Seed Work for Internal Healing and Leadership Growth
Tomomi Shimizu Kamonohashi Project May 6, 2021
Nine years will be completed in this August 2021, since I deeply got immersed into the issue of human trafficking in India. Among 4 developmental issues that I have worked in my career, human trafficking is the most complex and inhumane issue with overwhelming amount of entrenched and trapped emotions at every corner of the continuum. While so many people wholeheartedly committed and joined to end the human trafficking phenomena, in this 21st century, there are still people who are sold for commercial exploitation with diverse violations committed onto them, which leave unimaginable amounts of injuries inside. Through the programs my organization supports and manages, I do interact, engage with, and listen to survivors of human trafficking and people supporting those survivors 24/7 wholeheartedly. The journey we are venturing into together evokes me deeply at times, as their stories emanate the lights of the very core of their spirits, co-holding the darkness they went and are going through and the creation energy to manifest their inspirations and aspirations.
I met Kyoko and WindEagle and Seed Work in June 2018 through the Gift Seed journey, and I was immediately drawn to the world of the Seed Work. It was a deep healing journey through the five seeds every one of us are born with. Seed Work got them awakened and evoked the unimaginable amount of healing, appreciation and internal calling for me. The journey with Kyoko and WindEagle gave me a very new perspective to look at myself, my relationship with those I feel intimate to, as well as to enable myself to redefine “forgiveness”. This deep process of getting in touch with the seeds we were born with and the world of “Between” moved something inside me, which was for long asleep and refused to make a single step to come forward. I shared my deep evocation from the Seed Work with some of my colleagues and started planning how we can create such a space with survivor leaders as well as those who have been working with survivors round the clock wholeheartedly.
This conversation led to the Seed Work workshop in July 2019. The workshop was led by Ms. Yuri Morikawa who invited me to the Gift Seed journey and set the path to embark onto this healing journey for me. In order to contextualize the Seed Work with survivors’ context and mitigate any possible triggers onto survivor leaders’ state of mind, we sought Ms. Uma Chatterjee to co-lead the programme, who is the mental health professional and the pioneer to work with survivors for their healing, restoration and leadership growth. The workshop was also supported by Ms. Pompi Banerjee, Ms. Shaswati Mallick, Ms. Satabdi Paul and Ms. Arpita Nath, all of whom work very closely, on a day-to-day basis, with survivor leaders. We spent 2.5 days with 15 survivor leaders for the Journey of Gift Seeds in a place surrounded by ample nature, silence, and space for oneself. For this beautiful space to emerge, Mr. Roop Sen shared his deep wisdom and critical questions to make the workshop meaningful, and Mr. Snehasish Sarkar literally ran around to ensure that the entire group will have comfortable and meaningful ceremonies with all the required stuff.
The most impactful experience that I witnessed in the workshop was their deep process of immersing into one’s embedded seeds. Stories shared individually and collectively during the workshop took various forms such as disclosure, confession, courage with trembling, realization of deep appreciation, collective holding of shared voices with deep listening and empathy to one another. Behind the mask of warriors, we all have various stories. When those stories were touched and received with the sense of being heard, I witnessed that the tonalities get shifted and a new path opened with ignited lights in the person. Evocative moments I am still carrying with me after 1.5 years are the silent tears shed, both whispering and vocal voices I have heard, and me realizing what my dream seed was; intimacy. The moment we released the balloons to the sky, after putting all our prayers that our dreams would come true, was unleashing and rejuvenating.
Recently, I asked for the time to have conversations with those who participated in the workshop nearly 2 years ago to feel how their seeds are doing. Stories shared are of their transformation and healing in their relationship with self and people, after coming back to their daily life. “Every single one of our previous experiences in life will affect in some way the mental perspective from which we see the world around us” (Storm, 1972). When that experience is too impactful and it starts driving our belief system, inner energy often gets distorted and our conscious self gets taken over by the pains. The recent conversations with participants made me realize that the ceremony opened the potential of those seeds in each of us and transformed the energy of pains into the energy to live, share and love. One received a new life after the workshop, and eyes of another carry the grace of her loss and healing instead of resentment and hatred. The other emanated, through her beautiful tears, strong energy from her dream seed to aspire to continue to dream. All commonly shared that they started seeing others’ humane traits, rather than through labels such as “survivor” “men” or “husband”. Separation between “me” and “others” was healed, and I saw a vast plateau of empathy, curiosity and oneness with full energies of their activated seeds.
These are my words. I have spoken.
Tomomi
