When it comes to healers, sometimes I think we don’t truly meet them until we are in their hands, on their tables, in their care. In 2010, I was a national coordinator for an event called the US Social Forum in Detroit, and by day three my system was completely overwhelmed and blown out. I walked down to the Healing Justice Practice Space to see if anyone could help, and all I remember is stepping into a basement conference center room on the edge of tears. It felt like a circle of people surrounded and held me as my body began to shake uncontrollably but when I opened my eyes there was just the blessed, knowing face of Susan Raffo. She normalized the somatic release I’d had, affirmed the wisdom of my body, gave me water and gentleness, and sent me on my way. I walked down a hallway and entered a massive room where I got to sing “A Change Is Gonna Come” to Grace Lee Boggs in celebration of her birthday.

What I have understood from the inside out since that day was that Susan Raffo knows a ton about the body, and about organizing, and about Healing Justice, and about what movement workers need in order to continue being a part of complex efforts to generate liberation.

A few years later, I started to see these blog posts that Susan was sharing on social media. Without hyperbole, I must say I was astounded by her writing—both the poetic style, the gentle healer-teacher energy I remembered from being in her hands, and the brilliant juxtapositions she was making between the body and movement work and this moment in time. I found myself eagerly awaiting each post. I finally couldn’t take it anymore, I asked if she’d ever let us publish her as part of the Emergent Strategy series. She said yes!

In the pages that follow, Susan Raffo sets us firmly in the conversation about Healing Justice as one of the people who has helped develop the framework. She guides us through the work of stopping violence from the body up, helps us land in the current moment of not just our own bodies but the relationships and communities we must form around ourselves as we recover, and finally lays out how we create the conditions that allow the deepest healing. This book is equal parts poetic and practical. As Susan reminds us, there is no such thing as individual trauma—she helps us understand how to heal in community across generations and through lineage.

Now, I invite you into the experience of feeling mended, shaped, released, and inspired by this collection. And once it heals you, pass it on to a friend. Together we can heal.

—adrienne maree brown

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