Healing Beyond Systems
Remembering the Knowledge, Resilience, and Cultural Practices That Have Always Sustained Us
Healing, Justice, and the Systems Around Us
There is an important conversation happening about the relationship between healing and systemic change. As conversations around mental health and wellness continue to grow, more people are recognizing that individual healing cannot be separated from the environments people exist within. Poverty, healthcare inequities, educational barriers, housing instability, discrimination, and economic insecurity all shape people’s experiences and influence their ability to experience safety, stability, and wellness.
This acknowledgment is necessary because healing is not simply an individual responsibility. A person cannot always journal, meditate, practice self-care, or develop healthier coping mechanisms as a solution to conditions that are continuously producing harm. Individual wellness practices can be meaningful and transformative, but they cannot replace the need for justice, equity, and systems that support human dignity.
However, there is another important dimension of this conversation that requires cultural awareness: healing has never belonged exclusively to systems.
While systemic change can create conditions where more people are able to heal, history shows us that communities have always carried their own forms of restoration, care, and survival, even under systems designed to deny them those very things. To suggest that healing can only exist after institutions become just risks overlooking the knowledge, traditions, and practices that have sustained people for generations.
Healing and justice are deeply connected, but healing has never waited for justice to arrive.
Understanding Healing Beyond Institutions
When discussing healing, it is important to recognize the difference between systems that support healing and the human capacity to heal itself.
Healthcare systems, educational institutions, and economic structures can provide resources that make healing more accessible. They can reduce suffering, increase opportunities, and create environments where individuals and communities are better positioned to thrive.
However, systems are not the original creators of healing.
Long before modern institutions defined health, communities relied on relationships, cultural traditions, spiritual practices, ancestral knowledge, and collective care. Human beings have always developed ways to preserve life and restore wellness, even in circumstances where formal systems were absent, inaccessible, or harmful.
This does not mean systems are unnecessary. It means that communities have always carried wisdom beyond the structures created around them.
One of the clearest examples of this can be found in the history of enslaved Africans and their descendants.
Slave Medicine: Healing Knowledge Within an Oppressive System
One powerful example of healing existing within oppressive conditions can be found in what historians have referred to as “slave medicine.” This term has been used to describe the medical knowledge, healing practices, remedies, and caregiving traditions developed and practiced among enslaved Africans throughout the Atlantic world and the United States.
It is important to understand that slave medicine does not mean slavery created healing. Rather, it demonstrates how enslaved people preserved, adapted, and shared healing knowledge despite a system specifically designed to deny their autonomy and humanity.
The institution of slavery was one of the most violent and dehumanizing systems in history. Enslaved Africans were denied freedom, separated from families, subjected to physical violence, and often deprived of adequate medical care. Their bodies were frequently treated as property rather than as human beings deserving protection and dignity.
Yet, even within these conditions, enslaved people continued to practice forms of healing rooted in knowledge, observation, tradition, and community responsibility.
Historian Londa Schiebinger, in Secret Cures of Slaves: People, Plants, and Medicine in the Eighteenth-Century Atlantic World (2017), documents how enslaved Africans possessed extensive botanical and medical knowledge that influenced colonial medicine. Enslaved healers carried knowledge of plants, remedies, and treatments that originated from African traditions and adapted those practices to new environments throughout the Atlantic world.
This history challenges the assumption that medical knowledge only flowed from formal Western institutions toward marginalized communities. In many cases, institutions benefited from knowledge created and preserved by the very communities they marginalized.
Herbert C. Covey’s African American Slave Medicine: Herbal and Non-Herbal Treatments (2007) further explores the healing practices maintained within enslaved communities, including herbal remedies, midwifery, spiritual practices, and other forms of caregiving. Through historical records and accounts from formerly enslaved people, Covey illustrates that enslaved communities were not passive recipients of healthcare; they were active participants in preserving and practicing their own forms of medicine.
The presence of slave medicine reveals something profound: oppression can create suffering, but it cannot completely erase human knowledge, cultural memory, or the desire to care for one another.
The “Find a Way” Legacy
The ability to create, adapt, and care for one another under impossible circumstances reflects a legacy that continues within many communities today.
The “find a way” mindset often associated with Black communities is not simply about enduring hardship. It is rooted in generations of innovation, resourcefulness, and collective responsibility. It comes from people who created solutions when resources were limited, who preserved traditions when institutions attempted to erase them, and who built communities of care when systems failed to provide it.
This legacy can also be seen through mutual aid networks, faith communities, community organizations, traditional healing practices, and informal caregiving systems that have historically supported Black communities.
These practices were not created because people did not deserve better systems. They existed because people have always needed ways to care for themselves and each other while advocating for better conditions.
Resilience should never be used as an excuse to justify injustice. Communities should not have to constantly adapt to systems that harm them. However, recognizing resilience also means recognizing agency. Marginalized communities have never been empty vessels waiting for institutions to provide solutions. They have always carried knowledge, creativity, and healing practices of their own.
Why Cultural Competence Matters in Conversations About Healing
A culturally competent understanding of healing requires us to hold two truths at the same time.
The first truth is that systems matter. Access to healthcare, education, economic security, and social justice are essential. People deserve environments that support their well-being rather than require constant survival.
The second truth is that systems are not the sole source of healing. Healing also exists through culture, spirituality, relationships, community, ancestry, and collective care.
Ignoring this history can unintentionally create the idea that marginalized communities were only surviving until modern institutions arrived to save them. A more accurate understanding recognizes that communities were also creating, preserving, and practicing healing long before institutions acknowledged the value of that knowledge.
Healing is not only something that happens when systems improve. Healing is also something people carry, protect, and pass down.
Healing Has Always Been Ours
The pursuit of systemic change and the recognition of cultural healing are not opposing ideas. They are connected.
We should continue advocating for systems that provide healthcare, education, economic stability, and justice. These structures can reduce suffering and create opportunities for people to live healthier and more secure lives.
But we must also remember that healing has never belonged only to institutions. Across generations, people have carried healing through their traditions, their relationships, their communities, and their ancestral knowledge.
Our ancestors were not simply surviving history. They were creating pathways through it.
Healing is not only found in the systems we build. It is also found in the wisdom people carry when systems fail them.
Author’s Note: A Reflection on Healing, Wholeness, and What We Carry
When I think about healing, I often think about it as something much larger than an individual practice. Healing is not only what happens in a therapy session, a doctor’s office, a journal entry, or a moment of quiet reflection. Healing is also found in our relationships, our communities, our traditions, our memories, and the wisdom that has been carried across generations.
This reflection was born from a desire to hold two truths at the same time: the systems around us deeply impact our ability to thrive, and yet our capacity to heal has never depended solely on those systems.
There is a necessary conversation about justice, equity, and the ways social conditions shape our mental and physical well-being. People deserve access to healthcare, education, safety, and resources that allow them to live with dignity. Healing should not require constant survival.
But I also believe we must remember the histories of people who healed before institutions recognized their needs. We must remember the communities who created care when care was denied, who preserved knowledge when knowledge was dismissed, and who found ways to nurture life even in environments designed to diminish it.
For me, this is not an argument against systemic change. It is an expansion of what we understand healing to be.
Healing is both personal and collective. It is both structural and ancestral. It is found in the work we do to transform the world around us and in the wisdom we carry within ourselves.
At Shades of Wellness, I believe wellness requires us to look beyond individual practices and examine the deeper stories, cultures, and histories that shape how we understand care. Sometimes healing means building something new. Sometimes healing means remembering something we were never meant to forget.