Elegy for a Trauma Healing Framework

Author’s Note

This piece is a postmortem for the “Elemental Healing Framework” I’ve spent years of my life shaping and recently shared an introduction to here. A framework that, for a time, felt like truth.

But it no longer fits.

I’m not here to rebuild what I laid down, only to honor the need it was birthed from, and mourn with the self who needed it, bowing to the beauty and distortion of what I tried to make work because it hurt, and because I hurt.

If you, too, are holding a structure that no longer holds you…
carrying a thing that saved you but now asks to be buried…
You're welcome to join me. Let this be our mourning ground.

A Letter From The Rubble

This is not a confession and it’s not an unveiling of anything new. It’s just a resigned sitting-down in the soot of what once felt holy. Finally, finally, I am giving it a rest.

I released the introductory series—Earth, Air, Water, Fire—outlining my Elemental Healing Framework here on my blog over the past 8 or so weeks… even after I knew it no longer held. Even after I knew without a doubt that the shape of the thing had already collapsed. The words were no longer alive for me. At least not in the way I’d meant them.

And still, I let it each article publish, the way you might release a bird whose wings are broken but who once brought you the sky. I did it with tenderness, reverence, and the ache of letting go. This was an honoring act. I was honoring the self who constructed this thing—the one who needed categories and language and clear containers to place her pain inside. So afraid of coming apart she built a framework to keep it all together.

This isn’t a pivot or a next chapter.
This isn’t the part where I fix it.
No. This is a kneel.

And I’m not dealing in metaphors here. A real kneel, body bowed, face to the floor, palms covered in ash, still warm from the burning, trying to remember what was eternal about the fire before I named it and mapped it and turned it into something teachable.

So, here I am now, laid out bare where “healing” once was, and it’s humbling and uncomfortable, and I’m going to stay.

The arc of becoming
doesn’t always wait
for us to be ready
before it asks us
to be real.

I Had The Best Of Intentions

I described it as “A Way Back: Elemental Medicine For The Fragmented.”

I talked about how there are certain initiations you don’t choose... only survive. How I didn’t come to this work through aspiration, but barefoot, bewildered, bloodied by forces that had no interest in my thriving. I came to it because my body couldn’t bear the weight anymore. Because the world offered protocols when I needed presence and solutions when I needed sanctuary.

I came to this because somewhere, buried under the debris, there was a quiet voice that said: You are not a problem to solve. You are a body longing for ground. You are a breath longing for sky. You are a heart longing for tide. You are a flame longing for its own name. You know this to be true. You know.

I followed that voice.

The Elemental Trauma Healing framework emerged in the context of my daily life over the course of many, many years… as a map drawn on the inside of my eyelids, under my tongue, in the creases of my skin. I didn’t make this path. I met it. I slowed down (when I was left with no other choice), and in that slowness, I could finally notice the way things are.

I noticed how litters of mewling kittens were born in the Bougainvillea against the alleyway fence outside my house every March and October.

I noticed how the air smelled of fresh mown hay, rotting plums and sweet manure on the way to visit the cemetery on my mom’s death anniversary.

I noticed how my dreams were full of water—oceans, lakes, rivers, swimming pools, bathtubs, sinks overflowing—when I couldn’t cry but had everything to cry for.

I noticed my feet and hands and knees and hips ached when the fog fell like a thick, wet blanket over the town, and the tree branches seemed to me to be aching the same way. Could that be true?

I noticed. I noticed. And, the more I noticed the way life is, and the cyclical nature of all things, the less sense it made that I should be just one thing and just one way. If everything in nature has it’s time, grows and declines, expands and contracts, shifts and moves, rebalances, looks different when the season changes or the light changes… surely I am that way, too. Surely, it all connects and there is room for it all.

I noticed. I experimented. I studied. I researched connections across different disciplines. I practiced. I named my process. I documented everything.

I wrote: “What follows is not a sequence, but a spiralic journey through the sacred elements of Earth, Air, Water, and Fire,” and I shared a bit about my own personal experience:

Earth was there when I hit bottom. When the freeze descended… when everything in me said collapse, hide, disappear… earth laid its heavy hand on my back and said: Stay as long as you need. Root. Feel the bones of belonging inside yourself and in this place.

Air found me spinning. Frantic, ungrounded, racing circles inside my own mind. Showed me how to breathe through terror. To widen the windows. To understand the symbols. To speak my stories, instead of choke them down.

Water returned when my grief nearly drowned me. Taught me that softness is not weakness, after all. That there is so much courage in sinking, such dignity in surrendering to the currents we can’t control.

And Fire — Fire had its way with me when everything else in my life had burned to black. When my desires came out sideways and wrecked my relationships. And when my righteous rage finally came home and revealed itself as fierce love. Declared: Survival is not enough.

Earth. Air. Water. Fire.
Root. Breathe. Soften. Burn.

I wasn’t trying to build a curriculum, a 12-week course, a capital-H Healing System, another f*cking product to consume. I was trying to return what was always true right there beneath all the ruin. A way of weaving it all back together, bringing the body, the breath, the heart, and the will back into wholeness.

I wanted to craft all of this into something real. Something archetypal. Something that breathed. Something spacious enough to hold what couldn’t be held anywhere else. I wanted an offering that felt alive. Elemental. Something that whispered instead of shouted. That pointed beyond itself.

I set to work translating what I’ve lived for those who’ve carried their pain in silence. For those whose bodies have been treated as battlegrounds or burdens. For those who have grown weary of being pathologized, fixed, or saved. For those who know somewhere deep down that healing must be art, not industry.

I had the best of intentions.

But, If I’m Honest,
I Also Wanted It To Work

I wanted it to explain me to myself. I wanted it to make sense of all the splintered things I carried.

So I built it out, expanded and deepened it, made it make sense:

Earth for stabilization.
Air for witnessing.
Water for integration.
Fire for reclamation.

It felt true enough. Coherent enough. Useful enough. And in a culture that feeds on certainty that felt like a miracle, so I gave it form. I decided that this would be the through-line. I had devised a language for the unnameable. I thought I could midwife the sacred into a structure and have it stay sacred. That I could create something that would hold the unspeakable without domesticating it.

But what I was really building… quietly, unconsciously… was a container for my own grief.

Grief for the places I’d been blown apart and the questions keeping me awake nights and the ache of not knowing who I am outside of service. I poured all my longing into this. I wanted to make beauty from the wreckage. I wanted to give something real to those still drowning in the sea I had just barely learned to float in.

And, maybe it helped. Maybe it still does. I don’t know. I really don’t know. I’m not saying what I made is garbage, but I know now that it was never meant to last. Because the sacred doesn’t sit still. It won’t stay located. And the moment we try to defang a wild thing, it begins to die.

What I Couldn’t See Then

I really believed I was being careful. As in, full of care. I thought I was resisting the usual, refusing the package, the program, the formula. I told myself this was different. I thought I’d made enough space for the sacred. (How can you make enough space for the sacred?)

It seems to me that even things made with great care can and often do still carry the logic of the machine.

Supremacy knows how to wear soft linens. Capitalism knows how to speak in the language of mythos. Spiritual performance knows how to wrap itself in ritual and remembrance. It all knows how to shapeshift. It seeps in… into tone, into how you name things and in what order. It sneaks into the desire to be credible, legitimate. To be seen as someone with a thing worth paying for.

To be seen. As someone. Worthy of listening to.
To be worthy at all.

Oh.
Oh, yes.
There it is.
The wound. Still there.
I stick my tongue deep into it—
like the gash in your gums after
you jab yourself with the toothbrush.

Even when you strip the course into a resource, the product into a prayer, the content into a ceremony… something in you still wants to get it “right.” To be good. To be intelligible. And, to be the kind of healer who doesn’t sell out, but also doesn’t disappear. The kind who critiques the system, but not enough to get in trouble. The kind who’s not too fringe. Still marketable.

It’s subtle. It’s sneaky.

Even non-linear systems sort and imply progress and suggest that there’s a right way to unfold.

Earth, then Air, then Water, then Fire.
Stabilize. Witness. Integrate. Reclaim.

I know, I said it was a spiral, a circle… but let’s be real: I was still organizing. I was still taming the unruly. Still making healing into something that could be charted, tracked, and explained. G*ddamn it, if I wasn’t still offering a tidy little path through the mess—so no one had to feel too lost. Especially me.

I didn’t realize yet that to name a stage is to imply a destination. To offer clarity is sometimes just a way to avoid the ache of not-knowing and the grief of not being able to get home. To make yourself useful when it all feels useless can be its own hunger.

Beneath it all, I was still trying stop from happening what had already happened.
And I was publishing the series here to stop from happening what was about to happen.

I was at home in central California caring for my dying grandfather when I realized what I’d done and what I was up to.

I was sitting on the carpet at his feet, heart big and sore, looking up at his tired face, trying not to weep, and I knew.

Not all wounds are meant to close. Only be in devotion to. Lived out. Met in the raw, radiant ruined.

And there’s no map for that.

I Published Anyway

I published this series even after it was dead because I didn’t want to disappear the one who made it.

That’s what we usually do with the wound, isn’t it?

We cover it. We clean it. We name it something else. We say it’s not shame, no, it’s discernment. It’s maturity. It’s protection. We say we’re trying to help, trying to be responsible, trying to be better. We call it growth. We call it moving on. We say we’re being trauma-informed.

But, maybe we’re just trying to hide from the aching vulnerability of being in the mess, in the middle, in the moment when the story is still falling apart and nothing makes any sense and there’s no way of knowing when/if we’ll be steady and arrived ever again.

We want to skip the part where it hasn’t already become something past, something processed, something made useful. But that’s the part I’m called to learn to stay with.

Because trauma is not only the wound. It’s the silence that settles over it. The way we make ourselves unknowable, even to ourselves, in the name of safety. It’s the story that never got told, the feeling that never got named, the self we keep editing out.

So, I left the old words up. The story changed mid-sentence, and I wanted that rupture to stay visible to mark the shape of who I was when I needed it. To let that part of me exist without being rewritten. Because to erase the part of me who tried to bring beauty to the ache, to order the unorderable… is to say she isn’t worthy of being. And that’s the logic of trauma. And that’s what I’m still unlearning.

I refuse to exile the ones in me who got me this far. Even if they were wrong. Even if they were performing. Even if they were scrambling to outrun the pain. Especially then.

Truth often shows up in contradiction. And for me, usually in the funeral rites of something I once believed in.

In the end, the Elemental Trauma Healing framework asked to be buried.

And Now I Kneel

Here I am now, not honoring knowledge, but knowing. The kind that lives in the marrow and doesn’t need to be proven to be real. That doesn't sharpen itself into evidence for the sake of being believed.

I meet with reverence what won’t resolve, what resists simplification, what stays wild and unshaped and holy.

No more tools. Just touch. Skin to soil. Hand to heart. The warm ache of being-with, instead of fixing. The way contact, not instruction, can soften the nervous system back into trust.

Not instruction, but invitation. A gesture. A doorway. A soft beckoning into the mystery, with no promise of an outcome.

Not a system—but an altar.
Not a promise—but a poem.
Not a framework—but a field.

I’m laying down the compulsion to explain it to everyone. To make it make sense. To be useful. To be a good guide, a clear voice, a well-packaged offering. To make something of myself. To make something of the hurt. I’m laying down the impulse to turn everything into medicine.

This is so, so hard.

But. What if the grief and mystery of every raw-boned moment doesn’t need to be metabolized, therapized, treated, integrated? Only witnessed. Only wept.

I’m laying down the obsession with coherence. With being a trustworthy narrator. With telling a clean story of healing that crescendos instead of collapses.

I’m laying down the idea that healing makes you better. That there’s even a better to become.

I’m laying down that our pain that lasts and lasts disqualifies us from presence, or love, or leading.

I’m laying down the idea that I have something to offer anyone besides my presence. My willingness to not look away. To sit beside the wound, without rushing it into metaphor. To kneel beside the sacred, without trying to sell it.

What I’m offering now, I think, is a mourning ground. A place to let it rot and bless in its own time, where whatever it is can take as long as it takes, where we can remember the sacred without naming it, where we can be real and raw, and we can come empty and undone.

There Is Only This

Let this piece be a compost pile. We pause here in the muck and let it all go.

Let this be an altar for the unfinished. For the parts that never got their turn to speak. For the approaches, systems, tools, and modalities that started as lifelines and became cages. For the aching that doesn’t want to be healed. Just held.

We do not need another healing framework.
We do not need another f*cking map.
We need a place to kneel.
May this be one.

A soft patch of ground to release what we thought would save us.

No tidy ending.

Only this.

A single question, slow and low:

What are you still building that needs to be burned?

Let it burn.

Let it bless.

Then bury it.

And begin again…

without a name.