Nine of us were gathered for our first prep meeting to resume the Navajo Healing project and I recounted the above question that Justice Yazzie asked me when I first met him five years ago. The Navajo Project team this time had both seasoned and first time participants offering acupuncture, bodywork, herbs and education to the Dineh community* and I wanted to connect everyone to the history of the project. I spoke about my first encounter with Justice Yazzie, when he attended a talk I was giving on the worldview of Traditional Chinese Medicine. At that time, I had reached a point in my practice where it felt important for me to actively restore and reframe TCM back to how it was meant to be understood, practiced and lived --within a natural order of connection and harmony. Health is a restoration of our natural place in that greater order. I spoke about the central idea and assumption that our inherent connection with one another and the natural world is inseparable and that problems arise when we approach the world--as we do in the modern worldview--from an assumption of separateness and disconnection. Problems can manifest on a personal level as illness and disease and on a larger scale as war and environmental degradation.
Justice Yazzie’s question came at the end of the talk and it felt jarring, because despite the fact that I didn’t know who Justice Yazzie was at the time, his formidable presence made me feel that he was assessing me and testing what I had presented. I was already feeling vulnerable speaking publicly about a topic so important to me, and his question made me feel nervous, intimidated and I felt pressured to prove myself. I remember stumbling through something about contrast--that disconnection is necessary for us to understand the importance of connection. A sort of yin/yang answer. Judging from the dubious look on his face, it was an unsatisfactory answer.
What is the value of disconnection? What is the value of Covid, fires, racism, violence, injustice, climate change, poverty? Value. We know the value of a dollar. We measure it with what it can bring us in terms of security, pleasure and happiness--which is how we typically measure the value or worth of a thing. The value of a dollar, a home, a healthy body, a friend. But what does it mean when we ask what is the value of instability? What is the value of police brutality, wildfire, disease? The question forces us to put down the measuring stick of personal gain and security and puts us into a larger world where we must consider our connection to everything and everyone or to “all my relations” as was taught to me through Native prayer. If the value of a thing is not in service of personal gain, then what is it in service of? I believe it’s in service of our collective well-being, our Connection. Or simply, in service of Love.
Five years after being asked that question and reflecting on it with my team, I understand that Justice Yazzie didn’t actually want an answer. His question was an offering--a question that contained the answer. Inherent within the question is an assumption of value, an assumption of goodness within all things, or in Navajo understanding, “Hozho”. Hozho is Justice Yazzie’s favorite topic. If there’s one Navajo word that I’ve learned from Justice Yazzie, it’s Hozho. And it’s a good word to know. He speaks about Hozho tirelessly. When I first met him and asked what it meant, he simply answered “good” or “beauty” or “right”. It took me some time to understand that the meaning is not fixed in dualistic/ exclusive thinking, as in good vs. bad or right vs. wrong. The Navajo worldview, akin to TCM worldview, is one of interconnectedness and wholeness with Hozho as the underlying and all pervasive guiding force of Life. There is no opposite of Hozho.
As such, even within our disconnection--and the evidence of that disconnection today is as acute as it ever was--there is value. There is not anything, however it looks, that does not contain value and therefore we cannot actually disconnect from the fundamental value or goodness or Hozho that is supporting our existence. No matter what we do, no matter how we suffer, we cannot disconnect from Connection. We will always be guided to adjust our ways towards harmony.
Adjusting our ways towards harmony means in whatever action we take, we must carry the well-being of all our relations inside us and honor whatever shows up as a guiding and teaching force. When we do that, we connect to the source of healing. That connection restores our collective well-being and our wholeness. Hozho and restoring this connection is at the heart of what the Navajo Healing Project is about.
As I sat there with my team even amidst fires, disease and stresses of all kind, I could feel each person connect and commit to the mission of the Navajo Healing Project. And I knew that we have the support of Hozho and that our work would be good.
*BCA is returning to Window Rock, AZ Oct. 12 to set up a pop-up clinic offering free acupuncture, bodywork, herbs, nutrition and Covid PPE supplies for the Dine Community. Please support our efforts with a donation and spread the word! Thank you <3
In Community,
