F.I.R.E - Focus on Internal Restoration for Empowerment
FOCUS
For generations, Indigenous people have been dealing with the effects of intergenerational trauma. We have experienced displacement from our homelands and loss of our cultural practices and languages due to the impacts of residential schools. We have learned to hide our pain, that crying was weakness and to suffer alone in silence.
Indigenous communities experience loss at a higher rate than the Western statistical norm and while many methodologies are utilized to attempt to remedy these issues, they are not made to address historical trauma and grief of Indigenous peoples.
Historically, our survival as a people was determined by the health of all and support by others during times of loss. Relearning how to do so, is at the forefront of the F.I.R.E. Process. It is time to focus on our health and wellbeing in a wholistic way as was customary for our ancestors. Focus is necessary to heal what pains us and rebuild that spirit that was given to us from the Creator.
INTERNAL
Where do you feel your pain when you are grieving? While it is uncomfortable, and we are trained to avoid it, where does it actually sit within your body? Focus and acknowledge where your grief manifests itself within your body. It is signalling to you that it needs to be healed, but it cannot be healed if it is avoided.
Aseshate:ka'te is a Kanien'kehá:ka (Mohawk) word that means "relighting the fire" and in our ways fire is synonymous with our internal spirit. It is told to us that when we experience grief, our fire gets low.
The word for family is "Akhwá:tsire" and its literal meaning is "fires together". So when grief hits a family, it is said to scatter the logs. The ashes then settle in our eyes and we have tears, settle in our ears and we can not hear the positive things people say or nature around us, and it settles in our throats giving us a lump and making it hard to speak good words or swallow food to nourish our bodies. This process will focus our attention on how grief affects our bodies and our lives so we can restore the fire that is low.
RESTORATION
Healing begins when you go where the pain is, examine it, study it, understand it and then release what isn't meant to stay. Upon its release, we can then feel our spirits restored within our body. We must work to heal and therefore release the pain trapped in our bodies, so that we can experience true health. We not only heal our hearts, we heal our systems within our body by looking at ourselves in a wholistic way. To heal, is to process that which is unresolved.
Grief is not only caused by loss from death, it also accompanies many changes through-out our lives from divorce, imprisonment, trauma, loss of identity, loss of health and so on. The F.I.R.E process addresses loss in a step by step manner in a supportive environment to restore the fire within.
The process is meant to help guide participants as they journey to those painful experiences, that are relative to the relationships with others. Healing occurs from being able to revisit and resolve that which was not communicated within a relationship that caused pain. While painful to revisit, the release is typically uplifting and empowering.
EMPOWERMENT
Our strength and resiliency as a people has always been demonstrated by simply continuing to exist, while historically as a people, we've survived a genocide against us. Remnants of these practices have left a stain on our being and our ability to function as our ancestors did pre-contact.
Our survival was relative to our interconnectedness to our environment and each other. Healing and restoring the spirits we've been given, extends to those fires around us, our families. As a family heals, that fire grows and extends into our communities, and so on. While we have experienced generational trauma and have unknowingly passed the pain from those experiences to the next generation, we also as a people, must realize that we have also inherited generational strength and resilience that we can continue to pass on to the next generations.
Healing therefore, empowers us to relearn our ways, restore our relationships with others and with ourselves. The F.I.R.E. process will nurture and empower us as we work together to create the healing community our future generations deserve.