A HEARTSONG IN ACTION

In the process of loving forward the Gift of Emily, needing to find a a rescue for our second guest, deeper healing found Regina — giving birth to an ever-present heartsong in art and poetry, 

from the energy of love.

It began in 2023, when a physician in Poland saw Regina’s grief and concern poems on a Facebook page she made in advocacy for Kat, asked a question that dropped Regina’s jaw: do you have any health difficulties of your own?

A page created in advocacy for another woman is how a rescue found me!

“Rarely, if ever, are any of us healed in isolation. Healing is an act of communion.”

— bell hooks

By 2023 the twelve-year battle with NeuroLyme had ended in remission — yet Regina was still disabled. Unable to reliably hold down a job. Unable, alone, to meet the needs of her teenage daughter. Confused as to the why, and not alone in that confusion.

The doctor who reached out was an infectious-disease physician recovering from a near-fatal case of Covid and living with long Covid herself. She had seen Regina’s poems and art, not her diagnosis. She offered to treat her — not for profit, she said, but to

support the love in the art!

What she asked of Regina was daily and small. Create from feeling. However you felt to create. Sing. Let your body move to music however it can. Go outside, and walk barefoot on the earth. Lean against a tree. Every one of those things Regina believed she could not do, or should not spend energy on. 

In January 2024, moving to music, a song rose out of her. She pressed record. It became a daily mantra. In the months and years that followed, moving to this mantra, released the grip of CPTSD, and even a knee that had hurt for years stopped hurting. Regina is not offering this as medicine, nor as as proof that CPTSD can be healed. She is sharing what happened to one person who had been alone on a journey for a long time, and then was not.

When she wrote to the doctor about the joy of breaking free from CPTSD, she answered: 

now go light up the 

shadows with your song.

Read the full story: Calm Heart, Clear Mind — published in the American Diversity Report: 

WHAT THIS TAUGHT ME

Two things I did not know six years ago.

First, is that isolation is not a side effect of catastrophic illness. It is part of the injury. People do not simply hurt alone, they get worse alone, without adequate support.

The second is harder, and I learned it beside someone in severe, unrelieved pain.  A person living near the top of the pain scale, is barely surviving, and is vulnerable  physically and emotionally. Before any healing mutually was possible, before being asked anything at all—the rescue had to happen first.

That is why this work begins with safety. It is why Regina had to first heal alone: Read the fullstory:” Fall of The Human Spiral,” published in the American Diversity Report.