A different relationship with healing than most of us were taught

I stood in a bedroom at 56 Hope Road in Kingston, Jamaica, and I couldn’t move.

Not because of exhaustion, because on the floor, next to a modest bed, sat a meditation pillow, three Bibles, and the morning routine of a man who understood something about healing that most of us spend a lifetime trying to learn.

Our tour guide, Abigail, told us that every morning, before the music, before the studio, before the world got to him, he would get up and meditate. Then sit with his Bibles. Then juice: sea moss, which Jamaicans call Irish moss, a plant carrying 92 of the 102 minerals the human body needs to function. Before juicing was a thing, she said, and smiled.

He called it ital. Natural. No meat, no salt, no sugar. He carried his food to the studio in calabash containers; dried gourds from trees on the property, because nourishing himself was something he took with him wherever he went.

How many of us treat healing like a destination instead of something we carry? We think we will get to it after the crisis passes, after the diagnosis improves, but what the ital philosophy teaches, what this museum quietly communicated through every room, is that nourishment is the practice that makes surviving possible.

Then Abigail told us about the concert. He was shot on a Friday. Bullet lodged in his arm. Rita shot in the back of the head; her locks literally slowed the bullet and saved her life. Two days later, someone asked why he was still going on with the Smile Jamaica concert, wounded, gunmen still unidentified. “The wicked of the world don’t sleep. So why should I, the righteous, take a day off?”

I am not suggesting we push through trauma without rest; that is the opposite of what this column stands for. What struck me was not the bravado. It was the belief underneath it. The conviction that his purpose was larger than his pain. That people were waiting, and they needed to hear something true.

That is a different relationship with healing than most of us were taught. We have been told healing is private. Quiet. That you go away and come back whole, but here was a man who brought his Trenchtown community with him when he moved uptown. Who turned his home into a safe haven. Who sang One Love with a bullet still in his arm, and then two years later, got the two opposing political leaders driving Jamaica’s violence to come onstage and hold hands.

Healing as a public act. Something you do for people, not just to yourself.

Our tour actually began with a smaller story; Lady Musgrave, for whom a Kingston Road was named. The popular version was scandalous and easy to believe. The truth was quieter: she advocated for labouring women, for mothers fighting for the right to work and be paid fairly. Nobody tells the rumour correctly anymore, but the road is still there.

I came to Jamaica in the middle of recovering from things I have not fully written about yet. I expected music history. I came home with something I didn’t know I needed: a model of healing that is ital in the truest sense. Natural. Purposeful. Rooted. Carried with you in a calabash wherever the work takes you next.

“Possessions make you rich,” he was once asked. “My richness is life forever.”

I am still learning what that means for me, but I think it starts on the floor, with a meditation pillow, before the world gets in.