Why heal the horizon?

Healing happens at the edge of the comfort zone, not over it.-- Anodea Judith

Have you ever sat on a beach or near a body of water and just looked out onto the horizon? Or out across an array of treetops, branches billowing in the breeze. People have been connecting to the horizon for longer than the written word; something about it evokes the imagination because shifting to a wide view forces your eyes to use panoramic vision, which signals your brain to turn off the stress response. This reduced pressure on your eyes -- the most overused and abused of all our sense organs, allows us to re-connect to the big picture and provides us with space and time to consider our place in it. 

While I look at treetops everyday, most recently, I watched the horizon as I sat on the shores of Lake Erie (a place I of course knew existed from having been raised to memorize the acronym HOMES, but never really thought I’d see in this lifetime) and marvelled at the line where water and sky blended together in that miraculous way painters and creatives will always be trying to capture or master. 

You see while the word horizon can be defined, experiencing it is a state of mind. In English, the word “Horizon” stems from the Greek phrase, horízōn kýklos (ὁρίζων κύκλος), which translates to "separating circle.” For the ancient Egyptians, the horizon was the “place of birth and death;” and that place is life. Re-connecting to yourself here, in this intersection, is meeting yourself at the edge of your comfort zone, where healing can happen in a way that you get to design.

At Horizon Healing Counseling Collective, our therapists recognize that life can be complex. There are intersectional identities and challenges we all carry that make this living business seem quite onerous. Yet this place we call life is worth living. 

Horizon Healing Counselling Collective was founded by settler Canadians living, working, and playing on the Indigenous unceded territories of the Coast Salish peoples. While we are proud of our heritages, the lands from which our ancestors came, most recently from Europe, Asia, and Latin America, we understand the cost it took for us to become rooted where we are- both to our own ancestors and to the Indigenous peoples upon whose land we reside.

“After all these generations since Columbus, some of the wisest of Native elders still puzzle over the people who came to our shores. They look at the toll on the land and say, “The problem with these new people is that they don’t have both feet on the shore. One is still on the boat. They don’t seem to know whether they’re staying or not.” This same observation is heard from some contemporary scholars who see in the social pathologies and relentlessly materialist culture the fruit of homelessness, a rootless past. [North] America has been called the home of second chances. For the sake of the peoples and the land, the urgent work of the Second [Hu]Man may be to set aside the ways of the colonists and become Indigenous to place. But can [North] Americans, as a nation of immigrants, learn to live here as if we were staying? With both feet on the shore? What happens when we finally make it a home? Where are the stories that lead the way?” (Robin Wall Kimmerer, Braiding Sweetgrass)

Deciding to go inside yourself is making the decision to put both your feet on the shore and become one with the place you were born, the place that remains inside your core. Your own personal world and how that fits in to the world in which we are living. Origin stories say a great deal about how we are to understand our place in the universe and our relationships to other living things. It’s the history they don’t always teach us in school.

If this is something you have always wanted to do, but never had the time or the courage or the resources, our therapists are here to support you. Like looking into the horizon, therapy doesn’t need to add stress to your system in order to be successful. While healing can be painful at times, creating your own healing journey is empowering and rewarding; ensuring that the pain is re-defining, not confining. 

We are all in this world together, and while I have been looking inside for a very long time, there is always something new to explore. A horizon I have never seen before. I had never been to Lake Erie before and I became curious about the origin of the place and the life it sustained. After all, my story doesn’t exist in isolation, and each time I go somewhere new it seems logical to pay this respect to a new place- a new life perspective, one I am grateful to obtain. 

So I began to heal another horizon- one I hadn’t known was there: my understanding of why the Great Lakes are more than just the geography I was taught in school. For the Anishnaabeg, the Great Lakes is a spiritual landscape, formed by and embedded with the regenerative potential of the First Ones who gave it form. 

This is a powerful teaching that reminds me that in order to heal a horizon, I have to understand all sides of the seperation– where land or water meet the sky. It’s inspiring to realize that being human means I have the ability to choose to improve, not just my own life, but to be an ally of the land; of social injustices– historical and ongoing. With both feet on the shore I can explore the only mystery that is truly left and design the horizon of my own existence. 

When you are able to merge the past of who you were with the future of who you will be. In this vortex, you get to embrace the present exactly as you are, and that requires tailored support.

The hardest part is showing up, but healing the horizon is for everyone. No matter who you are or where you’ve been, you can break the cycle of mental strain and stress and give voice to your life. It’s well worth the trip, once you decide you are ready for it.