Resources for collective healing
Healing Bells offers this space as a living archive of tools and reflections to support your journey. Whether you're a survivor, an artist, or a caregiver, these resources were created to meet you where you are—with compassion, creativity, and care.
Inside, you'll find practices rooted in the healing arts, invitations to explore storytelling as empowerment, and guides for arts engagement designed to nurture self-expression, co-creation, and agency.
These materials are here to help you reconnect with your voice, process complex emotions, and build creative spaces for healing individually and in community.
Together, we honor the strength it takes to heal, and the power of art to light the way.
5 stages of trauma & healing:
healing isn’t linear, but it’s possible.
​Why can co-creating their stories through the arts can help people find a healing pathway? Because trauma is stored in the body. The arts engage the senses, precisely where trauma can be released.
In our Compose for Change: Healing Arts class series, learn how we flip narratives of oppression to empowerment. Witness how we forge a healing pathway for survivors to move from internal stages of shame and blame to external capacities to name-the-pain to tame-the-pain. Gradually, people can move to the ultimate stage: to claim their voices, their agency, and the beautiful people they are.
Trauma and healing–as with grief–are unpredictable and cyclical, which this circle diagram shows. From listening deeply to multiple survivors and from her own experiences, Healing Bells’ Artistic Director Pamela Ruiter-Feenstra developed and copyrighted this illustration of the journey of recovery. This circle diagram will be part of our trailblazing e-Handbook for Survivors, where we'll also offer hard-earned cultural wisdom about diverse healing modalities from ten healing centers.
Please respect the copyright and cite this work as Stages of Trauma & Healing, designed by Healing Bells' Artistic Director Dr. Pamela Ruiter-Feenstra, ©CHI Press, 2025. All rights reserved.