We Should Heal In Circles
Why Healing Together is More Powerful — and More Ancestral — Than Healing Alone
From experience, I’ve noticed that many people feel hesitant about healing in a group setting. And that makes complete sense to me — why would you want to lay your deepest vulnerabilities bare in front of strangers, risking judgement or misunderstanding? Modern society has explicitly taught us to protect ourselves, to heal privately, and to carry our struggles alone. I feel that this kind of behaviour is predominately shaped by modern Western individualism, where self-sufficiency is prized and being vulnerable or ‘‘dependent’’ is (quietly) shamed.
Yet time and again, I’ve witnessed something deeply transformative unfold when people are held in the right group container. It continues to humble me, to astonish me. And I have a clear point of comparison: people who work with me one-to-one and who then also attend a retreat.
I live in a culture that treats healing as a private project. Book the session. Do the work. Fix yourself. Improve your life. It’s a tidy, transactional model of healing and one that mirrors the same systems that harm and fragment us in the first place.
Across time, space and different cultures, healing rarely occurred (or occurs) in solitude. From the Eleusinian Mysteries in Ancient Greece, to Indigenous sweat lodge ceremonies across Turtle Island, to Sámi joik healing circles in the Arctic, to communal trance and drumming rituals across Africa, to Shipibo healing ceremonies in the Peruvian Amazon, healing has long been a collective affair.
Healing used to happen in circles, in rituals, in shared spaces of song, story, grief, and celebration where bodies regulated together and meaning was made together in collective acknowledgment. Often in direct relationship with land, seasons, ancestors, and the more-than-human world. Suffering and grief were held collectively, rather than alone and hidden behind closed doors.
At Stellar Folk, this is why we’re continually drawn back to group work. Because not only do groups support healing, they magnify it! Here’s why.
Why groups accelerate healing
Before beginning my healing journey, I often felt unsafe or unable to be my authentic, relaxed (or silly, or grumpy) self around most people. Working with the roots of early developmental trauma — and the protective strategies my body had learned — became the doorway to feeling safer in relationship. As that safety grew, so did my capacity to be with others in a present and attuned state, rather than a pleasing one. This remains an ongoing process for me, even if now on subtler levels.
“Being able to feel safe with other people is probably the single most important aspect of mental health; safe connections are fundamental to meaningful and satisfying lives.”
This quote, by trauma researcher Bessel van der Kolk, resonates deeply with me.
One-to-one therapeutic settings have supported me immensely, and, in fact, continue to do so. At the same time, I began to notice something important: many of the patterns I was healing had been formed in relationship, and they came most alive — and had the greatest opportunity to shift — when I was actually with other people. It was in group and ceremonial spaces that my nervous system could practise trust in real time, not as an idea formed in the mind, but as a lived, bodily experience. And that’s where a different layer of healing began to unfold for me.
Recent research is beginning to catch up with what many Indigenous and land-based cultures have long practised and lived. Studies on psychedelic group therapy, including research highlighted by Nature.com, suggest that group-based experiences often lead to stronger emotional breakthroughs, deeper integration, and longer-lasting benefits than one-on-one sessions alone. These studies echo insights from many Indigenous and land-based cultures, whose approaches have long honoured relational and communal forms of healing.
This is because healing isn’t only about insight; it’s for the most part about relational safety, felt in the body.
Much of our pain was originally shaped in relationship — through moments of misattunement, abandonment, silencing, or the absence of safe connection altogether. Our nervous systems learned how to protect us in response to other people and the worlds we grew up in. It follows, then, that healing cannot be purely solitary. When we are met by others with presence, care, and respect, those old patterns have a chance to soften. In relationship, the body is allowed to learn something new: that connection can be safe, supportive, and life-giving.
In a well-held group, each person’s process becomes an invitation for another’s. One person’s courage can soften something in someone else. One person’s grief gives permission for another’s tears. Shared intention, shared vulnerability, shared presence — this is where something beyond individual effort begins to move.
People often arrive at our retreats feeling unsure, guarded, and wearing the subtle armour many of us have learned to survive modern Western individualistic life. And yet, again and again, we witness those layers gently soften, sometimes within hours upon arrival. Through years of sitting in groups, both as a participant and a facilitator, I’ve learned that this shift tends to happen when a space is deeply grounded and non-hierarchical, or at least honest about power, responsibility, and consent; when facilitators recognise their own position and remain accountable to those they serve. And most importantly when facilitators allow themselves to be fully human too — not “better than,” not someone to live up to. It is this shared humanity and warmth that invites relaxation, relief, ease, and openness.
As the nervous system begins to feel safe, the “personality mask” tends to loosen, comparison and performance can fall away, and something more real enters the room: recognition.
Ah, we are all human here, facing the same life struggles. Just in different shapes and forms.
Loneliness is systemic
Modern Western society is profoundly individualistic. We’re taught to be self-sufficient, emotionally contained, and privately resilient. The result of these convictions is that loneliness truly has become an epidemic, alongside anxiety, depression, and burnout.
Individualism is deeply entangled with colonial and capitalist systems that prioritise productivity, competition, and control, often at the expense of care, rest, collective wellbeing and interdependence. Within this framework, healing is stripped of its relational roots and turned into a commodity. Something to purchase, optimise, and achieve alone, rather than a shared process of restoration and belonging.
I feel that group healing resists this narrative. In a subtle but radical way!
When we heal together, we remember that suffering is not a personal flaw or failure, but something entirely shaped by relationships, systems, and inherited histories, going way, way back. We begin to feel — not intellectually, but in our bodies — that we were never meant to do this alone.
Because if loneliness and suffering are systemic, then access to healing must be too. This is why we hold a community fund at Stellar Folk: a small but intentional way to redistribute resources, widen access, and ensure that healing is not limited to those who can afford it.
Group healing as an anticolonial act
Colonial systems severely fractured communal ways of living, caring, and healing. They disrupted collective practices that existed in relationship and reciprocity, replacing them with hierarchy, control, and institutional authority. Wisdom and lore that once lived within our families, lineages, and communities has been professionalised and regulated, and gradually removed from daily life. The same goes for natural medicines: they too, were extracted from their relational and ceremonial contexts, stripped of any cultural, spiritual, and ethical frameworks that held them in the past.
To gather in circles again — to centre community, mutual witnessing, shared vulnerability, and reciprocity — is not only deeply therapeutic, but can also, perhaps, be understood as an anticolonial act. It challenges the idea that healing must be expert-driven, undergone in isolation, or reduced to a transaction. When we include the wider environment, the land that holds us, regulates us, and heals alongside us, we restore and remember a more relational understanding of wellbeing. Healing emerges between us and through us, in relationship with each other and the living world, not solely within the individual.
I’ve witnessed something miraculous happen when our vulnerability is seen and met with a loving, regulated group presence. Just a few days ago, I’ve experienced this myself when sharing something very vulnerable with a group. Without advice, fixing, or interpretation, the simple act of being witnessed in our raw humanity seems to accelerate healing in ways that are difficult to measure or explain. What once felt unbearable becomes more metabolised when it is held in relational safety. What might take years alone can sometimes shift through moments of shared presence.
“Rarely, if ever, are any of us healed in isolation. Healing is an act of communion,”
as bell hooks, black feminist thinker, writer, and cultural critic with a deep emphasis on liberation through connection, care, and justice, names beautifully.
In group spaces held with integrity, care, and strong ethical boundaries, something profound can happen. People stop relating as consumers of an experience and start relating as participants in a shared field of humanity.
Here, we remember what it means to belong.
As a white-bodied person, I ask myself: could this be one small part of what it means to decolonise?
The medicine of community
When group healing is combined with psychedelic medicine — and held with deep respect and reciprocity toward the cultures and lineages these medicines come from — the effect can be especially powerful. Such work calls facilitators into continual humility, learning, and accountability. Medicine often dissolves habitual defences and amplifies the emotional truth residing in our bodies. In a group context, this can create moments of deep resonance, where people feel seen, mirrored, and met without needing to explain themselves. I have no words for it, really. It is magical.
The medicine is not the healer on its own though, this feels important to mention. The container matters — the care, the integrity, the skilled facilitation, all shape how the work and the experience unfold. And above all, the presence of others matters. Healing is not about the intensity of the experience or the size of the breakthrough; even the most subtle, quiet moments can carry a message of deep wisdom. Sometimes, the experiences that feel gentle, small, or even challenging in unexpected ways offer the most lasting insight.
What truly heals is not spectacle or grandiosity, but connection with ourselves, with the living world around us, and, as is so often reflected in feedback from retreat and group ceremony participants, with one another!
And, ultimately, with something greater: what many experience as the life force, Great Spirit, or oneness that connects us all. This deeper awareness helps us remember that we are never truly separate, and that healing flows most fully when it moves through this eternal, sacred connection that binds us all. At its heart, could we perhaps say that our collective dharma is a return to connection, on all levels?
Returning to what we’ve always known
Group healing, ceremony, and ritual are not trends. They are a remembering of something very ancient. A wisdom many of our ancestors lived and passed down, which colonial systems actively disrupted, though it continues to survive and thrive in communities around the world.
A remembering that our mammal nervous systems are social! And that our deepest wounds were shaped in relationship — and so, too, is our healing. A remembering that safety, belonging, dignity, and shared meaning are not luxuries, but the gentle foundations on which our lives and our society should be built and could flourish.
In a world that tells us to heal faster, alone, and quietly, choosing to heal together is a profoundly brave, radical and nurturing act.
And perhaps, in doing so, we don’t just heal ourselves. We begin to repair something much larger than ourselves…
Our offering: Symbiosis retreats
Sometimes, simply naming what is possible is enough. Those who feel it, feel it. And they tend to find their way to the places where this kind of work is being held.
For us, that place is Symbiosis. You can check out upcoming retreats on the events page.