Healing the Open Veins: Addiction, Consciousness, and the Soul’s Return
Eduardo Galeano’s Las Venas Abiertas de América Latina laid bare the brutal legacy of colonialism — the exploitation of a continent by foreign empires and corporations — leaving behind poverty, injustice, and intergenerational wounds. The goal of LovePlanetEarth is that after generations of conflict and scarcity communities are coming together to heal old wounds and remember that we can build a world rooted in love. Psychologist Eduardo Duran describes this pain as the soul wound of historical trauma: a deep psychic injury caused by oppression and cultural destruction. In Duran’s work, addiction and other self-destructive behaviors are often desperate attempts to restore a lost identity and spirit. He writes that the liberation journey must aim at a restoration of identity — for many people, a soul wounded by trauma — because addictions serve to “restore their soul/identity which was wounded or lost.” In other words, social ills like substance abuse and mental illness often echo the soul wound left by a history of exploitation and violence, passed down through generations.
Modern research bears out this linkage between trauma and addiction. Dr. Gabor Maté has argued that all addictions spring from emotional loss and disconnection. He explains: “all addictions come from emotional loss, and exist to soothe the pain resulting from that loss.” Childhood neglect, abuse, or even the absence of simple emotional warmth can leave wounds that a lifetime later we seek to numb with drugs, alcohol, food, work or other compulsions. Maté emphasizes that addiction is not a moral failing but a coping mechanism born of trauma and a sense of emptiness — an insight that dovetails with Duran’s soul-wound framework.
In this light, Michael Pollan’s psychedelic awakening takes on new significance. Pollan, author of How to Change Your Mind, has become a leading voice for using plant medicines to heal mental and spiritual wounds. He strongly supports the decriminalization of psychedelics as a matter of justice, writing that “no one should ever be arrested or go to jail for the possession or cultivation of any kind of mushroom.” Pollan argues that we must shift from a punitive war-on-drugs mindset to a compassionate paradigm: taking steps to make sure individuals are not penalized for the personal use and cultivation of psilocybin while also carefully expanding access under trained guidance. In practical terms, Pollan’s vision means allowing people to explore these medicines for healing — from depression to addiction — and supporting scientific research on safe, guided use, rather than stigmatizing or incarcerating those who seek them.
Alongside the psychedelic sciences, community-rooted healing practices are growing. For example, Itzhak Beery is a modern-day shaman. He explains that in his cosmology everything in our universe is alive with spirit — trees, water, rocks, even plastics are made of moving spirit-energy. Healers like Beery learn to interact with this energy matrix. In other words, ITzhak offers sacred rituals and intuitive guidance to clear the psychic residue left by trauma, restoring harmony to people and communities.
This spiritual understanding finds a parallel in the work of Tina Zion, a teacher of medical intuition who connects the same energetic principles to physical health. Zion teaches medical intuition — a practice recognizing the deep mind-body-spirit link. She reminds us that our modern medicine is astounding at finding, diagnosing, and treating disease, but discovering how the disease developed is neglected. As Zion notes, “If the mind-body can make us sick, it can also make us well.” Her view is that medical intuition looks beyond symptoms, connecting to psychological or spiritual roots. These intuitive healers combine Western knowledge with ancestral wisdom to help people reclaim their natural health and sense of purpose.
This intuitive understanding flows naturally into the work of Dr. Nadine Burke Harris, whose The Deepest Well transformed public health by revealing how adverse childhood experiences (ACEs) translate emotional trauma into biology. Working in San Francisco’s Bayview–Hunters Point neighborhood, she saw that toxic stress was literally reshaping her patients’ physiology—raising cortisol, rewiring immunity, shortening lifespans. Her research showed that trauma is not “all in the head”; it’s stored in cells, blood, breath. Yet with empathy and consistency, the body can learn to trust again, recalibrating toward safety.
Science journalist Donna Jackson Nakazawa, in Childhood Disrupted, extends this truth into adulthood. She shows how unresolved childhood stress rewires our immune and endocrine systems, programming inflammation and hyper-vigilance long after the danger is gone. But she also offers hope: through mindfulness, community, and love, neural pathways can re-weave themselves toward peace. The same plasticity that once encoded pain can encode resilience.
Completing this bridge between intuition and embodiment, Resmaa Menakem’s My Grandmother’s Hands reminds us that trauma is not only psychological—it’s somatic. Menakem, a therapist and trauma specialist, teaches that racialized and generational trauma live in the body, inherited like muscle memory. Healing, therefore, must happen through the body, not just the intellect: through breath, touch, rhythm, trembling, stillness. He writes, “The body, not the thinking brain, is where we experience most of our pain, pleasure, and resilience.” His grandmother’s hands—strong, loving, scarred—become a metaphor for ancestral endurance. The path forward, he says, is to “settle our bodies” so that we can stop reenacting the fear and pain of the past.
We are starting to see something beautiful— the nervous system is our sacred text, the place where spirit and science meet. Intuition listens to the whisper; biology confirms the echo. When healer’s insight meets data, we glimpse the architecture of repair—emotional, cellular, communal. Healing is not merely personal; it is ecological, ancestral, planetary—a great remembering that the mind, body, and Earth are one living system learning to trust itself again.
In this mosaic of healing, the Toltec teachings of Don José Ruiz (Don Miguel Ruiz) add a powerful thread. Jossay’s book The Shaman’s Path to Freedom teaches that personal freedom and healing come through radical self-acceptance and love. Ruiz writes that we can break your mind’s addiction to suffering by finding our own freedom grounded in unconditional love for self and others. Walking the Toltec shaman’s path based on unconditional love promises to allow us to live a life of peace and harmony within which in turn spreads healing outward.
Ruiz has been sharing this perspective with global audiences (often via online Zoom gatherings), urging people to reclaim inner sovereignty and forgiveness. In effect, the message expands the conversation: healing is not just about mending trauma but about awakening to our own power and authentic being as a foundation for collective peace.
Another guide for the soul is Fu-Ding Cheng’s Map of Desire. Cheng is an artist and shamanic teacher who has brilliantly mapped the terrain of spirituality and psychology creating vivid maps of our inner landscape for seekers on the path. Reviewers describe Map of Desire as “a GPS through a consciousness filled with invisible force fields… guide[ing] your journey.” Its pages chart the soul’s story from the “Unmanifest” (pure awareness) to our present human form and onward to a fully awakened future. In practice, Cheng’s work lets people navigate their heart and mind — spotting emotional “trapdoors,” clarifying intentions, and realigning with purpose. By visually mapping where we get stuck (fears, habits, old wounds), the book shows us how to move forward into full awareness and genuine fulfillment. For anyone feeling lost, it offers a symbolic compass to reconnect the soul to its true path and joy.
All these threads — Galeano’s story, Duran’s soul-wound insight, Maté’s trauma lens, Pollan’s science, the shamanic practices of Beery, Zion’s intuition, Burke Harris’s epidemiology, Nakazawa’s neurobiology, Menakem’s embodied wisdom, Ruiz’s Toltec freedom teachings, and Cheng’s visionary cartography — weave together into vision for a future where humanity is awakening out of fear and scarcity into compassion and creativity.
Healing the open veins, then, means connecting the dots between global history and personal soul. By addressing addiction and trauma as collective wounds we honor the legacy of our ancestors and heal the harm of colonization and exploitation. Since our reality is not a fixed thing but rather a choice we make together to grow, every day let’s choose a future where healing is our highest form of resistance and peace our inevitable path forward.
and : kindness will save the world
