Healing Landscapes.

I just got off the phone with a dear friend who lives in Hamilton Ontario. During our conversation I shared that I find Hamilton to be quite a deeply healing and special place. Playfully she asked to learn more, since that is not a common reputation for a city more likely to be personified as a working class steel town that’s down on its luck (while simultaneously becoming the newest suburb of Toronto).

Back in 2019 I had an unexpected and transformative somatic experience of sexual healing while visiting BC. It wasn’t something I was planning, however, it was something that profoundly informed my being, and massively shifted my self perception, desires, and values. When I went back to my life in Ontario, I found myself destabilized and without resources and community to help me make sense of what had happened in my life.

I began fervently seeking folks who might support me in my journey. Surprisingly, they were in Hamilton. My felt sense of that city became one of an oasis - one where folks without pomp or pretence but with aligned and embodied values were living and offering their gifts. Hamilton was a place where I could visit my learning  and healing edge while being a very messy version of me. It was where I began learning about somatics, where I received the beginnings of my own work in somatic sexual healing work, and where I began to build new scaffolding for my soul.

Oftentimes there might be an idea of healing spaces and people as being ‘extra ordinary’ - of hermits living in cabins in the woods, or mystics living overseas: people and journeys that transcend the banalities and disappointments of daily life. However, as I sit with what has truly mattered and what has truly made a difference for me, it was imperfect and ordinary people in imperfect and ordinary places. I’m really appreciating the deep reminding that healing happens where we are, with those we find ourselves in community with, and in the ways that work with the gifts and challenges of the realities of life.