Decolonizing Healing

 Returning to Movement and Song: A Decolonized Path to Healing

In today’s clinical landscape, healing often becomes confined to neat boxes—diagnoses, talk therapy, symptom management. However, for many, this structure does not fully capture what it means to be human, nor what it means to heal. Healing is more than talking; it’s remembering that, before therapy offices and diagnostic codes, we healed through the body, through song, through ritual, and community.

Returning to Movement for Healing

The body remembers what the mind forgets. Trauma, grief, loss—they live in muscle, fascia, posture, breath. When we sit still for too long, we trap these stories inside. Movement is the key to unlocking what has been frozen.

In cultures around the world, healing has traditionally included movement, such as dance, walking meditations, and ritualized gestures. These are not simply physical acts—they are embodied expressions of pain, joy, grief, and hope. In returning to movement, we begin to speak the body’s language again.

For myself, a Lebanese man, dance and music touch my soul in ways words never could. In the beat of a drum or the sway of a hip, I feel connected not just to myself, but to generations before me—those who also found solace and celebration in embodied rhythm. Movement allows me to return to myself fully, as a dynamic being, not a static mind seeking insight, but a whole human who moves, feels, weeps, and laughs.

The Power of Song in Healing

In every culture, there are songs for grief and songs for celebration; songs that mark the milestones of birth, coming of age, marriage, and death. Song is not an accessory to healing—it is a portal. The vibrations of our voice reverberate through the bones, inviting coherence between body and mind.

When we hum or sing in community, our nervous systems co-regulate. We remember we are not alone. Song calls us back to ancestral ways of being: ways where self-expression was communal, embodied, and sacred.

Even a simple hum, a quiet chant, or a breathy melody can soften the hard edges of pain and soothe an anxious heart. And in singing, especially when we do so freely—without concern for performance or perfection—we reclaim the birthright of expression.

Decolonizing Therapy

Decolonizing therapy means remembering that many of our healing traditions predate the modern understanding of psychology. It is about challenging the supremacy of Western, pathologizing models that reduce human experience to diagnoses, often stripped of cultural context.

For those whose cultures have been historically oppressed, healing must also include returning to indigenous, ancestral, or cultural forms of care, such as movement, ritual, prayer, song, touch, and community connection.

Decolonizing therapy invites us to stop viewing the therapist as the expert and instead honor the client as the expert of their own lived experience. It asks us to center liberation, not assimilation—to create space for culturally rooted practices that Western psychology has often dismissed or medicalized.

This is not a rejection of therapy, but a re-imagining. A re-grounding. Therapy that honors movement and song, therapy that remembers the wisdom of the body and the wisdom of ancestors, therapy that makes space for decolonized ways of healing—this is therapy that truly heals.

An Invitation

If you are on a healing journey, I invite you to return to your body. To sway, to shake, to stretch. To hum, to chant, to sing. To notice what your body is holding and to honor the ways your ancestors may have moved and sung through their pain and joy.

For myself, I am reminded that dance and music touch my soul—they allow me, as a Lebanese man, to reconnect not only with myself but with my heritage. They help me remember that healing is not simply something we do in silence, but something we do in movement, in rhythm, and song.

In this return, we honor not only ourselves but all who came before us.

Decolonized healing is not a trend—it is a remembering.