Whole-person Healing: Interview with Bernadette “Bernie” Lim of Freedom Community Clinic
Bernadette “Bernie” Lim, M.D. shares a collective, creative vision of a new kind of medicine, built in relationship with community and aimed at whole-person healing and systemic change. Blue Heart director and co-founder, Lindley Mease, asked Dr. Lim to tell stories about how she and the team at Freedom Community Clinic re-imagine health care.
Bernie: Before titles and stuff I always like to identify myself as a creator, a healer, and a warrior. I forefront purpose, which is to provide healing — whole person healing — for our communities. By day I’m a physician and also by day I am the founder and organizer of the Freedom Community Clinic.
This work is very personal. It started with my mother.
My mother immigrated from the Phillipines and as I was growing up in the greater ethnic suburbs of Los Angeles she would never want to go to the doctor. However she was having a lot of womb and reproductive health issues as I was growing up. There was a point where she had to go to a medical doctor because of an emergency. She had to get a hysterectomy. Because she didn’t speak English as well and she didn’t really understand the medical terminology, she didn’t understand the full consequences of that procedure. She already didn’t like going to the doctor, but this really scarred her. She never wanted to go again.
Growing-up I would never go to the doctor. We depended on soup, Vicks VapoRub, and 7UP as our cures. My mother faced a lot of trauma and because of that she had to find her own healing. She discovered–went back to–her own roots and did a lot of inigenous Filipino body work called hilot. She also had spiritual counseling and acupuncture that really helped her come back to her body, come back to her humanity, after that dehumanizing experience.
As I was growing up, going to college and university, crossing the line of prestige and societal privilege and then going back home, I began to realize that the stories of my mother were actually so common among Black and Brown people, women, communities in general. The medical system has a history of exploitation and trauma that it has not been accountable to. So, I went to medical school with the intention to really understand the hardships that my mother was going through, to understand the language that she didn’t have.
Now graduating medical school, I understand the depths of her pain and how inadequate, honestly, the current medical system is because it only sees people in terms of their bodies, their physical ailments, rather than seeing them as at the center of their healing process.
I’ve had frustration throughout my whole medical journey. In the middle of it I was like…I believe that we need to create–reimagine–a new healing institution, a new system that proposes an alternative, a new standard of community medicine, and that is Freedom Community Clinic.
The beautiful thing about Freedom Community Clinic’s origin three years ago is that it is very grassroots. In May 2019 I got an initial 500 dollars to do these community healing street clinics with different healers. Three years ago we literally started organizing out of our car trunks, our garages, local taco shops, having acupuncturists and health educators and doctors and nurses just come out to the street or the freeway underpass. It was so beautiful because we went directly to where people already gather and we were trusted. We didn’t ask them to come to a foreign hospital building.
I remember that in the very beginning so many people didn’t know about acupuncture or about these different traditional healers. People only saw it as a white thing and to see Black and Brown healers was so powerful.
Freedom Community Clinic has this framework that we coin as “whole person healing,” acknowledging that healing is about the bodies and the minds and the souls, and prioritizing the healing of Black, Brown, immigrant communities that have been exploited by not only the medical industrial complex but also the wellness industrial complex that has commodified so much ancestral healing.
In June 2020 with the resurgence of the Black Lives Matter protests, we had huge healing clinics right after protests in the historically Black and immigrant neighborhoods of Oakland. Literally, after protests we would have these HUGE healing clinics with Black and Brown healers of all kinds. Doctors, nurses, acupuncturists, chiropractors…. It was just so beautiful!
We also had napping and resting spaces! You saw Black, Brown, Indigenous people resting after protests. We began to really affirm that healing–community healing–is part of protests, part of revolution. There is something so revolutionary in seeing Black and Brown people resting. It makes society feel so uncomfortable to see Black and Brown people resting because that’s not the norm. Healing can be part of a social justice framework. It is not just about getting a massage. It can really elicit healing on the individual level and that affects the community.
We’ve had grassroots donations from the community, through Venmo, Paypal, and Cash App. That helped us catapult a lot of our regular program. We used to do monthly street healing clinics and then we were having clinics two, three, four times per month. Eventually we got to a point where a community wanted us to be at their institutions. Students of Color advocated for us to be at UC Berkeley. Now we have daily healing services at UC Berkeley where we honor the time of local community healers. We have two community healing sanctuaries in Oakland and Berkeley that have been funded and pushed by the community. Now we’re being asked by hospitals and clinics and institutions to provide healing for their community members and their staff. We are also going to start doing stuff at San Francisco State.
It did start with my pitch three years ago, but this whole person healing framework has become a collective vision that healing is critical to the social justice movements of today.
Our leadership is comprised of seven women and gender non-conforming people of color. I represent more Westerm medicine but we have acupuncurists, herbalists, health education specialists, activists in the undocumented community–people that embody our mission. All of our healing programs are community-led. We are based in Oakland but are also in the greater Bay Area. All of our programs are in English and Spanish. We have healing groups specifically for undocumented youth and survivors. We have a huge wide net of people who come to us and a lot of them face additional financial and societal hardships. They come to us. They see us as their platform.
Lindley: Do you have a particular story that you love to tell that really brings the work alive?
Bernie: When we do healing clinics we do them in partnership with local organizations, so we have partnerships with over thirty local orgs in the Bay Area that also have an aligned mission of serving Black, Brown, immigrant people. I remember we were working in deep east Oakland which is an area that faces a lot of violence–historically and presently.
So, we are in deep east Oakland with a very new clinic with one of our traditional energy healers. We have an acupuncturist and a health educator getting blood pressures as well as performing diabetes education.
It’s a street family festival at a local school and people don’t know who we are, but they see that the healers are Black and Brown healers. And they are like, “Who are you all?” Initially we are just talking with local community members about healing modalities and explaining who we are. It is a very loud atmosphere with Bay Area rap and kids throwing basketballs. It’s not the typical hospital or spa healing environment. Eventually we get one person who’s like, “OK. Acupuncture. I feel like I’ve seen that from one of my friends on Instagram. I don’t know about needles but let me try it.” So they try it and they’re like, “Oh my gosh! I feel the most calm and the most relaxed I’ve ever felt in my life.” The acupuncturist was Tiffany Lopez who is like one of the very few Afro-Latina acupuncturists in the Bay Area. So they’re like, “This is awesome!” And then they’re calling their homies, “Hey, you gotta come! You gotta try it!”
Eventually we have this community acupuncture circle and there’s E-40 Hyphy blasting Tell Me When To Go and everyone with their acupuncture needles. And they’re just like dancing to Bay Area rap in this acupuncture circle in their ‘hood. People are feeling it!
Then one or two people started talking to the traditional energy healer. Her name was Krista Washington. She is one of a few Black reiki healers, a traditional Japanese method. They tried reiki. They felt super relaxed after that.
It was at that point that multiple people are coming up to me and the health educator and sitting down and saying, “You know what? I have been deathly afraid to go to the doctor, but I do have a family history of stroke and heart attack. I feel like there is stress in my heart. Can you tell me more about high blood pressure? Can you walk me through it? ’Cause like after all that, I feel like I can talk to ya’ll about this.”
I feel like that story really represents how we bring healing to where the community is and it doesn’t need to be in this sanitized spa setting. It’s actually alive in the community in a place where people feel at home. We are obligated to build relationship and continual trust with people, to meet them where they are at, and celebrate with them that we are part of their community and their family. From that moment on we’ve continued to do work with all those orgs THERE because that’s where the community will really feel that relationship with us and trust us. That was the beginning of so many beautiful things. It was one of the first street clinics.
Lindley: That’s incredible! Wow! What an image!
Bernie laughs: Yea! Acupuncture circles and What’s My Favorite Word.
Lindley: One of the things that’s consistent across a lot of Blue Heart partners is the Black Panther model of serve breakfast and change the system, a powerhouse duality of meeting people’s material needs while also making a deep systemic analysis. That’s central to your model, too. And there are not that many organizations working on the medical industrial complex. A lot of people may not understand resistance to medical systems. They’re like “Health! That’s a good thing!” So it would be really helpful for you to unpack that a little more. How are you speaking to the systems piece? What are your dreams and hopes at a more systemic level?
Bernie: It makes me think that we should explain that even more in our work, because it’s central. I think it’s a spirit within the Bay Area with the history of the Black Panthers. The doctor to the Black Panthers, Dr. Tolbert Small, is one of our advisors. He is one of the doctors to first introduce acupuncture to the west and to the Black Panther Party. He was a primary care doctor who also did acupuncture. We have just built on that legacy. Just as the Black Panthers established free breakfast and health programs, we are establishing a new standard at Freedom Community Clinic. This is a new standard of community medicine where it’s not just health check-ups and Covid tests. It is actually building of relationship with community and acknowledging that medicine is not just Western bio-medicine.
Key to the medical-industrial complex is this centrality that health is located and only provided for by a Western bio-medical framework such that the hospital is the only place of healing, the only place for medicine. In reality “medicine” and “health” and “healing” are not just physical phenomena. The social, environmental, spiritual, all of these different factors, key into a person’s ability to walk and move about in the world.
What we’re doing at Freedom Community Clinic directly deconstructs the medical-industrial complex because we integrate ancestral holistic healing strengths alongside the strengths of Western medicine. We believe in deconstructing those hierarchies and say that community healers are as powerful– if not more than –Western bio-medicine because of the history and the rootedness they have in the earth, in respect for the earth, and the people and society. We elevate community healers who have been silenced by Western bio-medicine, who have been gaslit and invalidated. We uplift their work and we introduce that work to communities from which that originated.
How many times do you see yoga or acupuncture or holistic health be completely unaffordable? They’re found in these boutique studios or boutique gyms. They’re made inaccessible to the people from whom they came from. We are all about making those holistic healing modalities available at community scale and finding out what the strengths are of bio-medicine.
The other thing about the medical-industrial complex is that Western bio-medicine is based on treating disease rather than uplifting health. I can speak to this as a physician. I’ve been taught and trained to treat your disease and know how your disease works, but I’m not as educated in how to help you be healthy, how to uplift your inherent feeling-of-wellness mechanisms that are built into your body. Physicians don’t really know too much about nutrition or physical exercise. They don’t teach us that!
I learn so much from our holistic healers because they see every person at the center of their own healing process versus a lot of Western medicine focuses on pills and surgeries which can be helpful in an acute setting but in a world that’s being plagued by more chronic disease like diabetes, high blood pressure, heart disease, mental health issues, as well as auto-immune issues, where there is no clear answer right now in Western medicine.
We must create new institutions of healing that really acknowledge the body, the mind, the spirit. We can’t just keep throwing pharmaceuticals and profit-centered care at people when really these bigger issues require a whole person healing approach.
Lindley: There has been a centering of “spirit” in movement-building work in the United States for a long time, but it seems that there is even more of that recently. It seems like you would have a unique perspective on the centrality of spirit in this political moment and movement, particularly as an organization that supports the healing of the spirit. What does that mean and why is that important for creating the kind of change that we need?
Bernadette: The body, the mind, the spirit they are all one.
When we say “spirit” we mean that we believe that every person–every single human in the world– has an inherent purpose and potential.
We forget, get disconnected from that purpose because of the demands and stresses and traumas of society. Black and Brown and immigrant people are at an increased risk of being more disconnected because of added traumas due to racism and xenophobia and all these societal stressors. At the Community Clinic we believe that these societal injustices and traumas that are disproportionately experienced by Black, Brown, and immigrant people have harmful effects on the body. That trauma disconnects people from the true purpose of being here. And so that is why our whole thing is “healing is justice.”
Healing is justice and healing is resistance and healing is freedom.
We say that ’cause after, for example, protests and fighting for social justice when we affirm for our people that healing and rest are essential we are allowing and we are uplifting Black and Brown people to come back to their bodies and come back to a place of stillness where they are able to reconnect with their breath and their purpose.
I feel like “spirit” for us is related to “purpose” for Black, Brown, and immigrant people especially — but really all people. It’s also connected to the greater purpose and the lineage of communities that you come from. So, that’s why a lot of our programs go beyond healing services and are about community and ancestral healing. We bring in a lot of ancestral historical practices, whether that’s ritual like ancestral altar-making or dance or community therapy or food. All those things represent a grounding in purpose and the people and the places and the histories that brought you to where you are, brought you to why you love the things you do and all that stuff.
Lindley: Do you have any broad reflections after three years in this work about what’s worked well and what hasn’t worked well when people show-up to support you?
Bernadette: This brings me back to the systems-change question. I realize as we do this work, that what draws people and the reason we are able to galvanize a movement, is that we are not asking permission from the existing institutions to be better. We are moving in a way such that we are not asking for permission, we are doing and creating and reimagining what we know is the truth.
I think a lot of advocacy and activism gets stuck because they ask or there is talk within the institution like “Oh you need to serve these groups better. You need to do this…” But this still centers the imagination of the oppressor. It centers the power in someone else.
We at Freedom Community Clinic and our community see ourselves as powerful and we say we can create the institutions we imagine. We were given these visions because we are the people who need to implement them.
We can’t ask someone else to do that for us. We can’t ask them to implement a program. We have to create that program ourselves and believe that we have the answers to issues that we’ve been seeing.
We see Freedom Community Clinic as a platform to create the healing, the healing groups, the healing initiatives that people want for their communities and for themselves. I think about our group for undocumented migrant youth, for example. A person came up to me and was like “All the work that you do, I want to do that specifically for the young people who face similar things as me.” Now we are in our fourth iteration of our group called Undocu Healing: Un mundo sin fronteras. That is a completely youth-led group that centers on the healing for young people who recently came here. That is the story of so many of our different programs. We welcome and uplift the leadership of community. They are the ones who are dictating our agenda and we are constantly in communication and conversation with the evolving needs and what’s happening.
As we declare this new standard, we are at the forefront of creating what we need to see, then the institutions move with us! We have clinics at UC Berkeley, for example, and in some schools of the Unified school district. Hospitals see that their community members are coming to us and they want to shift their culture to become healing.
We are the visionaries and creators of our own institutions. We don’t need to ask permission from someone else to create the vision that we need to lead. It’s not just me or our organizing team, it’s everyone who has experienced trauma and violence.
We are all sources of our own healing. We emphasize that and we cultivate leadership so that people feel ready to do that for themselves and their communities.
Lindley: Mic drop.
