What We Learned About Healing in Poland and Ukraine
When we landed in Warsaw this fall, we stepped off the plane carrying three things that mattered more than anything else: our daughter’s stroller, a backpack full of ritual items, and a question we still didn’t know how to answer.
What does it mean to talk about healing in the middle of a war?
We were invited to join a small delegation traveling between Poland and Ukraine to meet the people already doing the work of repair: psychologists, volunteers, veteran leaders, and NGO staff who spend their days with children and adults whose lives have been torn apart since 2022. The delegation was led by former Congressman David Bonior, whose life has been braided into Ukraine’s story for years.
We came representing Raíces Ancestrales, our work at the intersection of ritual, nervous system repair, and post-traumatic growth. Our job was not to arrive with a program in a briefcase and a list of answers. Our job was to listen, to accompany, and to offer what we know only if it truly served the people in front of us.
From the first meetings in Warsaw, it was clear that the visible war on the ground had a twin: a quieter war inside people’s bodies.
Behind the Policy Numbers
At the Hotel Bristol, we sat around a polished table with Scott from the U.S. Embassy and Zofia from a Polish humanitarian organization that has supported Ukrainians since the first days of the full-scale invasion.
On the surface, the agenda looked like policy:
temporary protections for refugees set to expire
a stalled bill in Parliament
funding gaps for housing and services
what would happen to thousands of Starlink units that keep people connected across the border
Under the numbers, something else was in the room.
Luis watched how they spoke about families they had never met but felt accountable for. Caseworkers could not tell their clients what next month would look like. Parents did not know if their children would be allowed to stay in the same school. The people charged with being “the helpers” carried their own exhaustion in their shoulders and their breath.
When they turned to us and asked what Raíces does, we did not start with diagnoses or charts. Luis spoke about permission.
· The permission to feel the grief everyone is stepping around.
· The permission to rest without apology.
· The permission to imagine a future even when nothing in the present feels secure.
He described trauma not as a permanent sentence, but as a violent interruption in a story that, with care and time, can become the beginning of a different chapter.
Before we left, we asked if they would be open to a short blessing. No one stood up. People stayed where they were. Some kept their arms folded. Others let their hands drop into their laps. We invited them to take one breath that belonged fully to them, not to their reports, not to their responsibilities.
For a moment, the room went very still.
Afterwards, Scott and Zofia thanked us in the simple way people do when someone gives them five minutes where they do not have to be strong.
Sometimes healing begins with that: one honest exhale.
A House Built to Hold Chaos
The next day, we stepped into another layer of the war’s fallout.
The name “Polish Women Can Do” sounds almost playful. The women who welcomed us into their building carry stories that are anything but light.
Samantha felt it as soon as we walked in. This was a place built to hold chaos. There were therapy rooms with toys for sensory integration. Tables where social workers sat with coffee, laptops, and stacks of documents. A quieter corner where someone could cry without explaining themselves.
For twenty-five years, the foundation has done the slow work of supporting Polish families. Since the invasion, they have folded thousands of Ukrainian women and children into that same care. Many arrived with no language, no plan, and no clear path back to the lives they left. On the day we visited, they were celebrating an anniversary. There were flowers on a table and a cake in the corner. The mood in the room told another truth. People were tired. Waiting lists were long. Funding was uncertain.
We did not come with a flyer announcing a workshop. We came with our daughter, Sasha, who toddled between chairs and toys as if to remind everyone that life insists on continuing, even when the heart is heavy. Every mother in the room knew what it meant to try to protect a child’s sense of safety when nothing feels safe.
When it was time for us to speak, Samantha shared some of the practices we use with Raíces:
Simple grounding exercises that can be done in a waiting room, on a tram, or at a kitchen table.
Small rituals to honor the names of those who are missing or dead without needing a monument or a priest.
Ways to help children feel their own bodies as places of safety, even when the world outside the window is loud and uncertain.
We invited the women there to try a brief practice with us: one hand on the chair, one hand on their own heart, feet flat on the ground. For a minute, the stories of lost documents, court hearings, and border rules stepped back. All that remained were human beings in a room, alive, breathing, holding both loss and stubborn hope.
Later, the foundation asked if we would come back to share these practices with a larger group of Ukrainian women and their children. That invitation meant what we brought was not just interesting to hear about; it felt usable inside the life they live every day.
Veterans and an Uncomfortable Future
As the days went on, our conversations shifted more toward veterans and the future Ukraine will face whether the world is ready for it or not.
We met with people thinking ahead to millions of veterans who will return from the front. Some will come back with visible injuries. Many will carry wounds that only show up at three in the morning: nightmares, sudden flashes of anger, the inability to rest even when the body is exhausted.
This is where the language of post-traumatic growth becomes crucial.
Trauma is real. It leaves marks on the nervous system, on families, and on a person’s sense of safety in their own skin. But it does not have to be the last word.
In our work with Raíces, we’ve seen over and over that the same force that shatters a life can, with structure and support, become the force that rebuilds it in a different form. Not a return to “who I was before,” but a movement toward a deeper, more grounded self.
One afternoon in Warsaw, we sat with a small group of practitioners talking about veterans’ programs that already exist:
canine therapy for those who have trouble trusting people
peer-support groups where veterans can speak freely without performing toughness
entrepreneurship training to help them build work that feels meaningful
counseling for families who are trying to understand the person who came home
We asked simple questions.
· What would it look like to add a brief ritual for transition when a soldier comes home after a long rotation?
· Could breathwork and body awareness be woven into existing gatherings so veterans are not only telling war stories, but also learning how to live in their own bodies again?
· How do we support spouses and children who feel like they are living with a stranger?
None of this was abstract. It was tied to specific faces and names: the young medic who startles at any slammed door, the father who cannot bring himself to attend school events, the mother who feels guilty every time she laughs while friends are still under fire.
Children, Prosthetics, and the Question Underneath Everything
Even when our path took us deeper into conversations about Ukraine itself, the same pattern kept appearing: systems under strain, people doing the work anyway.
We learned about organizations rescuing children who had been taken or displaced by the war and bringing them to centers where entire families can start to heal. In one briefing, a team described a grandmother who crossed multiple borders to reclaim a child who barely recognized her, then spent three months relearning how to be a family inside a small apartment that did not feel like home yet. The tools were simple: therapy sessions, shared meals, and a school routine that told the child, “You belong here again.”
We heard from a prosthetics clinic reframing amputations not as the end of a life, but as the beginning of a hard, meaningful new chapter. One therapist told us about a former infantryman who now walks with a carbon-fiber leg and trains for distance races. Technically, it is rehabilitation. In his own words, it is “learning how to belong to my body again.”
The same question kept rising, in different accents and in different rooms:
How do we live a full life with this much loss?
That question sits at the heart of Raíces Ancestrales. It sits behind every ritual we design, every circle we facilitate, every story we help someone re-enter from a place of safety instead of re-experiencing from a place of panic.
Ordinary Courage
When we finally left, we carried home more than notes and contact lists. We carried a sharper picture of what courage looks like when it stops being dramatic and becomes daily.
· A mother getting up for the third time in the night to comfort a child who wakes up screaming.
· A volunteer returning to the station to meet yet another family arriving with one suitcase and a plastic bag.
· A therapist who walks into another session even though she cried in the stairwell after the last one.
None of them would call what they do heroic. They’d call it necessary.
For us at Raíces, this journey clarified three things.
Three Things This Trip Made Clear
1. Any practice we offer has to be practical.
It has to fit into cracked spaces of real life: five minutes in a hallway, three minutes on a tram, the time it takes for tea to steep. Long retreats and perfect conditions are rare. Breathing, grounding, and naming grief have to be portable.
2. Healing has to be shared.
Individual counselors and social workers cannot carry this alone. Families, peer groups, and small rituals that anyone can lead are not extras; they are part of the core infrastructure. A grandmother leading a candle ritual at a kitchen table is doing real mental health work, even if no one uses that language.
3. Healing must honor culture.
Ukrainian trauma cannot be healed by importing someone else’s story wholesale. Our role is to offer tools that can be translated, argued with, and reshaped until they belong to the people who live there. If a practice cannot survive that process, it does not belong.
What This Means for Raíces Ancestrales
We returned to Tamarindo with our luggage heavier and our hearts strangely steadier. The war hasn’t ended. The needs are not shrinking. But our sense of what Raíces can contribute is clearer.
Over the coming year, we are focusing on three concrete steps:
Co-designing small pilots with local partners.
We are in ongoing conversations with organizations like Polish Women Can Do to adapt short, repeatable practices they can integrate into their own programs for Ukrainian women and children. The goal is not a Raíces-branded workshop. The goal is two or three tools that feel natural in Polish and Ukrainian mouths, inside their own cultural frames.Building a simple, daily practice pathway for individuals and families.
A short series of grounding and ritual practices that can be shared digitally with partners in Eastern Europe, designed for people who have no therapist, no quiet room, and very little time.Developing training that stands alongside, not in front of, existing work.
When invited, we will offer training for local facilitators and staff so they can carry these practices themselves. Clinical care, peer support groups, social services, and ritual-based tools should stand shoulder to shoulder, not compete for space.
If you are reading this as a practitioner in Poland, Ukraine, or the broader region and want to explore whether these practices could support your work, we would welcome that conversation.
If you are reading this from elsewhere and asking what you can do, the answer is simple and not glamorous: support the people who are already there. That includes organizations like Polish Women Can Do, local child-rescue and prosthetics programs, and the small, underfunded teams who are building normal life in abnormal times.
Roots don’t exist to hold us still. They exist so that, even in the hardest soil, something living can still grow.
That is what we saw in Poland and in the stories of Ukraine: not an absence of fear or grief, but a deep insistence on life. Our work at Raíces is to stand beside that insistence, offer what helps, and remember that healing is not a gift we bring. It is a capacity we tend, together.