Our Story, written by Founder and Executive Director of The Healing Cave
It is one thing to understand the benefits of holistic care and become licensed in modalities of bodywork that encourage a holistic approach. It is an entire additional phenomenon to realize it is a soul purpose to bring this understanding and utilization to people who do not have access to it in the midwestern United States in the 21st century.
Many cultures throughout humanity’s existence have revered caves and cave-like structures as being a place of retreat, renewal, and rebirth. It is a place to reconnect to the cosmic womb/void. It is a place to embrace the dark (dis-ease, dysfunction, pain, trauma living in tissues of the body) for all it can teach us so that we can heal ourselves. Metaphorically, we can look at our energetic heart space (and/or womb space, which transcends gender and physical body make-up) as our own personal cave. Our sacred center within, that offers its own dark and light. It is a place to embrace the dark and light within each of our journeys of healing.
Emilee, our founder, started uncovering this Cave of healing as an idea when she was learning reiki and myofascial release (as a massage therapist). She became a student of fascia, and how the body holds onto trauma in its fascia, on a much deeper level than just massage therapy had taken her. Learning about such natural, innate, primal self-healing mechanisms that our bodies have built into them simply because they are mammalian bodies, sewed this seed into Emilee’s consciousness:
How can we make forms of self-healing and assisted healing accessible, tangible, and approachable to all those people out there who could desperately use this new (yet ancient) perspective to improve their quality of life? The response? To give this seed fertile land to grow.
The 5013c documents were filed and approved in the summer of 2022. The next two years entailed finding a helping person or few, learning the ins and outs of how to build a non-profit organization; hearing all this information and education for the first time.
Time is a funny thing. It will never obey our linear matrix-like rules that we create out of hurrying, forcing, or worrying. Building a non-profit that’s goal is to offer FREE health care that is HOLISTIC in nature for those with confounding barriers to access it, will teach you this over and over…and over again. This is also a vital meta-lesson and reminder for our core purpose–healing is also not linear, as much as the medical books and conveyor-belt-like western medical approaches and insurance games will have us believe.
Soon, the seed of a question grew into a sprout: We aren’t just creating a non-profit organization; we are birthing a new paradigm of healing into Indiana, USA.
The wise herbalists and natives that walk this Earth will tell you that if you want to have success in growing something, you have to start with the soil. You have to observe the soil that you have. You have to feel into and learn about its history, its conditioning, how it got to its current form. You have to put aside what YOU want to co-create with it, and first focus on what it needs from you, without expectation of anything in return. Then and only then can you tend the soil.