## Metadata - Author: [[Prentis Hemphill]] - Full Title: What It Takes to Heal - Category: #books ## Highlights - I don’t think healing begins where we think it does, in our doing something. I believe it begins in another realm altogether, the realm of dreams and imagination. A realm that I might also call spirit. A place of potential, where possibilities reside, where we retrieve, through prayer or in dreams, visions for ourselves and for the world that make us more whole. ([Location 325](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0CF18C11N&location=325)) - The world she was born into was on the brink of civil war and was contained and kept in order by both casual and ritualized public violence, by intimidation, and by the denial of rights. Masses of people were being indoctrinated with propaganda that created and reified the world’s most recent invention, race. She led people anyway, through battlegrounds and forests into an iteration of freedom, a new context. ([Location 333](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0CF18C11N&location=333)) - A few years ago, I read an article about why humans tend to be so bad at predicting the future. What researchers found is that we predict in a linear fashion, but the factor that makes projections most accurate is the ability to anticipate new relationships, unexpected alliances, and possibilities. ([Location 381](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0CF18C11N&location=381)) - Tags: [[blue]] - There is a difference between the visions that come out of our most individualistic tendencies and those that arise when we are able to admit that we need other people. I’ve often found that the visions people articulate for themselves, those that they are most afraid to admit, are their yearnings for connection and their longings to lead and coordinate something that will have a big impact on the world. I’ve never encountered anyone’s most vulnerable visions to be about isolation or money. ([Location 484](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0CF18C11N&location=484)) - Tags: [[blue]] - Commitment expects our despair but doesn’t waver. It comes from inside of us, keeping steady when we lose hope, or give up, or decide to step away. What lives inside us does not go anywhere, but waits, so we can return to it. ([Location 505](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0CF18C11N&location=505)) - Tags: [[blue]] - Oppression is the distribution and concentration of trauma into bodies and communities designated less powerful. It is the mechanism that leaves these same bodies and communities without the resources in time, money, or support to heal. ([Location 707](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0CF18C11N&location=707)) - Healing is the process, often lifelong, of restoring and reawakening the capacities for safety, belonging, and dignity on the other side of trauma. It’s a simple definition but it works for me. We can’t heal or act effectively under active threat, when our safety is not assured. We either find safety or create it with who and what we have. Belonging is about bringing us back into the world around us, and back into relationships with others. Dignity is where we feel our worthiness again, where we are about the business of eradicating shame and expressing our agency and choicefulness. ([Location 757](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0CF18C11N&location=757)) - Tags: [[blue]] - Healing, I often say, helps us fight in the places we need to, but love in the places we long to. ([Location 775](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0CF18C11N&location=775)) - Tags: [[blue]] - Some years back, I told myself that I wouldn’t follow anyone whose vision for the future didn’t show up in their day-to-day life in how they cared for themselves and the people around them. ([Location 806](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0CF18C11N&location=806)) - Tags: [[blue]] - When we look to the nature of our relationships with one another, we can become more skillful and authentic in our interactions, and see that there are ways of relating that might allow us to connect and come out of the automatic past and entrenched ways of being so that we can meet one another now. Not bypassing our history but moving forward in its knowledge. Our ability to do this is key—our relationships, our social connections, are the bridge between individual and societal transformation. ([Location 1159](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0CF18C11N&location=1159))