Healing Cultural Trauma from Schools - "Just Like Me" Meditation
Sharing our stories about our school experiences is a good place to start. Facing the grief, fear, embarrassment, rage and other emotions that plagued our learning experience is an important step (on the edge of your own resilience) to liberating ourselves from those past experiences. Sharing stories with others – people who care about us and who see us – and allowing those people to remind us of who we really are, versus what got done to us can be a great source of liberation. It gives us the ability to observe and consider the stories that we’re telling ourselves about ourselves, which can lead to the freedom to tell ourselves truer stories about ourselves in authentic and lasting ways.
Here is a little background on the Just Like Me meditation
Many of the worst experiences from school are linked to other people who were or are the agents of our oppression. They were the instigators of those awful experiences – our teachers, other students, family members, the media. We can hold a lot of anger, fear, rage, and humiliation, not only about ourselves, but about those people (while also loving some of them). Those emotions often get projected onto other relationships with other people, or onto other parts of our lives.
Our healing practice this month focuses on creating a sense of safety within oneself in order to increase one’s agency in creating safety within our environments. While we must take radical action to create or restore safety, access, inclusion and equity in learning environments, we must also heal the trauma that we have all gotten in one form or another from our participation in a system that has harmed generations of young people.
This compassionate practice “Just Like Me” is designed to bring ourselves back to the truest story about ourselves and those people who cause us harm – that we are all HUMAN. Yes, that sounds hokey. But it’s definitely true. It’s a way of acknowledging that harm happened and that struggle continues to happen to ALL of us, both past and present. It’s not an easy practice. You may not engage it and then instantly think, “all better now.” But with constant practice, you might find yourself moving from numbness, to identifying and expressing distinct emotions, to experiencing the core connection that exists within all of us. At the very least, you may be able to distinguish between your feelings about your experiences with these people, and the boundaries of the relationships you have with those people in the present moment. It’s worth giving it a try.