Optimal Healing Environments!
On healing spaces and monuments and stone
“Healing is a holistic, transformative process of repair and recovery in mind, body, and spirit resulting in positive change, finding meaning, and movement towards self-realization of wholeness, regardless of the presence or absence of disease.”
— Samueli Institute
This definition allows for the possibility of healing even when a cure is not possible, say the authors of “Exploring the Concept of Healing Spaces.”
In this article, they lay out the Optimal Healing Environment (OHE) framework. These elements and constructs are meant to facilitate the innate healing process.
Let’s nerd out
The authors of this study discuss how much research has been done on the impacts of space on physical healing (still focused on curing, by the way) but not as much on holistic healing, or that which we might call spiritual.
On built environments
“The built environment can facilitate healing through a variety of mechanisms. In some cases, architectural elements have direct impact on healing, but for the most part, architecture influences behaviors that then impact the healing experience.”
To conclude their research, the authors provide a new definition for healing spaces.
“Healing spaces are spaces that evoke a sense of cohesion of the mind, body, and spirit. They support healing intention and foster healing relationships.”
Which brings me to memorials.
You can’t get very far on any of my Juniper House materials without running into this problem statement:
Spaces and ceremonies abound for what I call “tangible” loss. There are funerals, cemeteries, and memorials. And that matters because these spaces help us find meaning in our loss. In order to heal, we need to inhabit the uninhabitable.
This type of space can be hard to find for those experiencing disenfranchised grief and ambiguous loss, such as infertility, divorce, chronic pain, religious trauma, and so much more. It can also be fleeting for those who have experienced death loss.
I first realized this when I was researching and writing an article for Sojourners Magazine on the first permanent public memorial for sexual assault survivors. I didn’t realize there weren’t any spaces for the rest of us before that. But I sure felt it.
Memorials, monuments, even rituals, are usually reserved for death.
But why? So much of loss is ambiguous and literally everyone experiences ambiguous loss and its associated disenfranchised grief at some point in their lives.
Grief demands space
In order to come to a place of understanding — or healing — one must inhabit the uninhabitable distance between ourselves and our loss events, architect Julian Bonder says in the Places Journal article “On Memory, Trauma, Public Space, Monuments, and Memorials.”
That, he adds, is what artistic and architectural practices can do (emphasis mine). This phrase — inhabit the uninhabitable — has captured my imagination since I first read it.
Oops: up until right now, I was attributing it to philosopher Gaston Bachelard’s “Poetics of Space.” An understandable conflation as architects are philosophers in their own right. Also, are we sure this turn of phrase isn’t in something literally called POETICS OF SPACE? But I digress.
Back to memorials and monuments, which my fellow etymology nerds will appreciate comes from the Latin monere (to advise, admonish, instruct, remind).
“A monument is an ancient, one might say archetypal, response to the passage of time: a device to stare out time and extinction. Flesh is made stone. Via the monument, we save that which is temporary by connecting it to — or embodying it in — that which is enduring. A monument is an expression in concrete…”
— Martin Auster (emphasis mine)
I can’t help but think of Rilke’s poem Pushing Through.
It’s possible I am pushing through solid rock
in flintlike layers, as the ore lies, alone;
I am such a long way in I see no way through,
and no space: everything is close to my face,
and everything close to my face is stone.
Maybe through inhabiting the uninhabitable, by embodying our grief through place-making and monument-building, we can keep but finally remove the stone from its suffocating closeness. Flesh is made stone.