Healing is defined as “to become sound or healthy again”, derived from the Proto-Germanic word hailjan, literally meaning to make “whole”. In bell hooks’ love letter to Black women’s emotional wellbeing, sisters of the yam: black women and self-recovery, she opens with a quote from Toni Cade Bambara’s The Salt Eaters that I’ve sat with for a long time: “Just so you’re sure, sweetheart, and ready to be healed, cause wholeness is no trifling matter. A lot of weight when you are well.” Fabled healer of Claybourne Georgia, Minnie Ransom speaks these words to patient Velma Henry as she attempts to heal her out of a heartbreak and burnout-induced breakdown. Therein lies a core truth about healing. Something that the influx of commercial wellness-based products on our Instagram feeds fail to recognise is that returning to yourself is not a linear journey. To “become sound or healthy again” is ultimately followed by another challenge, another bruise, another experience to process and integrate, especially in a world that is decidedly anti-love. Healing then is a strategy, an ongoing commitment to attempting to be whole and present in spite of all the reasons why being disembodied may sometimes seem less painful. 

I came to this realisation late last year after my five year anniversary of being in psychotherapy. As much as I’ve come to appreciate the lifeline that my biweekly — weekly if I’m weary — phone calls with Amanda have been for me since my university days, it dawned on me that there was no finish point. No stage in sight where I’d comfortably call it a day and declare myself successfully therapised and healed. As much as life continues, so does trauma, and since then, my goal has shifted towards creating spaces for communal restoration to make way for larger shifts. 

In comes the work that community-based charity, The Maya Centre, is engaged in. Set up in 1984, The Maya Centre provides specialist counselling and holistic support to low-income and minoritised women throughout the London boroughs of Islington, Camden, and Hackney. Currently, 65% of their clients come from Black, Asian, Minority Ethnic or Refugee backgrounds. Due to cuts in public funding, this is one of a few accessible community mental health-based charities in London alongside centres such as the trauma-informed holistic Body & Soul service in Islington and BAME-specific The Oremi Centre in Kensington and Chelsea.

On a cloudy Monday afternoon, I spent some time at The Maya Centre’s physical space in Archway. Opposite Central Saint Martins’ Art and Science campus stands a tall brick building with an inviting purple banner that let me know I was in the right place. On the top floor is the centre’s premises — a few therapy rooms and the reception, all full of light coming in from large windows, colourful fabrics decorating surfaces and plants in every corner. I immediately felt at ease despite my long commute to get there.

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The Centre works with many qualified practitioners who currently speak 14 different languages (Albanian, Bengali — both dialogue Sylheti and Bangla, Hindi, Urdu, Arabic, Danish, French, German, Kurdish Sorani, Farsi, Kurmanci (Kurdish dialect spoken by Kurds in Syria, Turkey). But that day, I was meeting with the primary art therapist Joanna Sellam, two lead facilitators of the Black Women's Therapy Group, Emily Lewis and Fiona Reynolds, and clinical director, Melanie Dottin, to learn more about their three main pillars of work: Counselling, Education, and Wellbeing. 

The Black Women’s Therapy Group has been in existence since the summer of 2021, when Lewis began working with the charity. She tells me, “My whole career has involved being in a supportive role. So, I was a teacher where I worked with children with special education needs, and I went from that to doing some support work, working with adults and adolescents with mental health concerns, from that moved to working in hospitals and being an advocate for black members of the community who were being sent to mental institutions and so on. Then I had my own journey of counselling, which had a major positive impact on my life, so I started my own private practice of counselling and therapy, which led me here to The Maya Centre.” 

As a member of Black African & Asian Therapeutic network, she uses holistic modalities such as aromatherapy, therapeutic play, guided meditation and person-centred psychotherapy. Since 2020, she and Reynolds have been connected through running online wellbeing workshops for Black men and women through her organisation, I Found Me Therapeutic Counselling. “Let’s Talk Black Women” and “Let’s Talk Black Men” were expanded to podcasting and radio in partnership with a local community radio station. It was around this time that Lewis saw an advertisement for a facilitator of a Black Women’s Therapy group and jumped at the opportunity to work with a women-focused space alongside other Black women therapists. Soon after, the first group took place last September.

Lewis and Reynolds tell me their group lovingly refers to their dynamic as “mother” and “big sister”, respectively, which makes sense to me as we speak more. Not only do the two of them have palpable chemistry, but they repeatedly emphasise the importance of community-building in providing care. Reynolds is an avid-people watcher whose curiosity led her to studying psychology at university. Reynolds says, “I had no clear idea what I was gonna do afterwards, except that I was very much aware I wanted to work with women and children back home in Jamaica. I had done a stint of volunteer work that had really kind of opened my eyes to the level of conflict most women live within a patriarchal society, you know, you know, chauvinistic society. I recognised there was a huge gap in service provision from the mainstream agencies. They had no ability, no knowledge, no capacity to really deal with Black bereavement. So, I opened my own practice to attend to that and that eventually led me to meet Melanie and Emily, who introduced me to The Maya Centre to work with her on the Black Women’s therapeutic group . From that, I was offered a position here as a sessional therapist.”

In sisters of the yam, bell hooks writes, “As Black women come together with another, with all the other folks in the world who are seeking recovery and liberation, we find the will to be affirmed, we find ways to get what we need to ease the pain, to make the hurt go away. We are discovering that the experience of community is crucial to wellness.” In line with this, for 12 weeks, a group of eight women of various Afro- heritages and ages came together in a space at The Maya Centre that is safe for them to articulate their interior lives and express their experiences without judgement. Participants were selected through self-referral, responding to open calls and/or past engagement with the centre. Although the facilitators outline each session, the flow of the group is intuitively shaped by what each person shows up with that day and draws on different forms of therapy, including creative expression. As of this month, the second edition of the Black women’s therapy group has begun and is due to finish on the 27th of June.

Speaking specifically to the significance of group therapy, the centre’s art therapist Joanna Sellam tells me, “The magic of a group is that they can actually validate and hold each other's experience and as a group, they have a kind of unity together that forms over a period of time.” Both an art therapist and Jungian Sandplay therapist, Sellam is retiring soon after 14 years in the NHS, four years in voluntary organisations, three years in education and eight years in private practice. During this time, she has witnessed people who were initially resistant to the idea of therapy open up when given an outlet to express themselves. 

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At the onset of the pandemic, Sellam would send out art materials to the women she was working with and guide them in creating something that spoke to their emotional state, which they would later photograph and share with her. She confides, “It's hard to talk about some things, but there's so much need for understanding other people and an appreciation of who they are, and I think art can do that. Why I like sand play — which we don't do here — is that you don't need any skills for it whatsoever. All you need is a willingness to take the little figurines and put them in the tray, and be able to touch the sand. Similarly, I like striving for art therapy to have ways that are quite enabling for anyone without any experience to use so that they can enjoy making images. It's very intuitive, and over the years, I've kind of collected different ways of making images that people can enjoy so that the mind doesn't come in and say, ‘you can't do it’, because a lot of people get put off the idea of art because they've been told they can't do it.”

For the women who make use of The Maya Centre, healing is a commitment to trying new things and life-long learning. Whether it’s through jumping right into one-on-one sessions, sitting in one of the specialist group therapies or starting small by taking a psychoeducation workshop on what therapy is, there are a number of ways to integrate wellbeing practices into their lives. What’s most important of all is that they’re not doing it alone.