What It Takes To Heal: How Transforming Ourselves Can Change the World by Prentis Hemphill
In What It Takes To Heal, Prentis Hemphill joins the renaissance chorus of voices who are singing us out of the dark ages of pathologizing the impacts of trauma, that age-old and expiring practice of making an individual wrong/bad for having perfectly reasonable responses to the oppressive systems they are tangled with. My heroes Resmaa Menakem, Brene Brown, Bessel van der Kolk, adrienne maree brown and others all throw their weight behind this work via book blurb on the back cover.
In this petite hardback, my favorite golden yellow color hides under the book jacket beautifully, like the secrets I keep inside until the environment is safe enough for their reveal. Because I love books as objects in this way, I gave up highlighting my favorite passages years ago and now favor dropping a sticky note on the page instead. In the two weeks I spent nibbling, one chapter at a time, on WITTH, I added dozens of posties among the pages.
The author is a charismatic minister of how the work of integrating our personal trauma is not separate from the work of healing everything all around us, doing no further harm, and living into the vast and largely untapped compassionate potential of humanity. Integrating our personal trauma IS the work. AND it is a group project. I sat in the audience shouting “amen” time and again as they braided tender and compelling story with unvarnished cultural context and truth that our interconnected bodies are critical to our integration.
Part storybook and part wise insight, with the tiniest, near-subliminal suggestions for practice, this book earns a permanent space on my nearest bookshelf, the one I reach for when I need a little gas in my tank on my spiritual journey. Hemphill’s identification of the ubiquity of change alone “so constant that we might better understand change as the pace and process of life itself” among many other beautiful sentences qualifies it to sit adjacent to bell hooks, Don Miguel Ruiz, Pema Chodron, and my other favorite fellow travelers.
What differentiates this book from other spiritual gas stations I visit is the author’s clear queer lens. When they relate an unnamed conversationalist engaging with them about the merits of “sit(ting) down with people who might reject me because of race or sexuality and show them that I was, in the end, just like them,” the author asserts, “Who in the end is more human than you or me that we should plead for acceptance into their version of humanity? I am not just like them and I am human still.” The author goes on to conclude “Expanding our concept of “we” is not about erasing difference but about redefining human to include all of us for who we really are.”
In applying this refreshing lens, the author reinforces and validates what I have come to know in my own queerness: when we arrive at paradox, we are holding multiple truths. These seemingly conflicting truths benefit from our expansion into the “yes, and…”
