Who Gets to Heal? On Access, Integrity, and the Real Costs of Holding Space
I originally wrote this piece for the Liberatory Wellness Network blog, where it was first published on December 22, 2025. As that network has since sunset due to financial strain, I’m sharing it here as part of my ongoing effort to archive and steward my work.
The Question I Keep Returning To
As a somatic practitioner, longtime coach and educator, and community organizer in Austin, I’ve learned that healing work is never just about what happens in the session or circle. It’s about the conditions that make those spaces possible — the emotional labor, the preparation and grounding, the lineage of teachers we honor, and the very real economic realities shaping our capacity to show up.
Recently, a question resurfaced — one that has quietly shaped my work for years: How do we price healing work with integrity when the cost of simply living keeps rising?
This question has followed me across coaching sessions, community meetings, yoga studios, and late-night school board testimonies. And honestly, I’m still working through it — especially as housing, food, childcare, and basic survival become increasingly unaffordable in Austin.
But this is not simply a personal or professional dilemma. It is also deeply woven into my work with ATX116, the grassroots coalition I co-lead that emerged during a period of historic instability in Austin ISD—marked by school closures, Turnaround Plan restarts, displacing staff, and escalating state (TEA) pressure.
ATX116 formed as families and educators across the city—particularly those in Title I, emergent bilingual, and special education communities—were navigating the shock, grief, and uncertainty of seeing their neighborhood schools destabilized or slated to disappear. The coalition exists to build community, clarify what is happening, and grow a collective, organized voice for those most impacted by these decisions.
As a co-founder and community organizer, my role is to help facilitate spaces for collective processing, translate complex and often opaque policy into accessible and actionable understanding, and create pathways for impacted communities to participate meaningfully in conversations that too often exclude them.
These examples highlight a critical question of equity: How can healing become truly accessible, and who is ultimately left out when the costs of holding space are pushed back onto the shoulders of the healer?
The answer to the pricing question directly determines who gets to heal—whose body and nervous system the system deems worthy of support.
The through-line between healing work and community organizing is clearer than it seems: Both ask us to hold the emotional weight of systems that were never designed to support us.
The Ethics of Access: A Real Tension
There is an unspoken expectation placed on healers—particularly those working within systems shaped by gendered, queer, disabled, and racialized inequities—to offer care that is endlessly accessible, endlessly flexible, and endlessly affordable.
And at the same time, accessibility matters deeply. I believe in it. I fight for it.
In ATX116, this looks like:
Facilitating listening circles for families facing school closures
Strengthening collective voice across multilingual communities
Sitting with educators, students, and parents in grief, anger, and uncertainty
Walking alongside families as we make sense of policy and its impact on their schools and lives
Holding grounding practices in the after of school board meetings so people could breathe again
In healing work, this shows up in how I structure access, pace care, and create relational spaces where people can reconnect with one another, their own experiences, and a renewed sense of agency.
The tension is the same in both arenas: Accessibility without sustainability isn’t justice — it’s extraction. Especially when it relies on the underpaid labor of people already living in precarity.
When Practitioners Are Also Living in Precarity
It’s easy to idealize “healing work” as something pure, sacred, outside of money. But the people doing that work live in the same economic landscape as everyone else. Yoga teachers rarely receive a living wage. Somatic practitioners often hold second jobs. Community facilitators and public school teachers absorb emotional labor that nobody sees. Parents navigating a skyrocketing cost of living carry layers of stress the body doesn’t forget.
And when you’re holding space for entire communities — whether in a small group coaching setting or a cafeteria meeting about school closures — the labor is real. The energy is real. The toll is real.
My integrity calls me to make my work accessible. My nervous system reminds me that I also need rest, stability, childcare, and the ability to make ends meet. This isn’t selfishness. It’s acknowledging the ecosystem.
The Real Costs of Holding Space
Holding space has costs we rarely name out loud:
• Time — preparation, follow-up, regulation before and after sessions or meetings
• Emotional labor — absorbing grief, rage, fear, and uncertainty without institutional support
• Nervous system load — the physiological toll of staying present in dysregulated systems
• Economic tradeoffs — unpaid labor, sliding scales, missed income, second jobs
• Care infrastructure — childcare, transportation, healthcare, rest, and recovery time
These costs don’t disappear when the setting changes.
Lessons from ATX116: Care Is Political, and It Has Real Costs
My work in ATX116 has shown me what it means to hold space in the middle of a systemic crisis. When Austin ISD announced closures, many families — especially Title I, emergent bilingual, and SPED communities — were left to navigate the shock alone. Our coalition stepped in to create spaces of:
Grief processing when neighborhood schools were slated to disappear
Embodied grounding before parents spoke at board meetings
Community translation and policy interpretation, so information was accessible
Collective strategy growing sustainably
Protection against isolation, helping families organize across campuses instead of competing for survival
These were healing spaces — even though they didn’t look like healing spaces. They were somatic spaces — even though no one was on a yoga mat. They were community care — especially when no institution was providing it. What I learned: holding space for community trauma is healing work. And healing work has economic, emotional, and energetic costs — for practitioners too.
A Liberatory Lens on Pricing
The conversation about ethical pricing in healing work cannot be separated from the larger structures we are operating within. What if pricing wasn’t a moral test? What if it was a relational, transparent practice?
A liberatory approach to pricing acknowledges:
The real cost of care labor
The economic precarity of practitioners
The diverse access needs of community members
The systemic inequities that shape who can access healing in the first place
The intersections of race, gender, class, and caregiving labor
The emotional impact of doing this work while navigating your own survival
This isn’t about making healing work expensive. It’s about making it honest. Integrity is not self-sacrifice. Integrity is alignment with truth — the truth of what care requires and what it costs.
Toward Healing That Doesn’t Harm the Healer
I’m learning that it’s okay to hold two truths at once: I want this work to be accessible. And I need this work to sustain me. Those truths must coexist. When healers undercharge to the point of burnout, we reinforce the very systems that devalue care. When we pretend we can hold the emotional weight of entire communities without tending to our own needs, we perpetuate cycles of harm. This is true for healing practitioners. It’s true for educators. It’s true for organizers. It’s true for parents. And it’s true for entire school communities navigating systemic instability and harm. Healing work cannot flourish if the healer is depleted. Community organizing cannot flourish if the organizer is collapsing. Public schools cannot flourish if the people holding them together are undervalued and overwhelmed.
A Call for Community-Centered Solutions
If we want healing work to be accessible, the solution cannot fall solely on practitioners lowering their prices or sacrificing their well-being. If the current system relies on my individual self-sacrifice, what models can we build together that truly distribute the burden and the resources?
This is why we look toward models that center collective care, like mutual aid efforts and community-funded initiatives. They show us what’s possible when we fund the ecosystem, not just the individual session.
We Need Collective Solutions for Sustainable Wellness:
Valuation of Care Labor: Develop and implement funding models that explicitly recognize and adequately compensate the economic value of emotional, relational, and care labor, moving beyond volunteerism and self-sacrifice.
Decentralized Resource Sharing: Establish sustainable mutual aid networks and solidarity funds to ensure equitable access to comprehensive wellness resources, prioritizing those most impacted by systemic marginalization.
Primary Prevention in Education: Advocate for robust public education investments focused on community school models, creating trauma-informed and restorative learning environments, thereby addressing and reducing sources of systemic trauma at the community level.
Community-Governed Wellness Funds: Foster collective action for community-led and transparently funded healing initiatives, ensuring that the governance, structure, and priorities are determined by the communities being served.
Structural Burnout Prevention: Implement organizational structures, policies, and practices (e.g., adequate time off, realistic workloads, non-hierarchical decision-making) that actively prevent practitioner and organizer burnout and promote long-term sustainability.
Systemic Economic Reallocation: Build and promote solidarity economies, cooperative models, and restorative resource distribution systems that prioritize community well-being and equitably distribute wealth, capital, and resources, rather than concentrating them.
And we need conversations — like those Tristan Katz has modeled in community dialogues about pricing, access, and integrity— that name the complexities rather than hiding them.
Integrity as a Living, Breathing Practice
Integrity in healing is not a destination. It’s a living practice. A breathing one. It asks us to revisit our boundaries, listen to our bodies, and name the real cost of care with our communities as conditions shift around us. I’m committed to that practice — imperfectly, transparently, and with as much care as I can offer. But my commitment, and the commitment of every healer, organizer, and parent, is not enough. We must demand and build the collective structures that make this integrity possible for all of us.
Healing cannot depend on the quiet exhaustion of the people holding it. If this work is meant to be liberatory, it has to be built on care that is honest, shared, and sustainable.
Reference, Sources, & Influences
This piece is informed by lived experience, collective organizing, and the teachings of many thinkers, healers, and movements. Any omissions are unintentional; this work exists in community.
Somatics, Healing Justice, and Care Labor
Haines, S. K. (2019). The politics of trauma: Somatics, healing, and social justice. North Atlantic Books.
Hemphill, P. (2022). What it takes to heal: How transforming ourselves can change the world. HarperOne.
Menakem, R. (2017). My grandmother’s hands: Racialized trauma and the pathway to mending our hearts and bodies. Central Recovery Press.
brown, a. m. (2019). Pleasure activism: The politics of feeling good. AK Press.
brown, a. m. (2017). Emergent strategy: Shaping change, changing worlds. AK Press.
Hersey, T. (2022). Rest is resistance: A manifesto. Little, Brown Spark.
Generative Somatics. (n.d.). Healing justice framework. https://generativesomatics.org
Intersectionality, Burnout, and Care Work
Crenshaw, K. (1991). Mapping the margins: Intersectionality, identity politics, and violence against women of color. Stanford Law Review, 43(6), 1241–1299. https://doi.org/10.2307/1229039
Lorde, A. (1988). A burst of light: Essays. Firebrand Books.
(Original essay: “Self-Care Is an Act of Political Warfare”)
hooks, b. (2000). All about love: New visions. William Morrow.
Price, D. (2021). Laziness does not exist. Atria Books.
Petersen, A. H. (2020). Can’t even: How millennials became the burnout generation. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt.
Poo, A.-J. (2015). The age of dignity: Preparing for the elder boom in a changing America. The New Press.
National Domestic Workers Alliance. (n.d.). Valuing care work. https://www.domesticworkers.org
Mutual Aid, Collective Care, and Solidarity Economies
Spade, D. (2020). Mutual aid: Building solidarity during this crisis (and the next). Verso.
Movement for Black Lives. (2016). A vision for Black lives: Policy demands for Black power, freedom, and justice. https://m4bl.org/policy-platforms
Solidarity Economy Network. (n.d.). What is a solidarity economy? https://solidarityeconomy.net
Education Justice and Community Trauma
Love, B. L. (2019). We want to do more than survive: Abolitionist teaching and the pursuit of educational freedom. Beacon Press.
Hammond, Z. (2015). Culturally responsive teaching and the brain: Promoting authentic engagement and rigor among culturally and linguistically diverse students. Corwin.
Journey for Justice Alliance. (n.d.). School closures and education justice. https://www.journeyforjustice.org
Coalition for Community Schools. (n.d.). Community schools results and impact. https://communityschools.org
Accessibility, Disability Justice, and Ethical Practice
Mingus, M. (2011). Access intimacy: The missing link. https://leavingevidence.wordpress.com
Piepzna-Samarasinha, L. L. (2018). Care work: Dreaming disability justice. Arsenal Pulp Press.
Katz, T. (n.d.). Ethical pricing, access, and integrity in healing work [Blog and talks]. https://www.instagram.com/p/DRuj7ZimCW_/?utm_source=ig_web_copy_link&igsh=MzRlODBiNWFlZA==
