Ujima

When I sit with Ujima, the third principle of Kwanzaa, I think about what it means to build and maintain community together and to recognize that our problems, and our healing, are shared.

Two things start playing in my mind at the same time. One is Lao Zi’s teaching from Chapter 54 of the Tao Te Ching:

“Cultivate virtue in your own person,
And it becomes a genuine part of you.
Cultivate it in the family,
And it will abide.
Cultivate it in the community,
And it will live and grow.
Cultivate it in the state,
And it will flourish abundantly.
Cultivate it in the world,
And it will become universal.”
​
The other is the song “Chinese Proverb” as sung by Sweet Honey in the Rock, with its simple, steady reminder that what we tend in the heart eventually becomes peace in the world. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fSkOpLbvpDc

Ujima reminds me that health is not a solitary achievement; it is something that emerges from relationship, from the way we show up for one another and for ourselves. When I work with patients, I do not see an isolated body on a table; I see a nervous system, a history, a family, and a community all speaking through that one person.

I also hold close Lao Zi’s teaching about how what we cultivate in ourselves radiates outward. First radiating into the family, then into community, and eventually into the world. The same is true of healing. When I support one person in becoming more regulated, more grounded, and more attuned to their body, that change does not stop with them. It shifts the way they parent, partner, work, and participate in community. It changes how they respond instead of react. In that way, each individual treatment has a collective dimension.

The quick-fix, high-speed model of Western medicine often works against this reality. A four-minute visit, a brief glance at labs, a prescription written with very little context. These decisions may address acute crises, but they rarely address the deeper fabric of a person’s life. That system is structured for efficiency and liability, not for relationship or meaning. Over time, it teaches people to see themselves as cases to be managed rather than as whole humans in need of being witnessed, understood, and partnered with.

In that environment, patients are trained to hand over both credit and power. They come to believe that healing is something a clinician “does” to them.

So when someone says to me, “You fixed my shoulder,” or “You healed my sleep,” or “You changed my digestion,”

I gently correct the story.

I might say, “Your body did that. I supported the process, but you have been doing the work every single day.” Your body is constantly repairing, recalibrating, and maintaining its homeostasis, even while you sleep. It is endlessly communicating with itself, adjusting to the season, to the weather, to your emotions, to your choices.

My role is not to overrule that wisdom; it is to work alongside it, to interpret the body’s signals, and to help smooth the pathway so it can return to its own balance.

When I speak this out loud, I am practicing Ujima in the treatment room. I am naming the process as shared work: your innate intelligence plus my training and attention, working together toward coherence. I hold responsibility for my presence, my skill, and my integrity; you hold responsibility for showing up, listening inward, and engaging with what arises. In this way, we redistribute power back to where it belongs. It belongs in the relational space between practitioner and patient, and into the body’s own capacity to heal.

I hear, over and over again, how unusual this feels to people. Many of my patients have cried simply because I slowed down long enough to ask a real question and actually listen to the answer. They are relieved not to be rushed, not to be told that if their labs are “normal” their suffering must be imaginary. They are relieved to be believed. Those tears are not just about pain; they are about the shock of being treated as a person instead of a problem. That experience alone can be regulating. It begins to repair the rupture that many have internalized from years of being dismissed or minimized.

From my perspective, Ujima means acknowledging that the harms of our healthcare systems are not just individual misfortunes; they are shared conditions that we all participate in and all have some responsibility to change. I do not believe all doctors are uncaring or incompetent. Many are working under immense pressure and within structures that constrain their ability to practice the way they would like to.

And I have heard enough stories, day after day, of people leaving offices feeling unseen, shamed, or abandoned to know that something fundamental is off.

Within my small circle, I take Ujima to mean this: I will not pretend to stand on higher ground. The practitioner does not live above the patient. We stand in the same field, on the same earth, working in different ways toward the same rhythm: coherence, connection, and freedom. That is where true health arises—not in hierarchy, but in collaboration. My commitment is to co-create that kind of space wherever I can, so that each person who walks through my door (or virtual space) remembers that they are not alone in their problems or in their healing.

For me, that is Ujima in practice: honoring that your body and my skills, your story and my listening, your courage and my responsibility are all part of one collective work.