Hope as Medicine

Before becoming a deconstructed adult during such unprecedented times, I probably thought hope was a trite platitude associated with a few bible verses and Easter Sunday. An idea that was tossed around without much heft or importance.

All of my therapy career has been through challenging times. I attended grad school on the heels of a divorce and life change that shook my core ideas about what being an adult woman was. In grad school, during the election of Trumps first term, I was taught how to confront my own privileges as a white woman raised as a christian within the colonist patriarchal white nationalist culture I live in, balancing the rage of being an oppressed woman while understanding how my personal identity has harmed others. (A lifelong journey, to be sure) Then came the pandemic...followed by Trumps second presidency. To know that I, and most of my clients, have been short on hope is an understatement.

But in the past couple years, activists and creators have been sharing hope, lights in the dark, art to fight facism. So when the opportunity came to learn from Dr. Sabrina N'Diaye at the Psychotherapy Network Conference on Hope as Medicine, I jumped at the chance.

Sister Sabrina, as she asked us to call her, is a Sufi Muslim woman who radiates hope as medicine. We began the workshop naming how hope is an act of resistance in a world dominated by war, capitalism, racism, and all the other oppressive systems that want to use us as cogs in their machines until we are no longer breathing. This is not the trite kind of hope that ignores the terrors of the world, but hope to heal during the terrors of this world.

We were challenged to leave space for possibility, to see storytelling as a radical act of love, to embody a hopeful relationship to create change in all our lives, to hold stories with hope, not spiritual bypassing. Sister Sabrina reminded us that a solitary fantasy can totally transform a million realities. She led us through several exercises like: writing a letter to someone (who we are mad at, who hurt us, who we blame for pain)'s highest self, she led us through a mediation to connect with an ancestor about what made them hopeful and knowledge they could pass on to us, she asked us where in our practices does hope live?

Lastly, to encourage our own hope to grow, she led us through an exercise I will share here:

Drawing the Sense of Hope

What does hope smell like?

What does hope sound like?

What does hope taste like?

Smell: I drew lavendar at it is my favorite calming scent, grounding and hopeful.

Sound: I drew a singing bowl as sound baths and playing meditative instruments in grounding and connects me to my highest self.

Taste: I drew a lemon because making lemonade out of lemons (or margaritas depending on your taste!) is a hopeful, refreshing, and crisp act.

What do you think about hope? How can you find your sacred medicine of hope in these dark times?