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For You.
Survivors of Violence and Sexual Assault
I dedicate this page of poems to all survivors. It is a gift, honoring those who did not survive. It is also a declaration that 3% of all Vessel Healing Arts proceeds will be donated towards helping support survivors in their search for safety and healing.
If you also feel called to support someone in need, I invite you to donate below. All donations will go directly to an individual who is seeking help, safety and healing, but lacks the financial means to find assistance.
I believe in your resiliency.
Many individuals that I work with are survivors of violence, abuse, neglect and sexual assault. For a large majority, the trauma happened during the tender years of early childhood. This rupture is often devastating, greatly affecting the individual’s health, relationships, and worldview. Survivor’s are more likely to have eating disorders, addictions, anxiety, depression, chronic pain and autoimmune disease. They are also more likely to attempt suicide and self harm.
As a somatic therapist I hold space, guide and witness a slow, but great unfolding. I watch as resiliency is built and fixed patterns of protection begin to transform. What is emerging? What is possible? What can we become? How does the lotus grow from such mud?
I may never understand how or why evil takes shape. But, I do believe that our love and care for each other can make a difference. I do understand the long journey of healing. Often access to therapy and other protective, life saving services are not available to those that need them the most due to financial inaccessibility. It is my intention that my contribution along with others will help make healing and safety services more available to individuals with economic hardship.
“A distinction must be made between that writing which enables us to hold on to life even as we are clinging to old hurts and wounds and that writing which offers to us a space where we are able to confront reality in such a way that we live more fully. Such writing is not an anchor that we mistakenly cling to so as not to drown. It is writing that truly rescues, that enables us to reach the shore, to recover.”
—Bell Hooks, writer and philosopher
“Are you unable to donate financially? You can also donate a poem or words of encouragement to be posted to this site. Submit below.
On the day when
The weight deadens
On your shoulders
And you stumble,
May the clay dance
To balance you.
And when your eyes
Freeze behind
The grey window
And the ghost of loss
Gets into you,
May a flock of colours,
Indigo, red, green
And azure blue,
Come to awaken in you
A meadow of delight.
When the canvas frays
In the currach of thought
And a stain of ocean
Blackens beneath you,
May there come across the waters
A path of yellow moonlight
To bring you safely home.
May the nourishment of the earth be yours,
May the clarity of light be yours,
May the fluency of the ocean be yours,
May the protection of the ancestors be yours.
And so may a slow
Wind work these words
Of love around you,
An invisible cloak
To mind your life
~ John O’Donahue
You Are A Survivor
The bits of you that are broken,
The Bits of you that are damaged,
do not see them that way.
Instead see them as slowly being filled with beautiful experiences and truths
you have learned from the damage,
the equivalent of lacquered gold.
I want you to remember, you are not a broken thing,
Instead, you are a human full of incredible and wonderful experience,
made of the same things swords and diamonds are made of.
You are a survivor, my darling, and
I salute you for everything you have been through,
and for making the universe so proud,
so very proud of what you have become.
Nikita Gill
One day you finally knew
what you had to do, and
began,
though the voices around you
kept shouting
their bad advice --
though the whole house
began to tremble
and you felt the old tug
at your ankles.
"Mend my life!"
each voice cried.
But you didn't stop.
You knew what you had to do,
though the wind pried
with its stiff fingers
at the very foundations,
though their melancholy
was terrible.
It was already late
enough, and a wild night
,and the road full of fallen
branches and stones.
But little by little,
as you left their voice behind,
the stars began to burn
through the sheets of clouds,
and there was a new voice
which you slowly
recognized as your own,
that kept you company
as you strode deeper and deeper
into the world,
determined to do
the only thing you could do --
determined to save
the only life that you could save.
~ Mary Olive, The Journey
Here is a story
to break your heart.
Are you willing?
This winter
the loons came to our harbor
and died, one by one,
of nothing we could see.
A friend told me
of one on the shore
that lifted its head and opened
the elegant beak and cried out
in the long, sweet savoring of its life
which, if you have heard it,
you know is a sacred thing.,
and for which, if you have not heard it,
you had better hurry to where
they still sing.
And, believe me, tell no one
just where that is.
The next morning
this loon, speckled
and iridescent and with a plan
to fly home
to some hidden lake,
was dead on the shore.
I tell you this
to break your heart,
by which I mean only
that it break open and never close again
to the rest of the world.
~ Mary Oliver, Lead