite different! Alex Soran is my good friend and colleague at Union Theological Seminary, and we sat down recently to have a conversation about trauma and how it relates to chronic illness and autoimmune disease. As you will hear, Alex and I both struggle with autoimmunity, chronic illness, and histories of trauma (we don’t go into any detail here) — and we both turn to the natural world for healing and understanding frameworks for collective care and liberation, especially when it comes to overcoming the fragmenting isolation we experience in a production-driven capitalist society. Join us as we envision more grounding, nurturing, and sustainable ways of being.

We created this issue for our Trauma-informed Pastoral & Spiritual Care class, but these intersecting areas are of such interest and importance to us both that I anticipate deeper exploration of them in the future. Please share your thoughts and resonances with us below. Thank you for your continued support.

[The following text is a transcript of our conversation, which you can listen to above.]

Jennifer: Welcome back to The Pomegranate & the Rose. This is Jennifer. Today, we're going to be doing something a little bit different. I'm here with my good friend Alex Soran. We are both students at Union Theological Seminary. Today, we're going to be having a bit of a conversation around trauma and suffering. So if you're interested in that fun stuff, I hope you stick around. This is something that we talk about fairly frequently and that we both focus on in our work here at Union, and how we are aiming our vocational paths forward. I think both of us would agree that this is a really rich area for exploration, so I do hope you find this interesting. This will be a little bit of an introductory conversation that may turn into something a bit richer in the future, but we'll see!

Alex: Hi there. My name is Alex Soran. I am a student at Union Theological Seminary with Jen. I'm particularly interested in building skills around chaplaincy that address embedded theologies that specifically relate to our context in American culture and some of the more harmful ideologies that have developed as a result of colonialism and how those ideologies affect people who have oppressor roles.

Jennifer: And I have been working at the hospital chaplain this past year as I finish up my studies and will be engaged in a chaplain residency starting this summer. So the areas of suffering and trauma and grief, as they relate to individual experiences and as they relate to our structures and systems, is something that we are both really interested in and that we are gaining a lot of really nuanced perspective on.

Alex: Jen and I both have ongoing journeys with autoimmune disease and move, I would say for myself, in and out of disability. And so, we often talk about that and how it relates to our relationships to trauma and recovery and how hard recovery is in a disabled body in a society that is so isolating and has systems that are constantly stacked against us receiving care.

Jennifer: This is something that we spend a lot of time talking about and navigating, and we are both really interested in exploring the ways experiences of trauma live on in our bodies and how those experiences of suffering become chronic illness and autoimmune disease. And I think today actually might be three years since we officially went into lockdown in the covid pandemic, and while we are hopefully on our way out of it, the past few years have really been an unprecedented global experience in so many ways, and I think something that we haven't even begun the process is what an isolating experience this has been and how traumatic for how many people.

Alex: Not only have we dealt with the physical isolation being in lockdown, but then this “mass disabling event” is how it's being described, the covid-19 pandemic, and how that also is isolating in these ways, but people are permanently disabled. And then, because of the way that our society structured, cannot access resources or cannot access community. So it just compounds on itself.

Jennifer: Right. I think the pandemic has really brought to light how unprepared so many of our social structures are for accommodating disability and accommodating trauma and grief and prolonged suffering. Our health systems certainly seem unprepared to handle it in many ways. I mean, I know the hospital that I've been working with is still in there, trying to come to grips, still in the aftermath. And I don't know if our health systems will ever be the same, but I know that so many people are dealing with chronic autoimmune disease following covid, and we probably won't have answers or appropriate therapies for people for a while to come.

And I think that also brings to light just how isolating these experiences are. The experience of disability is inherently isolating. And if you look at the narratives that dominate pop culture, we see so much about self-care—everything is self-care—and there's just all this pressure on the individual to help themselves to get better, to stop suffering on our own, and we don't really talk about how unrealistic and unsustainable that is as advice and as a pathway towards healing. We're not really designed as a species to be isolated, and healing doesn't really happen on an individual level. We, I think, are inherently relational creatures and so I think it's really important for us to look at isolation when it comes to prolong the suffering.

Alex: Yeah, I think that, under capitalism and particularly post-industrial revolution, there's been such a shift into not only rugged individualism, but this idea of man-becoming-machine and this obsession with production and productivity. Within man-becoming-machine is this narrative that we are not living organisms and the increased and really extreme splitting from our bodies.

Jennifer: I think when we look at that kind of disembodiment that is really prevalent in our culture, and you think about the theologies that we have that really look more at transcending the body, at the body as being something transient and lowly and earthen, and that that is something to be either suppressed or overcome or transcended beyond. And I think that those theologies have done a lot more harm than good when we are looking at theologies around suffering that acknowledge the reality of suffering, and grief, and trauma, and illness, and all of these things that we are so often unwilling to really look at and sit with. If we think about or look at what other spiritual pathways exist that are more nourishing and grounding and nurturing, we often find ourselves being led back to the natural world that we are inextricably a part of, and yet we don't consider ourselves as such. But I think looking at examples in our kin in the natural world and drawing on ecological frameworks for understanding trauma and suffering, I think there is a lot of richness and a kind of redemption to be found of our experiences.

One of the things that often comes to mind to me, is this phrase that was coined by Buddhist teacher and anthropologist Joan Halifax of “fruitful darkness,” and that brings to mind for me images of good soil: rich and dark soil that has been made fertile through decay and decomposition. And if we look at soil and we understand soil that way and where fertility comes from in the natural world, we can sort of better understand these cycles of life and death, of fecundity and decay, and we can become more comfortable moving in and out of these seemingly opposite realms, but which are so deeply intertwined.

Alex: It's interesting to reflect on my journey with theology and trauma and look at how it was actually theologies of suffering, existing theologies of suffering and transcendence, that did cause harm to me and made me disinterested in engaging with my spiritual traditions. And the way that I actually found liberation out of those theologies that told me that it was part of God's plan or that I needed to just transcend my body almost in a dissociative way. What brought me through that was actually an environmental science class where I engaged with the salmon forest project and the work of David Suzuki in British Columbia. And in the salmon forest ecosystem, we see there are these keystone species that kind of hold the ecosystem together in the life cycle, and those were the salmon in this case. And, of course, that has implications for conservation. But within the salmon Forest, there was the story of life and death and how the salmon are being brought by the bears into the forest after being caught and eaten, and they’re decaying, they're being eaten by the maggots, they're being strewn about the forest floor, and then out of that are growing fungi and eventually the trees are fed. And we eventually see that the whole ecosystem is entirely cyclical and that it relies on life and death cycles.

And I think for me, that allowed me to contextualize my spiritual death in the face of trauma in this broader story of death as a process that's necessary for rebirth. And so I think these stories that our natural environments tell us are often a lot more compelling because they not only intellectually make sense in terms of being reflective of what we are observing in nature, but I think that they actually resonate with our bodies because our bodies inherently know that we are both light and darkness, we are both death and life. We hold all of these dualities and we cannot separate ourselves from them. And that within ourselves, we have the capacity for creation and destruction, and we ultimately do need to go through processes of life and death over and over in our material life and then beyond.

Jennifer: I think there's so much wisdom in the things that you just shared. I feel like in my journey with chaplaincy so far I have found myself an increasingly outspoken advocate when it comes to talking about grief and trauma in pastoral care spaces and spiritual care spaces because there's almost a pathological aversion to that kind of spiritual darkness, that people just want to totally block out and be all sunshine, and hope, and silver linings in a way that is not only not real, but is so injurious to ourselves and especially to others. Especially if we're in any kind of caregiving role, it's extremely harmful to suppress somebody else's suffering and try to rush them along into what we think of as a positive outcome.

There's a quote that is coming to mind that is a beloved quote of mine from the late great Joseph Campbell that says, “The cave you fear to enter holds the treasure you seek.” And I love that quote because I think it speaks to this deep fear that we have of the dark. And yet, I think so many of us would say that we feel a deep longing for something. I think there's often, especially in our culture, a longing to be seen, a longing to be witnessed and affirmed, and we may not even be able to name it, but I think we can feel the shape of what's missing. And I think we can claim part of what's missing by becoming more comfortable venturing into the dark, and not just by ourselves but together. I think that's a really key piece especially when it comes to grief care and trauma care.

I often say, when people ask me, what I see my role as a chaplain as, I think of it as holding hands with someone in the dark. It maybe sounds overly simplistic, but it is surprisingly difficult for people to do. I think it's often very uncomfortable and it may not be what comes naturally, but I think it is one of the most loving and kind things that we can do for somebody else. And we actually understand this to be one of the most healing kinds of spiritual care and accompaniment that we can offer someone.

Alex: I think, too, in looking at our religious traditions— Jen and I, I know we both have significant Abrahamic lineage. And when we look at our prophets and we look at our saints, so much of what they created that we hold dear and that we consider beautiful today was birthed in darkness. And not only was it birthed in darkness, but it was birthed in darkness and then transferred to a community that was in darkness. And it was in holding those stories and creating beauty within those horribly oppressive contexts that the people actually came together and were able to hold hands in the darkness and not actually transcend their bodies, but create stories of resistance that would carry them through and pass them on to their children.

And so, I think it's really important to contextualize those stories in the real experiences of those people, not just the mythical—I feel like we mythologize those stories often. And we kind of turn them into these broad archetypes rather than actually understanding the lived experiences of those people and how the stories those weren't just myths, those were actually lived experiences of wrestling with darkness and often coming out completely changed. We think of Jacob wrestling with God and having a permanent limp. Like, what are the implications of that for disability? So when we think about these stories that we carry through our theological and our traditions’ lineages, I think one important and sacred aspect is the creation of beauty and how, for me as a disabled person, I feel like that's something I can always create.

So in this world of productivity and needing to constantly produce something that's practically significant or materially significant, I remember that beauty— and not only creating beauty but embodying beauty— is inherently sacred and I think that reframe is what allows us to begin to talk about a just society in terms of disability because now you're going from “I'm not capable of doing this thing,” to your whole world is shifting in viewing creation, viewing the non-material as just as sacred as the literal things you’re producing, and just shifting the way that you interact with beauty, no longer as a commodity. It's something that I think is so hard to commodify and, oftentimes for me being sick, that’s something that I feel like is what often perpetuates my own internal ableism towards myself—it’s like, oh well, the only thing I can create now is beauty and that isn't practical, and so therefore it's not worthy. But when we look at our religious traditions, that's actually what’s carrying us. So for collective care, if we're viewing beauty as something that's as important as anything that we can materially produce for our daily living, it changes everything.

Jennifer: Yeah, I think beauty kind of turns us back to questions of, “What does it mean to be alive? What does it mean to be human? Why are we having this experience of being alive? What do we do with the time that we have?” And I think we would probably mostly all agree that we don't exist for the purpose of producing profits for other people. We don't exist for the purpose of material productivity and commodification. We are not just links in a capitalist system. If we think about what makes us human, what we think differentiates us as a species, I think beauty, and stories, and meaning-making are the types of things that come to mind. And all of those things, I think, exist and arise from community and from collectivity. We don't really create meaning on our own. We largely don't tell stories just for ourselves. These are things that get passed down through generations, and chains of transmission are usually carried forward in beautiful, creative, artistic ways. And if we think about the arts and we think about that kind of creation for pleasure and joy and meaning, it so often involves the body, and is grounded in the body, and is the spirit speaking through and with the body, whether we're talking about visual arts or dance or other kinds of movement, singing… you know, there's so much sacred alchemy that takes place when we are utilizing the full ground of our being for that kind of creation.

Alex: Yeah, and so I think that groundedness ultimately— when we're reflecting, tying it back to ecology, bringing us back to this idea that you introduced of holding hands in the darkness— really brings us together in this collective grounding and what Laura Marie from the Las Vegas Radical Mental Health Collective, drawing from her traditions, calls this concept of “being with.” And for her, being with is rooted in the body, it's rooted in just being, and there's nothing more that's necessary. In her blog Listening to the Noise Until it Makes Sense, which I highly recommend you read, she talks a lot about fat phobia, fat liberation, ableism, disability, chronic illness, and abundant love and compassion.

She writes in her blog that, for her, “being with” is to be grounded, to be in her body, and to be curious. She says, “Love is what my body is for. When I'm just a spirit, I'll have a different project. For now, I'm on Earth as a human being. This body is to hold other bodies. My heart is to pump my blood, but it's also ticking to remind me that I only have so much time here as Laura Marie. I'm going to do all the love I can during this sacred possibility.”

Jennifer: That’s such a beautiful quote, it brings us back to this idea of collective care and our inherent relationality and interbeing not just as humans, but as all living beings on Earth. We are all far more deeply interrelated and interdependent than we even realize. I think the idea that this body is to hold other bodies and that we're here for love and that loving is what our bodies are for— that is just such a beautiful reminder of what we are reclaiming when we distance ourselves from the productivity demands of capitalist culture. But when we remember that we are we are here as bodies and that we only have so much time and none of us knows how much time we have, it brings a different sense of value and sacred importance to the time that we do have, and what we do with our bodies, and the love that we show for others, and how we are able to hold others.

When it comes to acknowledging suffering, the more that we are able to sit with our own suffering, the more capable we are to sit with others in their suffering. So that healing just ripples outwards, our wholeness, our peace, our liberation happens within each of us and it happens within all of us together.

Alex: In our own processes of healing ourselves and healing in community, I think drawing back from these metaphors within the natural world and going even further and connecting ourselves, contextualizing our life story in the natural world and reminding ourselves of our relationship to fungi, to plants— I think, within that space is where we can begin to build trust again with our bodies that have been so alienated by capitalism and by consumer and productivity mindsets. And I think it's within that space that we actually restore our relationship to our bodily wisdom. And we're not just drawing on our own story, we're drawing on the stories of our ancestors, we’re drawing on the stories of our saints, and our prophets throughout our traditions. And we're drawing literally from the soil, from the trees, from the water, and all of that together is what is creating this knowing, this deep internal knowing and wisdom, and that is where we find redemption in suffering. I believe that is where we root down into our resilience, and our knowledge of life and death cycles, and our inherent knowledge that we will be reborn through absolutely anything.

For me, this process of reconnecting with my body and meaning-making through relationship to the natural world, and through my spiritual traditions— the wisdom that I'm gaining in just listening to my body in connection with those beings is actually the biggest and greatest teacher right now in seminary. We can read a million books, we can read a thousand studies, but ultimately the embodied wisdom that we gather from all living beings is incomparable. And when I think about the impact of trauma on the body and on the nervous system— the way that we look at the book we're reading in class together, The Deepest Well by Nadine Burke Harris— she talks about the way that our bodies throughout our lives carry the trauma in autoimmune disease and disability. And we look at Rima Vesely-Flad’s new book, Black Buddhists and the Black Radical Tradition, and we see intergenerational trauma and how that manifests in bodies. So if we're looking at trauma in bodies, and we're wanting to heal trauma in bodies, we have to go back to the body and we have to go back to our relationships with the environment that we’re in, because it was the environment that we’re in that created the trauma. And so for me, returning to the creeks, returning to the trees to find healing is absolutely paramount.

Jennifer: I love the idea of returning to the natural world as a way of healing. I feel like so much of my earlier childhood was spent in nature with my grandparents in ways that were really nourishing and really sweet, and I think which shaped a lot of my love and appreciation for the natural world as an adult. I'm actually thinking about all the time that I spent hiking earlier in the pandemic in the reservations that were near where I lived in New Jersey and what a lifeline that was in such an intensely stressful and traumatic time with so much uncertainty and so much social isolation. The ability to walk around in our local mountains, and walk along the streams, and breathe fresh air, and be with the trees and plants, and listen to birdsong was so deeply, deeply nourishing, and so grounding.

I don't know how much worse the experience of the pandemic would have been had I not had the ability to do that. There was just a sense of refuge that I felt out in the woods. I could feel myself connecting with life in a really deeply grounding way, and I felt so much more inner peace than I was able to feel locked up in my apartment. I think just going back to looking at what nature has to teach us and what nature has to remind us about ways of being and interbeing is really key to the larger conversation around trauma and healing.

Alex: Yeah, I think of two things. One, this idea of seeing the face of God in the other. And speaking to interbeing and then also reflecting on my own journey with trauma and recovery and how, for me, the alienation for my body as a trauma response and just the extreme dissociation I experienced. When I was 17 I started hiking, and I remember the first time— I think it was only 12 seconds of not being dissociated, and it was when I touched a leaf. And looking back on that now I see that it was actually through plants and through these experiences in nature, in the forest specifically, that God spoke to me and God healed my trauma through through these living beings. It reminds me of Sufi saying that that goes, “In every moment, in every tree, in every flower, in every blade of grass, he will see only God.”

Jennifer: That's just so beautiful and so rich, and I think something that we could continue talking about for a long time— and maybe we will! We did talk a lot in this conversation about how many existing theologies position the transcending of the body as the only means of spiritual healing and liberation and we touched on some of the ways that those ideas really perpetuate and prolong suffering.

And I think we're curious to hear from you all, in what ways you understand trauma and recovery through your own embodied experience and in your relationship to the natural world. Let us know your thoughts, your feelings about this in the comments. We would love to hear from you, and we'd love to hear whether or not you want to hear more about some of the topics that we discussed today.

We hope that you found this conversation rich and thought-provoking. We want to thank you for joining us. And thank you, Alex, for sharing your wisdom and experience with us today.

Alex: Thanks Jen. Thanks everyone.