Two months ago, the amazing team over at Bittersweet Creative sent a dedicated photographer & interviewer to SeekHealing’s Asheville location to do a special feature on our work & recent growth as an organization.
When they first approached us to do the article, I was stunned to learn that a media company like theirs would devote resources to this kind of journalism: covering important social impact projects that the world needs to know about, and that rarely have the budget to devote to public relations & digital media.
In case anyone’s curious – I thought I’d take the opportunity here to share my impact. 🙂
Gratitude. Big gratitude, first and foremost. I’m grateful to Avery & her team not only for the professional photography and headshots our staff will now have available to use in our partnerships & development work, but also for the opportunity to collectively step back, take a breath, and appreciate all that we do and how far we’ve come. It was a special group of seekers who came together for the interviews: facilitators, staff members, partner organizations, and folks whose lives have been transformed by participating in social health programs.
Peter’s interview questions were not only insightful and provocative, they inspired important conversations amongst us as a community about how we show up and what’s really important – which can sometimes get lost in the day-to-day madness of doing this work in a world that’s so profoundly disconnected.
Besides how amazing the folks at Bittersweet are, the thing that really impacted me most was the effect of zooming out and getting perspective. Moving through the process of being interviewed and telling our stories as a community generated a lot of in-the-moment gratitude when the Bittersweet team was here in Asheville. It brought our attention out of the weeds and back to what matters, and I watched it open everyone’s eyes to really appreciating each other, no matter how they’re involved in the work (giving, receiving, and both).
But the biggest hit of fresh perspective I got was reading the article itself – which for me, happened quietly on the patio of a beautiful little boutique hotel in Queenstown, New Zealand, the first week in March. I was out-of-office on vacation for the first time since taking parental leave last summer, attending a retreat about burnout for neurodivergent entrepreneurs – ideally located in one of the most beautiful & relaxing places I’ve ever been. I read the article while the sun was setting, and found myself tearful in a mix emotions: pride, imposter syndrome, a whole lot of gratitude and hope, and a little fear.
Getting to put myself in the shoes of an interviewer, or other stranger to this work and this project, it struck me all at once how damn simple our work is. At the end of the day, SeekHealing’s work is just so … straight-forward and human. It’s just about learning to see each other, listen to each other, trust each other, open up to each other. It’s just helping people figure out how to do that.
It feels so much more complicated than that to me, most of the time in my 40hr work week – not the least of which is because for most people, it’s not that simple. We’re all healing from a thousand iterations of cultural and interpersonal trauma that prevent us from doing this beautiful, simple thing. Pile onto that the work that it takes to actually live our values as an organization: to radically resist nonprofit urgency culture and take them time to dive into the rabbit holes of human emotion, whenever they emerge. And in my role in leadership, there’s the added intensity of financial paradoxes in philanthropy that can keep me from remembering that it’s nothing we’re failing at or doing wrong — it’s just hard to bring this dream to life in the world that we live in.
Reading the article gave me so much relief to see clearly, for even just a moment, that our organization really is cultivating more connection — at both individual and organizational levels. We’re living and breathing it, and protecting the little moments of it that blossom between seekers and facilitators and volunteers every day. It reminded me that we’re just one little non-profit here in these beautiful Blue Ridge mountains; doing our best and going through very normal non-profit things — and that we’ve managed to create something pretty unique, and incredibly powerful in the process.
One of my favorite quotes from Peter in this article is: “You don’t have to be anxious [at SeekHealing] that someone will barge into the inner sanctum of your one sacred life and start fiddling with the holy things. You can be here at ease.”
I’ll never stop being grateful that we figured out how to create that. Because damn if I don’t really, really, REALLY need that myself.
