Hills I Will Die on as a Disabled Healing Practitioner

Image ID: grassy hill under a blue sky.

1) Disabled bodies are not a liability in healing spaces. They are a source of lived intelligence, pacing wisdom, and deep attunement that cannot be learned in theory alone.

2) If participation requires ignoring pain, fatigue, or flare risk, that’s not healing. That’s compliance—when healing spaces insist the body must be overcome, they stop listening to what the body is actually communicating.

3) Rigid time, productivity worship, and punitive cancellation policies are not neutral. They are ableist by design.

4) Regulation does not look the same in every body. Stillness is not the gold standard and consistency is not the measure of integrity.

5) You cannot positive-think your way out of medical conditions. Mindset and nervous system care matter, but it is only part of the picture— not a cure.

6) Healing that only works for the resourced, the rested, and the reliable is not liberatory. It’s selective.

7) Able-bodied practitioners often misinterpret and pathologize the behavior/habits of those chronically ill and disabled— mistaking skilled, necessary adaptation to living in a body with limits as dysfunction that needs reshaped/tended to.

8) There is a massive lack of intersectional awareness in healing spaces— there are many doubly, triply…at risk, with little to no acknowledgement of additional care needed. Disabled individuals from other marginalized communities are especially at risk.

9) Many healing practitioners deepen trauma because they challenge and/or victim blame symptoms, forced environments of isolation, and ongoing, necessary medical precautions- which is just another form of medical gaslighting.

10) There are MANY ableist beliefs not only held in somatic and mindfulness spaces— they are continuing to be taught in them. Even in highly sought after organizations and by “esteemed leaders.”

11) Disabled practitioners are not “inspiring exceptions.” They are necessary correctives to systems that continue to perpetuate harm in healing spaces.

12) Pacing, cancellation, inconsistency, rest, slowness and withdrawal are often read as resistance or failure through an able-bodied lens— though often acts of self-preservation and care in those chronically ill/disabled.

13) The belief that disability and chronic illness are past life/ancestral punishment is deeply ableist and a common belief in spiritual healing circles. Disability is not punishment, nor shameful.

14) Disabled practitioners don’t practice despite our disability. We practice with it — and our work is more honest and accurate because of it.

15) There is a great deal of talk about community in healing circles and simultaneously very few facilitators and organizations actually doing the work to make their community accessible to those disabled and chronically ill. 

These aren’t hot takes. They’re lived truths. Disabled bodies have always been doing the work of adaptation, listening, pacing, and recalibration— the very things healing spaces claim to value, while often structuring themselves to exclude us.

You cannot positive-think your way out of medical conditions — and the insistence that you can has consequences. This belief doesn’t just misunderstand illness; it reshapes how bodies are judged. When healing spaces elevate mindset as the primary driver of wellness, they quietly reposition symptoms as personal failures. Pain becomes a sign of not trying hard enough. Fatigue becomes a lack of discipline. Fluctuation becomes inconsistency of character rather than a feature of living in a complex body. What gets lost is the intelligence already present in adaptation.

Disabled people are not passive recipients of care. We are constant problem-solvers. We learn how to pace, how to anticipate crashes, how to negotiate energy, how to read early warning signals, how to choose withdrawal over collapse. These are not deficits. They are refined skills developed in response to real physiological limits. Yet through an able-bodied lens, many of these strategies are misread.

Rest is framed as avoidance. Cancellation is framed as unreliability. Slowness is framed as stagnation. Inconsistency is framed as lack of integrity. And adaptation and organization to create greater disable ease is framed as perfectionism. This misrecognition matters, because it shapes the structures of healing spaces themselves.

When practitioners design programs around fixed timelines, rigid attendance, and productivity-based markers of progress, they are not creating neutral containers. They are creating environments that reward bodies that can endure and exclude bodies that must adapt. What is often called “high standards” is frequently just unexamined access.

Healing cultures that prioritize performance over presence end up mistaking compliance for regulation. They ask bodies to override pain, suppress signals, and perform stability in order to belong. This does not create safety; it creates dissociation. It trains people to mistrust their internal cues in service of external approval. Accessibility, then, is not about accommodation after the fact. It is about a different orientation to the body altogether.

A disabled-informed approach recognizes that regulation is not a static state but a fluctuating process. That capacity is not linear. That healing does not move in clean arcs. It understands that adaptation is not a problem to be fixed but evidence of a body responding intelligently to its conditions. This is why disabled practitioners matter.

We are not exceptions who “overcame” our bodies to be here. We are practitioners whose work is shaped by ongoing relationship with limitation, uncertainty, and change. That relationship sharpens discernment. It deepens attunement. It interrupts fantasies of control that often masquerade as healing.

Disabled practitioners don’t practice despite our disability. We practice with it. And from that position, we will always challenge frameworks that confuse endurance with wellness, positivity with truth, and normalization of harmful beliefs with care.

This isn’t about denying the power of embodied healing and nervous system care. It’s about interrogating which standards were built on harm in the first place. Because I’m not interested in healing that requires people to disappear parts of themselves to belong. I’m interested in work that can actually hold real bodies, real limits, and real lives.

Disabled people are not failing healing. Healing culture is failing to recognize disabled wisdom.