Manifesto for Healing

A lot of this blog is concerned with healing myself. I would not have been able to realize becoming a lawyer and working with prisoners and their families if I didn't begin the serious journey of healing myself.  

One of the ways that I heal myself is by traveling to meet people in my sleep. This is called astral traveling. During the hours when I am unconscious, as a spirit, I visit people and animals who have passed away or who are still alive. I visit places that I love and places that I have forgotten. It is a good way to meet with a spirit who is still alive because all the restrictions we have while we're awake are softened and melt away.  

Last night, in my sleep, I visited a colleague who I won't be able to see for a while. I was able to visit his home and meet his mates and we enjoyed each other's company. It's very difficult for him to communicate what he personally wants. I remember taking the bus to his house in my sleep because he asked me to. Now that we said goodbye last night, we can live lighter, with less anxiety and pain during our conscious waking hours. 

You can also make amends with enemies at this time. You can give and accept forgiveness. 

It is a time that you can use your creative powers to make and strengthen relationships that will heal your pain when you're awake. 

My sister taught me how to understand this tool that everyone has access to and that we all experience throughout our lives. 

It is important to understand its power and to use it to heal instead of using it to fortify fences of pain that we wake up to in the morning. This tool is to help mend and alleviate the broken heart that comes with being alive. 

The world is not as constrained and limiting as we have been raised to believe under Christianity, capitalism and patriarchy. Look at these systems of incarceration we have built to shackle ourselves and our children. 

Who could survive this prison we have constructed? 

We are taught the first rule of order in the US, scarcity, know it well, there is not enough to go around. There just isn't enough for everyone in your community.

As third world people, who were not raised in this philosophy, but have witnessed first-hand the consequences of converting our economies into dependency on aid from the colonial powers, we have internalized scarcity as if it was an ancient teaching from the ancestors.

Scarcity is when Tongans in positions of institutional power refuse to share information about educational scholarships, NGO and non-profit awards and grants, sports and community funding, etc. with other Tongans because they believe there's not enough to go around, only enough for my family, my church, my group, my children's future.  

Arundahti Roy, Indian writer and activist, reminds her country folk, as the Indian government and corporations build for war and corporate privatization, that India's greatest treasure and export to the world is civil disobedience. Civil disobedience led by Gandhi and supported by millions of ordinary Indian people.  I thought of being Tongan and the most important teaching that I carried with me from Tonga when my family and I immigrated to the U.S.

Tonga's greatest treasure and export to the world is 'ofa, love. It is a treasure of the people of Oceania. The Samoans call it 'alofa, the Kanaka Maoli call it aloha and so on. 

There is nothing sentimental about 'ofa, a gift of knowing from the ancestors, who are flora and fauna, land and water and sky. 'Ofa is our greatest gift to the world, because it is a tool that we have created ourselves, it is our self-love. When everything falls apart around us, and it did, and it does, and it will, we will not deny the great love we have. We have found, in our tumultuous experiences for survival in the West, that 'ofa is the most precious gift we have.  'Ofa is a knowing for all Tongans: half castes, queers, baby mamas,  lifers, live-ins, deportees, overstayers and especially for Tongans, who have not stepped foot on the homeland nor speak the mother tongue...you are Tongan, follow your heart. 

Tongan love is no joke. Collectively as Tongans, it has carried us through the destruction and eradication of our knowledges of our bodies, sexualities, our easiness we once had together as a people.  For the majority of us, enjoyment and acceptance is only reserved for Tongans in our tight-knitted-in circles. We have become very exclusive and too rigidly cautious of other Tongans who are not exactly like us. In our fear, we act cruelly and rudely to one another. While busy securing our comfort borders, we assure ourselves, "There is not enough of me to be open to them." We criminalize and demonize the realities that so many of us Tongans live today. Many of us who now have access to institutional power,  have forgotten so quickly that our own journeys in this new country had humble beginnings of poverty, lack of education, inadequateness and shame. We are all Tongans. Our paths may have diverted in material ways but our spirits yearn for 'ofa we provide each other.   

 

'Ofa looks at the face of scarcity, and says, "Well, we have to work together."  

In the diversity of the lives we live in 2009 as Tongans, an act of 'ofa is revolutionary. 

I have to tell you sisters and brothers, I think the most revolutionary act of  'ofa we can create, as my sister Fui told me several years ago, is to begin our individual journeys of healing. When you genuinely make the choice to change your individual life, all your ancestors and the gods will accompany your journey. You are never alone. 

The majority of Tongans are Christian. There are tools that Christianity provides that has helped and continues to help Tongans to heal. Christianity especially provides the great healing tool of congregating to praise together. 

When the news about Chris Brown and Rihanna hit the media, I was very disappointed that this young black pop star beat his girlfriend. I am a big fan and supporter of young brothas making it. Hitting your girlfriend means that, although you're selling a million records,  you need to slow down young brother and reevaluate your path. I'm only talking about Chris Brown because I wasn't a Rihanna music fan.

I loved listening to Chris Brown and Jordin Sparks blasted from down the street while Boricua mothers cleaned their living rooms in my Worcester neighborhood. And drinking to Chris Brown in every club in Tonga in Sep. 08. Chris Brown had an appeal and image that many Tongan boys emulated because it wasn't too fancy our outlandish, it was just the boy-next-door, who can dance. 

When the news first broke out, Chris immediately responded that he was going to take a break and get back to things that were important in life. He was going to visit his mother and he was receiving counseling from his minister at his church. 

When I heard that he was getting counseling at his church, my heart sank. My intuition as a girl who grew up Wesleyan and Mormon knows that church DO give you lots of counseling, but the kind of counseling that will help Chris think deeply about why he should not beat a woman, is, beyond the services provided by churches. Christian church must not be the only way to seek and receive healing.   

When we are serious about our healing, we must explore further than the institutions of power that were automatically handed to us by our parents, like the Christian church. 

My friend Shaimaa has a saying that she attaches to all her emails. It reads, "To discover new oceans you need the courage to lose sight of the shore." This is an appropriate saying for us when we decide that we want to learn more about how to heal ourselves. 

Tongan people, before the Christian church, there were ways that we loved and healed individually and collectively. Re-claiming those ways by using different knowledges that we have access to, including christianity, will give us back our individual powers to heal ourselves and each other. 

Healing can start with seeing a counselor. For many of us who have government subsidized insurance, counselors are available. There are community healing groups in many neighborhoods. They comprise of neighbors coming together to talk about their lives. Alternative medicine like acupuncture and massage are also ways to heal the body and the soul. Join meditation groups and ask people in the room about information on other ways to heal. Start a journal and talk honestly to yourself about how you feel and your goals for your life.

But these places and these people are all white and Asians and there are no Tongans or Pacific Islanders, you say.  Stay courageous, this is the reality about the world as soon as you step out of your Tongan church and that tight-knitted-in circle I mentioned earlier.  

There are healing groups for women and men of color, for gays and lesbians of color, for ex-prisoners. Remember the promise, when you are serious about your own healing, the entire universe will give you everything you need to make it happen. 

As I write this, my grandmother Sauliloa sits by my my side. She is serious about healing. Being together also helps both of us to heal. 

I still need to go back and write the story about my father. My grandmother really wants to be part of writing that story because she wants to tell my father "Kepa, sorry," and let him know that, "I love him so much."