Autonomous and Sovereign

Mind wanderings from an ADHD mind, a traumatized heart, and a committed healer:

Some of you may know that I have a deep connection to a tarot practice and that it’s been transformational to my healing and my work in the world, which feel like one in the same. 

I was just listening to a podcast by Lindsay Mack, one of my teachers and mentors whom I highly recommend if you are interested in tarot, who was talking about the importance of feeling autonomous and sovereign within our bodies, which is inaccessible to so many people.

As an eating disorder dietitian, I used to grapple immensely with how I’d been trained to view and treat eating disorders (my 1-hour graduate school lecture+continuing education to be competent) and how I felt, from a knowing inside my body, that healing thrives. So much of how I’d been trained in general as a healthcare provider told me to give an aura of being the expert and knowing the solution and the idea that I had this illusory control over how my clients bodies would respond to the ways I should tell them to act. 

Having been an excellent customer of both the mental and physical healing realms at the start of my graduate school program for nutrition and dietetics, from both a “traditional medical model” and “alternative” practices, perhaps my felt sense was even stronger than I had realized at the time- I knew these practices didn’t work because they failed me time, and time, and time, and time, and time, and time again. But, with always the promise of success, of relief. 

And when the dynamic is set up, that one person knows (provider) and other person doesn’t (patient), then the outcome will always filter through the same (asinine) equation, If the outcome “works” then everyone wins, and if the outcome doesn’t, then the provider is right and the person either didn’t engage appropriately in said behaviors or their body/ mind is really broken, “the unfixable”. 

I’m guessing, that’s why most of my clients feel broken. It’s why I felt broken for so long- because my problems were “unfixable” or I simply did not have enough willpower to follow through with the recommendations (if you know me well enough to know that I practice tarot you also know that I’m a Capricorn with gobs of willpower).

The thing is, when we don’t feel safe (which autonomy and sovereignty in our bodies creates) we can’t access our intuition, and so we outsource finding answers to professionals. Seeking help and support is such a beautiful thing and I am lucky to work alongside of so many incredibly compassionate healthcare providers and healers, who are questioning the equations we were handed in our trainings and allow for curiosity, complexity, and nuance into the healing relationship. And, time and time again I and others encounter harm of varying degrees when healthcare providers allow their egos to dictate what another person’s body, another person’s process, will look like. Should look like.

There is no other time then the present to see the wildness of our human experience. When we welcome in agency, a concept I learned in my sociology study- the capacity of individuals to have the power and resources to fulfill their potential, we welcome in the idea that given the appropriate resources (safety being a priority within a healing relationship) a person can access what they need to thrive. Of course, limiting factors to agency include systems of oppression and the trauma they cause for so many.

But so many providers have resistance to the idea of creating safety through the means of allowing for autonomy and sovereignty, for many, many reasons but one that I have been tasked to observe recently is perfectionism. The idea that there is a “right” way to be. To heal. To live. 

Which of course, is a silly idea. 

I was leaving a healthcare appointment the other week, and as I was paying and asking for super bills still taunting me from the corner of my post-it note scattered desk, I was chatting with my clinician as she did the part of her job that is the part of my job that is my least favorite, billing, scheduling, general admin work- I looked up and saw a print out taped to the wall above her colleagues desk. It read, in bold thick black font:

This Too Is Sacred.

Since then, I’ve been trying to move through all of my days holding this as a guiding light, alongside the King of Pentacles which for me sparks a similar truth (for you tarot wild souls out there). Brushing teeth, sacred. Scooping cat litter, sacred. Ignoring my post-it notes and to dos in honor of rest and snuggling my cat = sacred. All of it. 

And there’s a way that alongside the healing work I’ve done with this clinician, that through this process there has been greater access for me with my own agency. Because there is something about bringing sacred into the seemingly mundane, ordinary, or even chaotic, that allows me to create a sense of trust in my own process, my own knowing. Because what is, Is. And if it’s sacred, then it’s here, it’s supposed to be here, and there is nothing wrong. Nothing broken, Nothing to be fixed. Just a moment to be in relationship with. 

I wonder how this is and will change my own process of healing, and therefore my presence as a provider.