In the summer of 2025, we experimented with therapeutic impossibility alongside collaborators Zahra Nader and Kreshma Fakhri. Twenty-five to 30 Afghan women journalists, living scattered across continents, gathered digitally to practise something we called “healing.” Their cameras were off, their names hidden. The question haunting us: Can you tend a garden when the ground keeps disappearing? What does caring for mind, body, and spirit mean when the infrastructure for such care can be severed at any moment?
Women logged on from Kabul and beyond. Most were in Afghanistan, where owning a smartphone with our session link could mean imprisonment. The Taliban had recently just shut down internet access across 12 provinces, officially to “prevent immorality” but really to stop women from having a meaningful existence beyond their homes. “These online classes were my only source of hope,” 17-year-old Marjaneh told reporters after her connection went dark. Another described it viscerally: “When the internet went, it felt like the roof had fallen on us.”
The roof is falling. What does holding therapeutic space mean when the architecture keeps collapsing? How do we care for the whole person when conditions for wholeness are systematically destroyed?
The body remembers what the infrastructure of oppression forgets
Traditional psychotherapy assumes certain conditions: a room, visual contact, and the subtle dance of attunement. Our workshops had none of this. Cameras were kept off by design, as visibility could be deadly. Afghan women journalists face surveillance from the Taliban, from disapproving family members, and from multiple control systems that make a simple connection an act of courage. We worked with what we had: chat boxes, voices when bandwidth allowed, and most significantly, our bodies . Capacitar practises simple, ancient healing techniques designed for emergency response work directly through the body, proving more effective than approaches relying solely on language. Body-based practices integrate care across mind, body, and spirit in ways Western models often fragment. We began each session with breathwork: hands on belly, breathe deeply through nose, exhale slowly through mouth. After our first breathing session, someone typed, “I didn’t realise I’d been holding my breath for months.” Another wrote, “This is the first time I’ve felt my body since we left Kabul.” For some others, the breathing felt too much. Nobody was forced to participate and were asked to listen to what felt right for them – agency as an empowerment in circumstances that allow little of that. These women discovered their bodies had been in suspended animation, their breath literally held against danger. The breath helped them not only understand their trauma but also to physically release it. They spiritually reconnected with suppressed life forces.
Both of us taught fingerholds, by which holding each finger connects with a specific emotional state. The thumb relates to grief, the index finger to fear, the middle finger to anger, the ring finger to worry, and the little finger to self-esteem. One journalist shared, “I hold my thumb when interviewing women about their losses. It helps me stay present without falling apart.” Another stated, “I taught this to my sister. She holds her index finger when she has to go outside wearing a burqa.” The practice works by calming racing thoughts, releasing held tension, and restoring the spirit’s capacity for presence. Integrated Tai Chi movements and grounding exercises involve imagining feet as roots running into the earth, while breathing in earth energy while exhaling stress. This visualization offered grounding when literal ground remained precarious, working simultaneously on all levels: mentally providing focus, physically releasing tension, and spiritually reconnecting women to something larger than immediate circumstances.
‘Me too’ and the house of witness
Judith Herman wrote that “recovery can take place only within the context of relationships; it cannot occur in isolation” (1992, p. 133). She couldn’t have predicted that those relationships would happen in Zoom chat boxes. Yet it worked. The chat facility on the Zoom platform became our primary therapeutic space. Someone would type “Me too” and the air changed. Another wrote, “This is the first time I feel my pain is not just personal weakness.” A third stated, “The breathing exercise helped me manage panic during a deadline.”
That last comment deserves unpacking. Managing panic during a deadline sounds mundane until you remember that filing stories under Taliban rule can get you imprisoned and tortured. The panic is the body accurately assessing mortal danger. Teaching breathwork here isn’t treating mental illness; it’s giving someone a tool to hold themselves togethern long enough to tell the truth.
Women recognised their suffering as shared, politically produced, and structurally inevitable under the gender apartheid of Afghanistan, rather than an individual failure. Can we wonder if relational healing truly happens without seeing each other? The evidence suggested yes. The chat created a “distributed intimacy” connection without visual confirmation and a trust built through the accumulation of small typed acknowledgements.
Cultural inheritance as medicine
Zahra and Kreshma’s expertise proved indispensable. Instead of importing Western frameworks wholesale, we brought fragments from Persian and Sufi traditions — lessons of care older than the current catastrophe. This restored a connection with traditions where women’s voices held legitimate space, resisting what Jacqueline Rose calls totalitarian fantasy (1996). “This sounds like my grandmother,” one participant typed after a Sufi breathing practice. Another stated, “I forgot we had words for this.” while a third explained, “My body remembers these movements even though my mind has forgotten. It’s like coming home.” Integration of mind, body, and spirit happened through cultural memory as the mind recognized familiar patterns, the body remembered inherited movements, the spirit reconnected with ancestral wisdom.
With delicacy, Zahra and Kreshma guided us toward using which poets would resonate, which translations honoured original Farsi, and which metaphors would land. When we introduced Tai Chi, they framed the movements using Sufi poetry metaphors about divine light cleansing the soul.
Four sessions and the question of wholeness
The workshops worked. Twenty-five to 30 women attended each session despite electricity cuts and the risk of surveillance. It was a successful intervention by every therapeutic metric. Yet we all knew it wasn’t enough. Research suggests six to 12 months were needed for nervous system healing from trauma. We got funding for four two-hour workshops. When sessions ended, Zahra and Kreshma’s work continued. They maintained relationships, followed up, created spaces, absorbing costs that our grant-funded limitation didn’t cover. When Afghan women must access healing through entrepreneurial funding rather than guaranteed infrastructure, our intervention’s success coexists with systemic abandonment.
Perhaps this answers our question about wholeness: care for mind, body, and spirit cannot depend on professional facilitators or funding cycles but must be embedded in practices that belong to people themselves and which integrate all dimensions of being without requiring elaborate infrastructure or institutional approval.
What the darkness teaches
Sometimes the most therapeutic thing we can offer is permission to remain unseen. Witnessing doesn’t require visual access. Holding can happen through the act of simply showing up. Fingerholds needing no visibility. Breathing requires no device. Grounding exercises connecting to the earth without visual instruction.
Zahra and Kreshma continue their work, maintaining the garden through daily labour extending far beyond grant cycles. Women continue practising, held together by memories of shared childhoods, concealing hope in hiding, in displacement. The fingerholds spread through whispered teaching in the community.
The women remind us this is the garden under siege. It is not a lush growth but stubborn mint planted in windowsill cups, refusing complete erasure. In that tending of the garden we’ve learned what caring for mind, body, and spirit means: not separate domains requiring separate interventions, but integrated dimensions of being honoured even, nay, especially, in darkness.
About the authors
Dr. Salma Siddique is co-founder and clinical director of Third Space Practice, a psychotherapist in the United Kingdom, academic (UHI: Moray) in integrative healthcare, anthropologist, and clinical supervisor (UKCP).
Bea Mariam Killguss is co-founder and strategic director of Third Space Practice, a psychosocial educator, and writer. She lived and worked in Afghanistan, spending 18 years across the region.
