Co-Creative Healing with Carolyn Belanger

By Laura Mushumanski

(ANNews) – A term gifted to our Metis sister, Carolyn Belanger was ‘Co-Creating’ – this was an opportunity and insight that became a part of her medicine bundle as a health care practitioner. This understanding came with shaping and shifting Belanger’s own perspective into what healing is – insight and a way of understanding how to walk in the world together.

“Healers are facilitators, listening to [clients], what they have to say, intuitively what their whole body is saying … offering skills for where they are at and where they want to be,” she explains. This understanding of healers has shaped her vocation as a registered nurse. In other words, to Carolyn, “a healer gifts insight.”

This understanding and way of knowing came when she started to feel burnt out early on in her career as a nurse. And with the opportunity of working in remote locations in northern First Nations communities, Belanger started to look into and study different ways for holistic healing, leading to cranial sacral therapy and acupressure as part of her holistic health practice. This for Carolyn was a way to connect her knowledge from a biomedical understanding of health with holistic understandings within healthcare to support adults with trauma. It was a way that she could be in better service of other people.

Working directly with people within healthcare, Belanger learned about different healing modalities, and what boundaries for her looked like. “When you are helping someone, you don’t have to take it home… it is easy to get overly involved in the narrative.” And when doing the heavy lifting and shifting of perspectives, Carolyn began to see that “the healer has to do as much work on themselves as the client. [It is} an exchange of empowerment.”

“We are conditioned to rely on things that make us feel comforted,” Belanger shared. She is grateful to have had Elders share knowledge with her from a holistic mindset, where she started to see patterns with her understanding of health for what they were.

The first to come to mind was Belanger emphasizing on “self-effort” and the importance of trying. “Health has to be a priority, make space, push away things that are not serving you [because] there are so many things that can enhance your health… and quit bad habits.”

For Carolyn, learning these lessons took effort and discipline to make healthy choices, and asking oneself, how committed are we? “It has to all start with effort, self-manifestation has to do with the start of self-effort.” The reality of healing, that Belanger spoke about is to, “see that living in reliance [on people, places, and things] impacts our health. We don’t see how these ways are affecting our health. [We] have a forced dependency on systems at a cost we don’t realize is taking place of [self-healing].”

Part of self-effort that Carolyn continued to speak to is “getting back to culture, land, spaces, community, and connecting back to our Indigeneity customs… Self-awareness makes us accountable for our own self, [while] connection of land is there [to heal us].” This understanding that Belanger carries was built over time from her lived experience, connection to land, place and ancestors, and shared knowledge. “All these things put together helps me approach [health and healing] more than the bio-medical model does.”

The more that Carolyn learned, the more she was able to view her practice as holistic, leading to sharing advice with all learners. “Movement to self realization is not meant to be easy – it is a hard thing, Self-effort is the majority of the healing process.”

Carolyn has been a registered nurse for over 20 years. She is currently a PhD student at the University of Alberta in the Faculty of Native Studies. Her PhD research brings together key concepts such as Indigenous resurgence, Indigenous self-governance, health and wellness and health system and policy reform. 

Laura Mushumanski is a Local Journalism Initiative Reporter.