Sherpa: a collective database of healing journeys

Introducing Sherpa, a collective database of healing journeys

I've long been fascinated, incensed, frustrated, and awestruck at how much confusion and noise there is about emotional healing.

There are hundreds of modalities. Thousands of practitioners. Some of them are wizards who can change your life, and they may only be found by whispering the right words at the bank of the river on a full moon.

There is a charm to this, a beautiful serendipitous village-like feeling that comes from someone you know recommending someone they know who worked with someone who changed their life. And also, a (perhaps unnecessary) level of mystery.

My brain likes to organize things. For many years, I've had an indulgent dream of somehow mapping the space, capturing all the modalities and practitioners and nuances and frameworks into one Big Beautiful Database.

How do we organize the space and help people navigate it with more ease, I wondered, while keeping the mystery, the magic, and the feeling of connection that we get from stumbling into an event that leads us to our next healer?

Mapping the messy

Understanding people’s healing journeys is one doorway.

People’s healing journeys fascinate me. I love understanding the winding, nonsensical twists and turns that have led someone to where the are now.

Which modalities work for people who are chronically in their heads? Which ones resonate with people who have a hard time trusting? Which practitioners are the embodiment of the divine masculine, seeing through your bullshit and pushing you with love, and which embody the divine feminine, soft, gentle, and accepting? At what stage in your journey did you need each one?

This is how we start to map the space – not through descriptions stripped of context, but through understanding more and more of people's messy, nuanced journeys.

There's no such thing as the "best" modality, or practitioner. Healing is like music, and healers are artists: each one expressing a unique flavor of truth and love through their being. What will work for you depends on so many things that are beyond the intrinsic nature of the modality or resource itself. Like:

• resonance – each person, with their different wounds, experiences, and personality structures, needs a totally different balm. Someone may love parts work because it helps them make sense of their inner world, and someone else may find that it activates their thinking and makes it harder to drop into their body. Someone may need to be met with directness and strength, while someone else may need gentle attunement. We find our way to the frequencies and patterns that are the balms for our specific needs.

• timing – sometimes, you come across something years before you're ready for it. It bounces off and you barely even remember it. Years later, you come across it again, and boom, it's everything you need in that moment. Something that is transformative for someone who is opening their energy body may completely not hit for someone who is just starting to connect with parts. You can't rush the process, and you can't skip through the journey. You gotta trust the timing.

• community – we like working with modalities and resources that our friends like. We trust the people our friends trust. This is why healing recommendations happen in quiet little WhatsApp groups and DMs, and 'random strangers online reviewing practitioners' hasn't really taken off. When we explore, we bring our community along with us.

• and a little bit of magic – Mystery, consciousness, the universe is dancing us through this strange, unfolding life. Sometimes, we just need a little bit of magic – someone reaching out from the ether to recommend a podcast to us, or a prayer for support with ancestral healing being answered by an offering that appears the next day. Embracing the doesn’t-make-sense.

Introducing Sherpa

So, all of this led me to Sherpa. I'm so excited to finally share this with you all. It's been a slow, quiet process with many stops and starts, but there's finally a version that captures the essence of what it could be.

A few wonderful friends consented to share their journeys with me (and you). Each journey is something like an interactive essay – going through the different chapters of their healing journey, and linking their recommendations. It forms a database of resources (retreats, books, practitioners, community spaces, etc), where you can trace back where and how that resource impacted people in their journey.

It's available as a resource – you can check it out at sherpa.onrender.com!

Homepage

Interactive journey page

Resource database

Where does this go?

Sherpa is about being inspired by people's journeys, understanding more deeply the role that certain practitioners or modalities have played in people's lives, and that spark of: "Oh, that sounds kind of like me. Maybe I'll benefit from that too".

I don't know where this will go. It doesn't need to go anywhere, really – I hope people can read and get inspired by the journeys that are already there.

But, here are some of the ideas that excite me:

• Healing wikipedia – as people add their journeys, we pull out concepts and keep a living, updating wikipedia of healing concepts.

  
  Here's a little prototype of this:

• Recommendations – people could share about their journeys so far, and receive pointers to journeys that sound similar to theirs and the resources that might resonate with them next based on those journeys.

• Continuous journey pages – as your journey evolves, you can come and update your own page, like your own personal healing Wikipedia page.

• Friends – imagine signing in through Twitter, and seeing the resources that the people you follow are enjoying.

Share any sparks

My hope is that this inspires you in some way – whether there's something inspiring in the journeys and resources, or whether this gets you thinking about what you'd like to exist.

If anything sparks (an idea for what this could become, a random cool thought this prompted, or if you're interested in sharing your own journey), reach out! You can respond to this Substack email, or send me an email at amanda@soularise.co. And I hope you enjoy the beautiful stories that are there now :)

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A huge huge thanks to River, Dennis, Welf, Mel, and Pranab for saying yes to sharing their stories. And thank you to Stephen and Graham for many conversations and brainstorms about what is needed and what this could become!