(She Rises Vol 3 Excerpt) Guidance and Calling for Healing Justice by Tina Minkowitz

[Editor’s Note: This essay was first published in She Rises: What Goddess Feminist Activist Spirituality? Volume 3 (Mago Books 2018).]

I listen to inner guidance that also comes from the earth. The earth speaks within me. I touch and see and I know. Touching a tree, touching water, I know what I can’t put into words. Sometimes words come, or a sense of peace and intense love. Lately I’ve noticed the voice at my home, the hill on which we live centering on a beaver pond, belongs to the beavers, their presence and wisdom. I listen and learn. 

Centering in this wisdom has guided me throughout my adult life after I was broken up and opened by a kind of violence that is not readily sayable, and that feels still shameful. I was taken into a psychiatric institution where I was confined and forced to ingest a neuroleptic drug that completed a process of dissolution of self and dissociation from what and who I was. I became a ghost in myself and had to remake my life after it was over.

Life gave me the chance to repair the harm that I suffered, to grow and build beyond my suffering with the wounded healer archetype. I was guided to attend law school and my process there with its interruptions and repetitions put me in place to develop a skeleton of doctrine based on disability non-discrimination to require the abolition of forced psychiatry. I graduated shortly before the UN began work on a disability anti-discrimination treaty, and I was empowered by a new global organization of users and survivors of psychiatry to speak on its behalf. I steered by the guidance I kept checking in with, listening for my responsibility. In upending a system of practice and law that was abusive, I wanted to be sure to do no harm myself. I became sure as it continued to take shape that it was good and not harmful in any way.

My work was foundational to what became a true shift in international human rights norms, an innovation in legal doctrine that is working its way into domestic law and the practice of mental health services. It could not take place by any one person alone, there were many other survivors both grassroots and more professional, who contributed, and probably hundreds of participants in the UN process from government delegations and the worldwide disability community.

This opened up a world for me and a gift of service. While the intensity has diminished since the completion of the treaty and its interpretation by the official UN monitoring body in accordance with our intentions, this calling remains a source of beauty and growth in my life. I am teaching a course based on my work that is currently a great source of satisfaction. Like the work itself, the course is grassroots, without institutional academic support or funding.

Beyond the work, I have been able to return attention to myself again, my life, my marriage and home, where do I want to be, where do we want to be and what do we want to be and do beyond our separate work? I have come full circle to finding myself again needing to allow guidance to come without pushing it.

I have doubted myself and at times treated myself and others less than lovingly, at times the urgency of the work led me to prioritize a goal over people and relationships. This then led me to feel guilt and try to establish stability through conventional means, seeking conventional forms of power and esteem that always eluded me. I want to regain the equilibrium that comes with inner guidance and connection with earth, her beings and those I love. There has been suffering in this part of the process but it is the kind that leads to joy.

About the author: Tina Minkowitz is founder and president of the Center for the Human Rights of Users and Survivors of Psychiatry. She lives with her wife Diana Signe Kline in the Adirondacks region of New York.