Tending the Whole Garden
Healing-Centred Practices That Nurture Us All
For too long, we have treated trauma like a singular wound — something to be managed, mitigated, contained. The trauma-informed approach asks: What happened to you? and How has it shaped you? But healing-centred practice asks something more expansive: What is possible beyond the wound? and How do we move forward toward collective well-being?
Dr. Shawn Ginwright reminds us that trauma-informed care is not enough sometimes. It stops at recognition and treats trauma as an individual experience rather than a communal condition. It asks us to adapt to harm rather than uproot the systems that create it. Healing-centred engagement shifts the lens:
“Healing-centred engagement expands how we think about responses to trauma. Rather than being grounded in pathology, it offers an asset-driven approach that highlights possibilities for well-being.”
- Shawn Ginwright
Healing is not just the absence of harm, it is the presence of wholeness. And just as the garden cannot thrive if only its damaged leaves are tended to, we cannot build thriving communities by addressing trauma alone — we must cultivate spaces where joy, connection, cultural identity and heritage are nurtured as acts of resistance and renewal.
Trauma-Informed Versus Healing-Centred: A Shift in the Soil
Trauma-informed practices recognize that harm has occurred and seek to minimize re-traumatization. These approaches focus on safety and trust-building, emphasize emotional regulation and coping strategies, and seek to prevent further harm by recognizing “triggers” and responses. This is necessary work, but it is not the whole work. Trauma-informed care treats the symptoms of harm, while healing-centred engagement asks: What if we could change the soil itself?
Healing-centred approaches move beyond trauma as the defining narrative, seeing individuals and communities as whole and not broken. In centring culture, spirituality, and identity in the healing process alongside the acknowledgement of systemic conditions that created harm and working together to change them, we find more opportunities to celebrate joy, agency, and collective well-being with our students and ourselves, which is all necessary for deeper healing.
If trauma-informed care is about protecting the plant from further damage, healing-centred practice is about enriching the soil so the whole garden can flourish.
Healing-Centred Practice as a Culturally Responsive Approach
Ginwright emphasizes that healing is not a neutral act — it is deeply tied to identity, culture, and the conditions in which we live. For communities who have been historically harmed, resilience is not simply about survival, it is about reclaiming joy, language, tradition, and possibility.
Healing-centred spaces acknowledge that racism, colonization, and systemic oppression are traumas that require cultural and structural healing, never asking individuals to “cope” with harm but to work to dismantle the conditions that create it. To be healing-centred is to celebrate belonging, creativity, and self-determination as integral to well-being, bringing a person full circle from victim to survivor to advocate. After all, why would a person heal if they cannot see something better on the other side of their trauma? There is a danger when trauma becomes so intertwined with a person’s self-image they begin to confuse the impacts of trauma with their self-actualization and/or believed-to-be inherited personality.
This is why healing-centred engagement is not only an approach, but an act of resistance. It disrupts the idea that harm is inevitable, that trauma defines us, that survival is enough. It tells us that joy, care, and connection are not luxuries, they are our inherent right.
Tending the Whole Garden: What This Looks Like in Practice
A trauma-informed lens might look at a struggling student and ask, What happened to them? A healing-centred approach asks, What strengths and wisdom do they already hold? How can we create an environment where they thrive?
A trauma-informed school might focus on de-escalation strategies, mindfulness techniques, and calm spaces for students experiencing distress. A healing centred school fosters culturally affirming spaces where students see themselves reflected in curriculum and leadership, opportunities for storytelling, art, and movement as forms of expression and empowerment, and policies that challenge systemic inequities rather than just responding to their effects.
A trauma-informed workplace might implement mental health supports and flexible policies, whereas a healing-centred workplace asks: Are our structures harming people in the first place? Do our employees, collaborators, or colleagues feel a sense of belonging, purpose, and agency? How do we build a culture where well-being is not an afterthought, but a foundation?
Healing-centred practice is a commitment — to soil, to season, to long-term care. It recognizes that tending to the garden is not just about pulling weeds, but about planting what is nourishing, what will bloom long after we are gone.
The Future We Are Cultivating
The world tells us to manage our wounds. To be strong, to be resilient, to keep going.
But what if healing is not about enduring, but about flourishing?
What if resilience is not about bearing weight, but about growing towards the sun?
Healing-centred practice teaches us that we are not just what we have survived — we are what we create, what we love, what we envision together. It reminds us that justice is not just the absence of harm, but the presence of joy. That community is not just about repairing relationships, but about building something new.
“When we heal, we don’t just heal the past — we create a different future.”
- Shawn Ginwright
Let us tend to the whole garden.
Not just the wounds, but the roots.
Not just the trauma, but the possibility.
Not just what has been harmed, but what is waiting to bloom.
Cultivating wholeness, one seed at a time.
The soil is ours to nourish.
Tending the garden of liberation,
Ms. K
