The Tenacity of Water

A Reconsidered Framework for Holistic Healing

As I read my way through several nights of perimenopausal insomnia last week, Sophie Strand's early accounts in her recent memoir, "The Body is a Doorway," cut straight to something that has been niggling at me for months: the subtle ways our culture weaponizes wellness against the very people seeking healing.

A troubling undercurrent in the modern wellness world has inherited a particularly cruel distortion of ancient wisdom. The shift happens gradually, almost imperceptibly—somewhere between "you have agency in your healing" and "you manifest your own illness," a line is crossed that transforms medicine into morality play. When, despite having visited multiple providers and exhausting seemingly every resource, autoimmune flares persist, chronic pain endures, fatigue deepens, the risk of an unspoken question begins to surface: What are they doing wrong? What aren't they willing to heal?

This is victim-blaming wrapped in the language of empowerment—born of the same patriarchal impulses that frame poverty as personal failing, addiction as moral weakness, and systemic marginalization of women, LGBTQ+, and BIPOC communities as somehow justified. It suggests that suffering is a choice, that healing is a matter of will, that the body's rebellion against wellness is a character flaw rather than a complex interplay of genetics, environment, trauma, systemic oppression, and plain biological reality.

As holistic practitioners, we find ourselves walking a razor's edge between empowerment and harm, between hope and false promise, between honoring agency and perpetuating toxic myths about earned suffering. Many of us are already working thoughtfully to strike this delicate balance. Yet, the broader wellness culture, steeped as it is in these harmful patterns, continues to create pitfalls that can undermine even our most well-intentioned efforts.

Hope Without Harm

As practitioners, we've seen miracles—the inexplicable recoveries, the sudden shifts, the bodies that abruptly and magnificently remember how to heal under our care. More often, we've witnessed the gradual, beautiful unwinding of humans who cautiously but steadily find their way toward health and resilience. But we've also seen the quiet devastation of those who followed every recommendation perfectly and still didn't get well, often after framing our care as their last hope.

The question becomes: How do we hold space for multiple realities?

Perhaps the first step is releasing ourselves from the role of healer altogether. We are not the ones doing the healing—the body, in its infinite wisdom, does that. We are more like midwives to the process, facilitating conditions that support the body's own intelligence rather than forcing outcomes through sheer therapeutic will.

Having been praised for tenacity both in life and as a practitioner, my work in this realm has forced me to grapple repeatedly with the spectrum that lives within that word. What flavor of tenacity serves, and what is more apt to cause harm? After much rumination, I've come to aspire to the tenacity of water—able to flow, adapt, change form, yet remaining undeniably powerful in its persistence. Water doesn't break against obstacles; it finds a way around, through, or gradually wears them down. It seeks its natural level without forcing, connects what was separate, and transforms whatever it touches while remaining essentially itself.

This shift requires profound humility. It asks us to replace any preconception of certainty with curiosity—instead of "This is the answer," we offer "Let's explore." It invites us to honor the mystery that some bodies heal in ways that defy our understanding, while others hold their patterns for reasons we may never fully grasp. Both are sacred. Perhaps most importantly, it expands our definition of healing beyond the absence of symptoms to include the presence of acceptance, connection, meaning, and peace within the reality of what is.

Beyond Individual Pathology

True holistic practice recognizes that we don't get sick in isolation, and we don't heal in isolation either. The body exists within webs of relationship—to family systems that can harbor both trauma and profound support, to communities that may impose stress or offer belonging, to environments that contain both toxic and healing elements, to economic systems that create barriers and opportunities alike. When we focus solely on individual responsibility for illness, we miss the larger forces that shape health and disease.

We must address not only what we can change through lifestyle modifications or removing detrimental exposures, but also acknowledge the many forces largely beyond our individual control: the air we breathe, the water we drink, the systems that determine our access to nourishing food, the relentless pace and disconnection of modern life that keeps our nervous systems in chronic activation.

This perspective invites us to ask different questions: What is this person's nervous system responding to in their environment, past and/or present? How do systems of oppression show up in their body? What adaptive purposes might these symptoms serve? How can we address not just the unique wholeness that makes up the person but the web of relationships they exist within, while acknowledging the limits of what any individual can change?

As Sophie Strand writes in a piece from 2022, "Trauma does not belong to an individual. It is a web that includes someone. It is not an object that can be removed. Your body's innate ability to dance with harm and with discomfort is not always a problem. It is a relational tactic."

The Truth About Acceptance

There's an essential distinction between acceptance and resignation. Acceptance doesn't mean giving up; it means meeting reality as it is rather than how we think it should be. From this place, we can work with what is, not what we wish were true. If someone's nervous system is stuck in hypervigilance, we don't shame them for not relaxing fast enough. We honor the intelligence of a system that learned to stay alert to survive.

We can validate the wisdom of symptoms. Pain, fatigue, anxiety—these aren't enemies to be conquered but messengers deserving of our attention and respect. We can create space for grief—the loss of the body we had, the life we imagined, the future we planned. These losses are real and far-reaching and must be honored before transformation becomes possible.

Being human is humbling. We are so gloriously, heartbreakingly fragile. Our bodies can be undone by the smallest virus, the slightest genetic variation, the accumulated weight of a world that often feels hostile to our very existence. In this fragility lies not weakness but an earnest invitation to tenderness—toward ourselves and each other.

Strand offers us this reframe: "What if the abused body didn't passive aggressively keep the score? What if it acted more like an aperture, capturing pictures of horror as well as also imprinting cosmic light from distant galaxies? What if the body was a doorway open to more than human stories?"

The Humility That Heals

Humility might be our most potent medicine. When we approach each person as a mystery we're privileged to witness rather than a problem we're meant to solve, everything changes. The practitioner's primary role becomes one of deep listening and unconditional presence—creating a consecrated space where the client's story can unfold without judgment, where symptoms are witnessed rather than immediately silenced, where the person feels seen in their wholeness.

As holistic practitioners, we are often highly empathetic and deeply caring people—qualities that drew us to this work. Yet this very sensitivity makes it even more crucial to differentiate ourselves from the person we are trying to support. When we become overly enmeshed with our clients' outcomes, we risk projecting our own needs for validation onto their healing journey.

Many of us are also heavily invested in the modalities we practice, reinforced by the healing we've witnessed. We've seen bodies transformed, lives reclaimed, hope restored. This investment can become a trap, leading us to believe our particular approach is the "magic pill" for all suffering. But there is no universal remedy, no single path that works for every body, every story, every assortment of circumstances.

When our clients don't get well, we also face our own ego and sense of failure. The murmur of impostor syndrome grows louder: "Am I not skilled enough? Did I miss something? Maybe I'm not cut out for this work." These feelings are natural, even inevitable, but they belong to us—not to the person sitting across from us seeking support. Our internal work around these reactions should never become their burden to carry.

In Louise Penny's Inspector Gamache series, the inspector teaches his officers four crucial phrases that transform how they approach their work: "I'm sorry. I was wrong. I don't know. I need help." These same words, when spoken authentically in healing relationships, can dissolve the artificial hierarchy between practitioner and client, opening space for genuine collaboration and discovery.

Humility invites us to stay curious about what we don't know—every body is an experiment of one, with its own unique constellation of factors, traumas, and possibilities. It asks us to share power in the healing relationship, reminding us that the person in front of us is the expert on their own experience while our role is to offer tools and perspectives, not dictate outcomes. Perhaps most essentially, it gives us permission to admit the limits of our knowledge—"I don't know" becomes not a failure but an opening to deeper inquiry and partnership.

A Reconsidered Framework

What if we approached every interaction from these foundational principles: non-judgment, meeting each person exactly where they are without the need for them to be anywhere else; curiosity, asking questions that open rather than close, that explore rather than diagnose, that honor complexity rather than demanding simple answers; connection, remembering that healing happens in relationship to ourselves, to others, to something larger than ourselves; humility, holding our methods lightly, understanding that they are tools in service of something greater, not ends in themselves; and acceptance, practicing the revolutionary act of loving what is while remaining open to what might become possible.

Perhaps the most potent healing we can offer isn't the promise of cure but the gift of being truly seen and accepted in our wholeness—symptoms and all. Sometimes the deepest medicine is simply bearing witness to another's experience without the need to fix, change, or improve anything—starting with three simple words: "I believe you."

In this space, miracles still happen. Bodies still remember how to heal. Pain still transforms into ease. But when they don't, we have something equally meaningful to offer: the recognition that worth doesn't depend on wellness, that some of our greatest teachers are those who've learned to live beautifully within the constraints of chronic illness, and that healing encompasses so much more than the absence of symptoms.

A Practice

As we move forward in our work, let's practice holding the tension between hope and acceptance, between empowerment and surrender, between the miracle of healing and the sacredness of what is. Let's remember that our truest service might not be in the cures we facilitate but in the presence we offer, the witness we bear, and the radical acceptance we model.

Like water that persists yet adapts, we can maintain our commitment to healing while remaining flexible about what form that healing takes. We can be powerfully present without being rigid, deeply caring without being controlling.

The body is indeed a doorway, as Sophie Strand writes—not just to healing as we've defined it, but to a deeper understanding of what it means to be human in an interconnected world; to suffer, to hope, and to find meaning within whatever reality we're given.

In this work, we are all students. As Ram Dass so presciently reminded us, we are all just walking each other home.