Pulling back the curtain: Healing Ourselves

This is a blend of a very personal experience, how it intertwines with my work, and the vision of Bééhózin Consulting. Of course my journey in creating Bééhózin Consulting has always been very personal and in that journey I have met some wonderful people and felt supported by those who I might consider part of an "inner circle". That hasn't always been the case.

Part of my journey has involved recognizing a lot of my own shortcomings and how my past has impacted how I live my life, and thus how my career has felt like a never ending search for "something". I had never taken the time to stop and think about what that something was until recently. A BIG part of it was wanting to feel included and accepted. I grew up a mixed race girl on a reservation where mixed race children were uncommon in the 1980s and 1990s. Pre "online era", it wasn't easy to see what was beyond what I experienced day to day. I grew up to feel rejected, unwanted, unloved, and undervalued by the people I saw as MY people.

I won't weight this down with the details of how I got from that point to the point in where I am fiercely advocating for Indigenous Peoples, but I accidentally revisited that past during a meditation this morning. During the meditation in calling back my energy to myself, I thought about all those I've left some of my energy with because they had severely wronged me, bullied me, and made me feel rejected and undervalued. I envisioned those moments of toxic workplace pain and the thought drifted into my mind "I've been most hurt by my own." One of those punch in the stomach moments, I took a deep breath and meditated a bit more on that thought.

Far too often in my personal life and my career have I come across other Native American people who have a lot of healing of their own to do. Without recognizing that they have healing to do, they operate in those patriarchal colonial systems that were meant to obliterate us, they act and react out of places of fear, anger, and pain. Even within our own tribes there are "us" and "them". In some situations, the group that is "them" are the people we see as those who take advantage of power and money to benefit themselves. In some situations, the "us" are usually those who feel they are on the short end of the power dynamic.

How can we expect to rise up and heal as a people, reject the systems that are meant to destroy and control us when there is so much internal wounds and pain? We talk about breaking generational trauma in the context of our families and how we show up in our personal lives, part of that generational trauma is also recognizing how you're showing up in the world in general. What part of your mind, thoughts, behaviors need to be decolonized?