Last night, we attended a special screening of Aretha Greatrix’s film Wîwîp’son: The Healing Swing. I was sitting near the back of the theatre before the film began, watching people arrive. There was laughter, hugging, conversation and an unmistakable sense of warmth in the room. The audience was largely Indigenous, and what struck me most was the feeling of collective strength, resilience, belonging and joy. Even before the film started, it felt as though simply bringing people together in that space carried something important: connection, affirmation and a reminder of the strength that exists within community.

What Did We Actually Measure During Wîwîp’son?

After the screening, I was asked a simple question: What did the science actually show?

As a scientist, I often answer questions like this with graphs, numbers and technical language. We talk about EEG, heart-rate variability, autonomic regulation and physiological arousal. All of those terms have precise meanings, but they can make a fairly simple idea much harder to see.

So here is my attempt to explain what we were looking for.

When we are afraid, our whole person responds

My scientific training gives me tools for examining one part of that whole. I can measure some of the physical signals produced by the brain and body.

During our wîwîp’son study, we recorded electrical activity from the brain with EEG. We recorded the electrical activity of the heart with ECG. We measured breathing. We also measured movement.

None of those measurements, by itself, tells us whether someone is afraid, peaceful or healing.

But when we look at several of these rhythms together, we can begin to see something about the state the body is in.

Think about a time when you were frightened, worried or deeply unsettled.

That experience is not only a thought inside your head.

Your breathing may change. Your heart may beat differently. Your muscles may tense. Your attention may become more alert to what is happening around you. You may find it difficult to settle or sleep. And the experience can affect how you feel emotionally and how you understand what is happening to you.

One of the teachings I have been grateful to learn through this work is to think about people more completely: physical, mental, emotional, & spiritual.

The body can change states

As a scientist, I sometimes describe this as a change in physiological arousal.

I think a simpler way to say it is: We can watch for signs that the brain and body are beginning to settle.

Perhaps the easiest way to think about this is that the body can be in different states of readiness.

When we feel threatened, afraid or anxious, the brain and body prepare us to respond. That response can be extremely useful. If something dangerous is happening, we want our nervous system to notice it and prepare us to act.

The problem is that people can sometimes remain in this heightened state even after the immediate danger has passed.

When a person begins to feel safe, the brain, heart and breathing can also change. The body's rhythms begin to show a different pattern. The person may become calmer, less vigilant and more able to rest

So what did we ask about wîwîp’son?

Importantly, our study did not ask: Does wîwîp’son heal trauma? (though ultimately that may be what we want to know)

We did not recruit people because they had experienced trauma. We did not measure how much trauma each person carried before entering the swing. And we did not have a scientific instrument that could tell us whether someone had been "healed".

Our experimental question was much narrower.

For one part of the study, we recruited people who did not know much about wîwîp’son. Each person experienced two sessions.

• In one session, they were placed in the swing and rocked.

• In the other, they experienced the swing together with the ceremony that is part of wîwîp’son.

They did not know in advance which session was which.

That comparison was important because being wrapped comfortably in a swing and gently rocked for an hour might itself be relaxing. We wanted to know whether the full wîwîp’son experience was associated with a different brain-body response than the physical experience of being in the swing alone.

That is a much smaller question than "Does it heal?"

... but it is one that our scientific tools can actually begin to answer.

What did we see?

People did not all respond in the same way. .... That is important.

Experts on physiological arousal judged the data without knowing who the person was or which of the two sessions: swing alone, or actual wîwîp’son, they were evaluating. They found that seven people showed a pattern consistent with lower physiological arousal during the wîwîp’son session. Four showed no clear difference between sessions, and two showed greater arousal during the wîwîp’son session.

The EEG measurements added another part of the picture. Among those whose bodies appeared to move toward a calmer state, we also observed changes in brain rhythms that were consistent with a different state of brain activity ... the kind of change we might expect as a person becomes less vigilant and begins to feel safer.

And when we talked with participants about their experiences, many described things such as calm, relaxation, warmth, safety, connection, emotional release and feeling cared for. Others described experiences that were more activating. Those individual differences mattered, and they are one reason we have been careful not to describe wîwîp’son as producing one universal physiological response.

The study itself concluded that wîwîp’son appeared to facilitate transitions toward calm and embodied safety for many people.

Did we measure healing?

This is where I am most careful with my words.

I cannot look at an EEG recording or the rhythm of someone's heart and say: This person has healed from trauma.

Healing is much bigger than anything I can measure with the instruments we used.

What I can say is that fear, anxiety, and prolonged stress are not experienced only in our thoughts. They are embodied. They are expressed through the interconnected activity of the brain, heat, breathing and the rest of the body (that we didn't measure).

Because those states leave measurable traces in the rhythms of the body, we can also observe when some of those rhythms begin to change. We found that the full wîwîp’son experience was associated with a measurable transition toward a calmer brain-body state.

That transition is not the same thing as healing ... but I think it can reasonably be understood as a step along a pathway on which healing may occur.

That distinction matters to me as a scientist. It also leaves room for something equally important: the physiological measurements are only one way of knowing what happened.

Darlene's knowledge of wîwîp’son did not begin with an EEG machine. People have described their experiences of the swing for more than two decades. Our participants also told us what they experienced physically, mentally, emotionally and spiritually. Our research deliberately brought those different forms of knowledge together rather than treating one as more real than another.

Ninanâskomon

In reflecting on the journey of this research, on word keeps coming back to me: ninanâskomon — I am grateful. I learned this nêhiyawêwin word along the way and it captures better than anything else how I feel about this project.

Most recently, I am grateful to Aretha Greatrix for finding a way to tell this story through film: visually, authentically, and in a way that reaches people very differently than a scientific paper ever could.

Sitting at the back of the theatre and watching hundreds of people laugh, embrace, listen and respond to the story of wîwîp’son was a reminder that this work was never only about the measurements we collected.

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