A HEARTSONG IN ACTION

Bringing to light what’s invisible.

Preface: This is a lived journey of healing and rescue within Emily’s Place The One—an archive of story, art, and transformation at the heart of our work. (Key Insight Summary located below)

While Regina was loving forward the Gift of Emily and searching for a rescue for our second guest, a deeper healing found her—giving birth to an ever-present heartsong, from the energy of love. It began in 2023.

By 2023, a thirteen-year struggle with NeuroLyme had alreadyended in remission (2019) — yet Regina still faced challenges and was disabled. She could provide shelter for one woman at a time who was crushingly disabled as she used to be.

She could be their witness, a compassionate companion. She could make appointments. But she couldn’t reliably hold down a job outside her home, and she couldn’t meet the needs of her teenage daughter alone. She didn’t understand why, and wasn’t alone in that confusion.

Then, one day…

A physician in Poland discovered Regina’s art and poems and songs of grief, and of concern, for patients like the second woman she‘d invited into her home, on Facebook in 2023. Regina created this page to advocate for her in a life-threatening gap of care within our medical system. When this doctor in Poland reached out in messenger, she asked a question that caused Regina’s jaw drop,

“Do you have any health difficulties of your own?”

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

This was the day—

A Facebook page established to help another, became the pathway for Regina’s own rescue!

As it turned out, the doctor reaching out from Poland was an infectious-disease physician (Regina’s jaw dropped again upon hearing the news!).

The doctor herself was disabled—recovering from a near-fatal case of Covid and living with long Covid. Although she’d seen Regina’s art and poems, Regina had kept her own diagnosis private: strictly using this Facebook page for advocacy. Upon learning about Regina’s condition postlyme being in remission, she offered to treat her—not for profit, but to support the love in her art!

Jaw dropping again, gratitude filled Regina’s being!

What the doctor expected of Regina was daily and small: create from feeling. Whatever she felt, she was encouraged to create. Sing. Move her body to music however it could. Go outside, and walk barefoot on the earth. Lean against a tree. Every single one of those activities was something Regina believed she could not do, or felt she shouldn’t waste energy on.

But she took the leap, and followed all of the prongs of her treatment.

In January 2024, as she moved to music, a song emerged within her. She pressed record, and it became a daily mantra. In the months and years that followed, moving to this mantra released the grip of her CPTSD, and even a knee that had hurt for years stopped troubling her. Regina isn’t offering this as medicine, nor as proof that CPTSD recovery is achievable. She is simply sharing what happened to one person who had been alone on a long journey, and then found connection.

When she wrote to the doctor about the joy of breaking free from CPTSD, she received this reply:

“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 REGINA.

Two things she did not understand six years ago.

First, isolation is not merely a side effect of catastrophic illness; it is part of the injury. People do not simply hurt alone; they worsen without adequate support.

The second lesson is more complex, and she learned it alongside someone in severe, unrelieved pain. A person living near the top of the pain scale is barely surviving and is vulnerable both physically and emotionally.

Before any shared healing could take place, before any request was made—THE RESCUE had to happen first. That is why this journey begins with safety. It is also why Regina had to first heal alone. Read the full story: Fall of The Human Spiral, published in the American Diversity Report.

Key Insights / Summary for Research and Teaching Use

Heartsong in Action: Lived Experience and Mutual Rescue in Emily’s Place The One

1. Healing as Mutual, Not One-Sided:

Caregiving and rescue in severe illness is a reciprocal process; the one offering help is also transformed and can find healing or growth through the act of companionship and advocacy.

2. Isolation Deepens the Wound:

Isolation for catastrophically ill or disabled women is not just a social side effect but a core injury—prolonging or complicating recovery at the level of the nervous system, psyche, and self.

3. Systemic Gaps Have Personal & Biological Costs: When traditional systems “miss” women in crisis, the cost is not only logistical but neurobiological (e.g., persistent dysregulation, trauma sequelae), leading to more protracted and complex healing needs.

4. Place-Based and Personalized Care Promotes Dignity: Trauma-informed, in-home, relationship-centered support restores dignity and offers unique opportunities for stabilization, especially for those rendered invisible by mainstream care systems.

5. Creative & Communal Modalities Are Core, Not Supplemental: Healing at Emily’s Place The One engages music, movement, nature, art, and peer connection—demonstrating that “arts in health” is not an optional extra, but a lifeline for identity, affect regulation, and hope.

6. The Power of One Can Create Cascades:

Transformational change often begins with “one” person’s safety, seen-ness, and enabled voice. Restoration at the individual level becomes both proof of concept and a seed for broader healing.

7. Narrative as Data:

Lived-experience storytelling, poetry, and creative nonfiction herein serve as qualitative data that can inform trauma-informed practice, patient-centered research, and narrative medicine curriculum.