Hope As A Practice
By: Kelly Caul
The Healing Thread: April
I have been thinking a lot about hope.
Not the kind that asks us to pretend things are fine. Not the kind that looks away from what is hard or heavy or real. Not the kind that asks for optimism before grief has had its say.
I am thinking about hope more like a practice. Hope as something we tend.
Before we go further, I want to invite a small pause.
Maybe feel your feet against the floor, notice the support beneath you, or connect with your next breath, if it feels available.
Resourcing: Orienting Toward What Tends Us
There is a concept in somatic work called resourcing: the intentional practice of orienting toward what settles us. Turning towards what nourishes us. Taking in what helps the nervous system remember that we can connect with a sense of safety, that goodness is real, that we are held by more than we sometimes feel.
This is not a bypass. It is a practice that builds our capacity to return.
A nervous system that only ever orients toward threat — toward what is wrong, what is at risk, what must be braced for — eventually loses its flexibility. It stays contracted. It gets very good at vigilance and very unpracticed at softening.
And a nervous system that cannot soften cannot heal, cannot connect, cannot do its most creative and courageous work.
Tending hope is a way to restore that flexibility.
It does not ask us to stop seeing what is hard. It asks us to also see what is here alongside it.
Maybe that is noticing the person who showed up. The small act of care. The body that showed up today. The flower that is blooming.
A Different Question
I know many of you are carrying a lot right now, for others, for yourselves, often for both at once. That is no small thing. And I am not asking you to minimize it.
I want to sit with a different question.
What, right now, helps you feel even slightly more grounded or settled? What reminds your body that you are not alone? Where, even briefly, does something in you soften?
I also know that these questions land differently depending on what you are living. That access to safety, rest, and the ability to turn toward hope is not equally distributed in this world. I hold that, and I hold you, wherever you are finding yourself right now.
This is not about indulgence. These are the things your nervous system needs in order to return to presence, not just survive.
Tending Hope As Resistance
Tending hope is a form of care, and a form of resistance. Something Black feminist healers and leaders have known and practiced long before the wellness world caught up. I am grateful to be learning from them, and I want to honor it fully: this is not the wellness culture version of turning inward as a reason to disengage from the harder work.
It is resourcing as what sustains us in right relationship with one another and the work.
It insists that beauty, rest, connection, and joy belong to us, even now. It refuses the idea that exhaustion is the only honest response to the state of things.
An Invitation for This Season
This spring, I want to invite you to practice orienting toward what tends you.
Because the capacity to hold what is hard grows from the same place as the capacity to receive what is good. We cannot build one without the other.
Notice what helps you feel just a little more held. A moment, a person, a practice, a place. You don't have to stay there long. Just let it register. Let it count.
Healing grows where hope is tended. And we are here to learn to do that together.
With love and solidarity,
Kelly
This piece originally appeared in The Healing Thread, the monthly newsletter of Empowered Spaces. If you'd like reflections like this delivered to your inbox each month, you can subscribe below.
What helps you orient toward hope right now? Leave a comment or reach out — I'd love to hear from you.
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