My Experience of a Quaker Healing Circle

A note about this post’s discussion of religion and spirituality:

I have been a Quaker my whole life. I share here how members of my Quaker community have significantly contributed to my healing. I hope that sharing about my progressive faith community does not inflame any harm and trauma that many have experienced in organized religion.

I am posting this piece in the week of our first online Healing Circle on Sunday 1/26/25. The experience we are offering on Sunday is NOT explicitly spiritual. The overlap between this story of a Quaker Healing Circle and what we are hoping to create on Sunday is the fundamental belief that every person has innate worth and wisdom, and the use of silence and reflection to create a safe space where healing can move through us.

Sage wrote two pieces about Community Care, describing her Wheelchair Walks and then offering suggestions for 5 Ways to Build Community Care. The kind of Community Care I have most directly received has come in the form of a Healing Circle. It has been enormously helpful to me over the past two and a half years as I’ve dealt with the physical, emotional, and spiritual challenges of a recurrence of my ME/CFS.

In September 2021, after four years of increasing health, sustained ability to work in my field for pay, and starting the doctoral program in public health that I’d wanted to do for almost 20 years, I relapsed. I took medical leave from work. In January 2022 I tried to start working again five hours a week, and within a month I realized that even that amount of commitment was inaccessible to me. In March I fully left my job.

My sister suggested I ask for a Healing Circle from our Quaker Meeting. I had heard of them, but never participated in one. My illness has kept me from attending Quaker Meeting on Sunday mornings (I don’t function before noon), so I felt sheepish about asking the community to invest in me when I had not been able to invest in it. At the same time, it sounded like exactly the kind of support I longed for, so I got over myself and reached out. I made a list of the people I wanted in the group, focusing on people who made me feel loved when I was in their presence, regardless of how well I knew them. I generated a list of ten, expecting half to decline. When eight of the ten invitees accepted the invitation, I was shocked; I still didn’t understand precisely what I was inviting them to, yet they agreed to come along!

Quakers’ primary form of worship is to sit in silence together, opening ourselves to the balm of quieting our minds and listening with our hearts and spirits for leadings from the Divine. (I understand God to be the spirit of love and the universal life energy in each human being and the natural world. I use the terms God, the Divine, Spirit, and Inner Light interchangeably. My God is NOT personified or gendered or separate.) The fundamental belief of Quakers is that each person has “that of God” within them. We don’t have any individual who leads the service, because we do not need a conduit between us and God. We each directly connect to God through our “Inner Light”. If a person is led to share a message verbally, their words are filtered through that person’s life and experiences, but the core message is from the Divine. In this way, we can each be a conduit for guidance from God. Each person who walks this Earth has a direct connection to something greater than themselves. If we put our intention towards that inner voice we can become a conduit for creating a Divinely held space. A Quaker Healing Circle is not a support circle where people impart their wisdom to help you take the right steps in healing. It is a gathering in which people sit together in community with the intention of channeling love and healing into the space such that the individual at the center can better connect to their own internal wisdom.

A recent gathering of my Healing Circle

I did NOT understand this when I started my Healing Circle. I didn’t know what was supposed to happen, but I knew of other people who’d had profound experiences of healing and community in Healing Circles, and that sounded great to me. In the first meeting, in June 2022 we started with silence, and each person responded to a check-in question. Then I shared the story of my life before my illness and the ebbs and flows that I had experienced since 2013 when I first became sick. Folks asked clarifying questions and expressed love and compassion. We discussed the structure and logistics of the Healing Circle. Since I was concerned about being too much of a burden on each of these wonderful people, I suggested that we meet every other month. Two of the members of my group who had participated in other Circles stepped in to say that was not nearly frequent enough for the group to come together and gain momentum. Again, I wasn’t sure what that meant, but I trusted their expertise. So we started off scheduled gatherings twice a month. The next meeting, I went in prepared to give updates on various aspects of my illness and share some more details about hard things in other aspects of my life (marriage struggle, the challenge of parenting a teenager, etc) It was not particularly spiritual or powerful, but there was a sense of the group getting to know each other and me. After two months we settled into monthly meetings. I would get to each meeting and feel a little nervous because I didn’t have an agenda and I wasn’t sure what we would do. I was still under the false impression that we were supposed to DO something.

Sometime after six or more gatherings of the Healing Circle, I started to realize that I was showing up without an agenda and still loving every minute of it. I actively looked forward to every meeting. I would show up, get a flurry of hugs from loving people, settle into silence, and then see what happened. Sometimes I needed to talk and I would pour out what was inside, often accompanied by torrents of tears. Sometimes I needed silence and we would mostly be in silent worship with a few messages. Sometimes I would sit in a chair in the middle of the circle and everyone would come and gently place their hands on me. Sitting with the soft weathered hands of a group of loving people on me I could feel the love being pressed into my very being. Sometimes I would ask a question and folks would share reflections from their own lives. I realized that it was better if I did NOT show up with specific expectations for what would happen. The point was to show up and open ourselves to the silence; whatever needed to arise that day would.

Early on, one of the members of my Healing Circle talked about facilitating my spiritual healing. I was annoyed! Yes, I was leaning on a practice from a spiritual community, but my illness is very much a physical illness. I’m not sick because of spiritual failings; I’m sick because my physical body has been invaded by something that has caused chaos! Slowly I came to realize that we were both right. My illness is very much an issue of biology and disruption of bodily processes. But just like a virus invaded my body and caused chaos in my physical health, my illness invaded my life and caused chaos in every other aspect of my lived experience. My career, my marriage, my ability to parent, and my ability to participate in various communities, including Spiritual community, were all deeply affected by my illness. I went into the Healing Circle thinking that maybe it would help heal my body. What I came to realize is that the experience of sitting with powerfully grounded loving people who show up with the sole intent of holding space for my healing was supporting healing of all of me, not just my body. I believe that basking in healing energy can affect my body, but the Healing Circle was also supporting my heart and mind and spirit such that I could improve my quality of life and my ability to contribute to good things in the world whether my body improved or not.

After a year of meeting monthly, I was in such a better place that I suggested that perhaps the Circle should stop meeting. Again, I was worried about the cost-benefit for the members of the group: since my benefit was lessening as I got healthier, was their cost still worth it? What I heard back was that every person there was enjoying the gatherings greatly and each was able to point to ways in which the experience was helping them. When you open yourself to be a conduit of healing and community for other people, you become a recipient of that healing and community as it moves through you. We continue to meet two and a half years on from our start in June 2022. Sometimes our gatherings don’t focus on me at all, and we each share what is on our hearts. The Circle has a bit of a life of its own. The Healing has been democratized. I’m still not working and have now separated from my spouse. But, my sense of well-being, community, spirit, and hope is strong.

In her piece called “Wheelchair Walks: How to Build Community Care” Sage described welcoming her community in to support her, and she noted ways that the people who pushed her around the neighborhood in her wheelchair started to talk with her and process hard things in their lives. With my Healing Circle, I invited my community in to care for me and discovered ways in which those offering care were touched and grateful for the healing they received in the process. What are ways that you’ve asked for Community Care in your life? Has anyone expressed ways that offering that care was beneficial to them?