Whitney Sutherland

“The practice above all practices is to relinquish the immature desire to be taken care of in false belonging and to parent our own originality. Again and again, our dreams demand leadership from us, calling our life’s vision forward into the world, step by tenderbrave step.”
― Toko-pa Turner, Belonging: Remembering Ourselves home

“The keeper of silence has tremendous control. What she keeps sealed away can never be harmed so long as it remains hidden. Silence is a power, yes, but when does silence turn upon its keeper and become the captor? When does it inhibit the natural impulse to speak, the urge to sing, the longing to contribute? So many wait for the express invitation to speak, for some permission to be granted, to be coaxed into contributing. But what if this invitation never comes? When does silence stop us from fulfilling our purpose, or making connections with others? When does silence stop a healthy disagreement, like the one that names an injustice and invokes change? When is silence being complicit, when it should be calling on a revolution waiting to happen?”
― Toko-pa Turner, Belonging: Remembering Ourselves home

“The medicine is already within the pain and suffering. You just have to look deeply and quietly. Then you realize it has been there the whole time. Saying from the Native American oral tradition”
― Thomas Hübl, Healing Collective Trauma: A Process for Integrating Our Intergenerational and Cultural Wounds

“The energy of intense suffering is pushed out of consciousness simply so that life can be allowed to go on. Denial permits us to survive the unsurvivable—for a while. Left too long, any unconscious defense mechanism becomes detrimental to life. When collective denial goes unaddressed, we see the proliferation of groups that deny that the Holocaust occurred, that a civil war was waged to defend the economic institution of race-based slavery in the United States, or that hundreds of thousands of Rohingya Muslims are subjected to state-sanctioned ethnic cleansing in the form of mass murder, sexual violence, and forced exile from the primarily Buddhist Myanmar.1”
― Thomas Hübl, Healing Collective Trauma: A Process for Integrating Our Intergenerational and Cultural Wounds