The Healing Power of Community

by Lusijah Marx

I received guidance through the latihan and dreams for co-founding Project Quest in 1989. Lucas Harris, a Subud gay man in his twenties who had AIDS when most people with an AIDS diagnosis died within two years, was the co-founder. While attending a healing retreat, we had the same dream. It was about forming a center where people could get really good mental health care, receive acupuncture and naturopathic treatment, even if they had no money to pay for it. We knew that building a community of care was essential from our mutual dream. Years later Project Quest, our nonprofit center that emerged from our shared dream, was renamed Quest Center for Integrative Health. It is both an SDIA and an SDUSA project.

This book was written by three authors who shared a challenging but meaningful life- changing experience during the AIDS pandemic in the 1980’s and 90’s. Graham Harriman, Robin McCoy Brooks, and I are all therapists who felt the call to work with this community in crisis. Graham was in his twenties, a mental health therapist who almost died several times. Robin is a Jungian therapist/analyst and I am a nurse/psychologist.

When Robin, Graham and I got together in 2017, we laughed and cried as we remembered our beloved Project Quest Community and the lessons we learned. Graham was living in NYC, Robin in Bellingham, and l in Portland, the home of Quest. We decided we had to write it down, in order to process what we learned, and to share it with others. We spent seven years meeting and feeling inspired by what our experience with AIDS taught us. We learned about love, caring and following one’s inner guidance at a desperate time when people were dying. Our book is called The Healing Power of Community.

We came together to process a time when over 40 of our early Quest community members died. We also knew that the mainstream system of medical and mental health care functions in a colonial, corporate way that keeps many people from accessing care and holds out numerous barriers. We knew there was another way where people cared for one another, as we had experienced it at Quest.

We started writing our own personal stories from the early Project Quest days. Our publisher, Routledge, suggested that we make the book into three sections. We begin with presenting the idea and evidence that often goes unnoticed, that humans are genetically coded to care for one another. Darwin’s concept of the survival of those most fit and of our competitive nature became the dominant paradigm in our country. We quote Kropotkin and others who were speaking at the same time as Darwin of cooperation and collaboration. The first section of our book is to create the foundation for mutual aid—how to form collaborative communities where people learn to handle conflicts, speak authentically, and express vulnerability with discernment and care for each other.

The second section tells our personal stories. We were asked to write the third section which was the hardest, on how we each are taking what we learned into our lives and the work we do. It helped me to have the courage to move forward and form a new small nonprofit in March of this year called Radiance Integrative Health and Wellness.

Quest Center has over 80 employees and is doing great work, and I continue working there part time. The new nonprofit is called Radiance Integrative Health and Wellness and has only three practitioners which allows for more ease and less barriers for doing innovative, creative healing work. Writing the book helped me find a place of inner knowing that I needed to start Radiance and to put the things I have learned into action. I love and value Quest, but I knew that I had to have another place to follow my inner guidance and do the creative work that I receive to do.

The day after I made that decision, a person who volunteered 30 years ago at Quest to teach meditation, approached me and offered to donate a house that she had purchased years ago for the Pine Street Sangha, her Buddhist community. The house was the perfect size with a large group room with a fireplace, a kitchen, two bathrooms and three therapy/treatment rooms, plus other possible spaces.

My chapters in the book are very personal. My first chapter is a memoir about how I grew in courage, willingness, understanding and trust by following my receiving and guidance. I do talk about Subud to explain my trust in the process of following inner guidance. My second chapter is the challenges in being able to take action and do creative, cutting-edge work in a large organization.

I’m certain that without the latihan I would not have started the two nonprofits for Wellness Health Care (based on strengths, not pathology) nor written this book.

We discuss how The Healing Power of Community grew out of our collaborations at the height of the AIDS crisis, from which Project Quest, an HIV/AIDS clinic, was established in 1989. We asked ourselves how the liberatory emergence of “Quest” can be applied to psychology today. We advocate for using mutual aid approaches within group and community practice to transform how we train, teach, and practice. In this way, mental health professionals can support radical change in nonprofit clinics, public administration, private practice, and research.

Use the code SMA22 for a 20% discount before July 31. Book is available for pre-order  on June 13, 2024. Item will ship after July 4, 2024. Order here.