Holding Healers

In Bali, a therapist arrived for what she called due diligence. She wanted to walk the ground herself before bringing others here next year—meet the healers, observe the rituals, make sure each practice was safe, authentic, and trauma-informed. She came as a professional, composed and steady, her schedule threaded with online client sessions she refused to miss.

Each evening, she joined me for dinner. At first she was animated—curious about logistics, cultural nuances, the psychology behind each ceremony. Then, gradually, she began to quieten. Between sips of tea and long pauses, she would share something small but raw—a story from her own life, an unspoken grief, a moment of uncertainty. Each one felt like an exhale, a soft release of what had been held too tightly for too long.

By the time the priest’s ceremony came, she had spent the day in back-to-back appointments. Her laptop was still open in the corner, her body still tuned to the frequency of other people’s pain. She went exactly as she was—tired, devoted, unwilling to abandon the clients who depend on her steadiness.

The ceremony took place at dusk in a small family compound. The air was dense and warm; she had been moving through menopause and felt perpetually overheated, a kind of inner blaze that mirrored the relentlessness of her work. The Mangku, the Balinese priest, raised a small bowl of holy water and poured it gently over her crown.

Something changed. The heat receded. Coolness spread down her scalp and spine. Her thoughts slowed, her breath deepened, her mind went still. The burning that had lived inside her—professional vigilance, hormonal fire, the hum of responsibility—was suddenly extinguished by the touch of a healing hand.

Afterwards, she said little. Only that the silence in her head felt like medicine.

The Cost of Holding

Therapists work on the front line of human emotion. They listen for hours each day to grief, rage, and confusion, using the same neural pathways that sustain intimacy and love. The profession depends on constant co-regulation—one nervous system helping another find safety. Over time, that circuitry frays. Compassion fatigue is not a moral weakness; it is a physiological consequence of continuous exposure to distress.

Research across the helping professions shows rising rates of secondary trauma, insomnia, and emotional numbing. The language is clinical—burnout, depletion, vicarious stress—but what it describes is heartbreak: people who give their lives to healing others forgetting how to feel safe themselves.

The Balinese priest who blessed her that evening had never studied the polyvagal theory, yet the ceremony he performed rested on its same foundation: safety and connection repair the human system. The water, the rhythm, the repetition, gentle touch—all cues of co-regulation.

The Physiology of Love

Modern neuroscience describes love not as sentiment but as state: the body’s ability to relax into presence. When safety cues outweigh threat cues, the ventral vagal system engages, allowing empathy, curiosity, and creativity to return. Without safety, even the most skilled clinician operates from defence.

For centuries, women—therapists included—have been conditioned to equate love with labour. To give until empty. To measure worth by endurance. The nervous system learns this too: stay alert, stay useful, stay strong. The result is a body that cannot find neutral.

In therapy rooms across the world, practitioners teach regulation—breath work, grounding, mindful awareness—yet often neglect to grant themselves the same permission.

Ritual as Nervous-System Repair

Balinese culture is built on daily offerings: small gestures of reciprocity with the unseen. A sliver of banana leaf, a flower, a grain of rice. It’s called manusa yadnya—the ceremony of being human. Each act acknowledges that balance requires maintenance.

Western psychology names similar principles: supervision, reflective practice, rest. The language differs, but the purpose is the same—to keep the system clear so love can flow.

During her week on the island, the therapist noticed her breath slowing to the rhythm of bells and cicadas. The ceremonies did what theory alone could not: they gave her body evidence that safety was possible. The trauma she carried for others loosened its grip.

Healing, it turned out, wasn’t an interruption to her work. It was what made the work sustainable.

The World Behind the Screen

Outside the temples, the modern world hums at a punishing frequency. Therapists log into sessions between childcare and news alerts. Clients appear in rectangles of crisis; the headlines between calls describe collective dysregulation.

Love, in this climate, feels like a scarce resource. Everything costs something: rent, attention, therapy itself. Even affection is mediated by algorithms, ghosted before it can root.

Yet love remains the primary medicine. Stephen Porges calls safety “the neurophysiological platform for health, growth, and restoration.” Without it, communities collapse into protection; with it, they move toward connection.

The therapist’s experience in Bali becomes emblematic of what the world needs: the helpers must be helped. The nervous systems that heal others must also experience repair.

When the Cup Refills

Therapists often speak of the body confusion that arises from their work—the nervous system mistaking professional empathy for intimacy. The fatigue that follows isn’t weakness; it’s the organism asking to be loved back into balance.

In research, it’s called self-care or professional resilience. In human terms, it’s the art of being held. Supervision that listens not only to cases but to the clinician’s pulse. Therapy for the therapist, not to fix pathology but to keep the inner instrument tuned. Art, prayer, movement, sunlight—forms of beauty that restore coherence.

Some practitioners now formalise this through restorative programs combining cultural wisdom and evidence-based recovery—spaces where professionals can safely drop their vigilance and remember they, too, are bodies deserving of rest.

A regulated practitioner can co-regulate dozens of lives; an unregulated one transmits urgency or collapse. The decision to pause is therefore not indulgent—it is ethical maintenance.

The Feminine Lineage of Reclamation

Women have always sought this pause. Virginia Woolf called for a room of one’s own; Elizabeth Gilbert’s Eat Pray Love gave modern language to a timeless impulse—the right to step away and listen inward; and Florence Given’s Women Don’t Owe You Pretty brings that impulse into the present—urging women to reclaim pleasure, beauty, and rest as rebellion in a world that profits from their exhaustion.

These gestures were never about escape. They were about creating the conditions where selfhood could re-emerge. In every century, women have turned toward solitude, therapy, and ritual not for luxury, but survival.

The therapist in Bali stands in that lineage. Her willingness to receive healing is not a detour from her vocation; it is its continuation.

Love as Ecology

Love functions like an ecosystem. Healthy systems self-correct; unhealthy ones consume themselves. The Earth, too, is sending cues of imbalance—storms, fires, exhaustion. On every scale, the pattern repeats: too much output, too little restoration.

If the planet mirrors the human nervous system, then every act of genuine care—every replenished helper—is part of planetary repair. The nervous system and the biosphere are not metaphors for each other; they are iterations of the same design.

The ceremonies in Bali, with their smoke and water and song, echo this truth: balance must be maintained daily, not rescued in crisis.

The World Will Have to Have Love

Because without love, the system collapses.
Relationships become transactions. Therapy becomes technique. Nations become markets. The earth becomes extraction.

With love—slow, studied, embodied love—there is repair. The breath lengthens. The field steadies. The work continues.

The task now is not to find love but to become capable of it—to cultivate the physiological and cultural conditions in which love can survive. For therapists, that means spaces of replenishment. For clients, it means therapy grounded in safety rather than survival. For all of us, it means remembering that connection is the oldest medicine we have.

The world will have to have love—real love, regulated love, love that rests between sessions and prays before action.
And perhaps it begins here: a therapist, still damp from holy water, finally cool, her mind quiet for the first time in a long time, realising deep in her body that healing was never a profession alone. It was always a shared nervous system.