By Anastasia Hernandez, Co-founder of Inner Immersion & End-of-Life Doula
As an End-of-Life Doula and the co-founder of Inner Immersion, I often meet people at their most vulnerable thresholds , moments when life feels uncertain, fragile, or beyond repair. My work as a doula isn’t to fix or rescue, but to hold space, walking beside and witnessing, and holding a field of calm where truth and peace can coexist.
This year’s World Mental Health Day theme , “Access to Services: Mental Health in Catastrophes and Emergencies”, feels deeply relevant to that practice of walking alongside. Access to care is also at the heart of our mission. Jose and I believe that access to care is not a privilege , it’s our birthright as social beings. Our work has always centered on those too often overlooked by traditional systems: people in recovery, individuals navigating trauma, and communities that deserve the best care but often receive the least. Through Inner Immersion’s group-based healing model, we’re working to close that gap, making deep, transformative care more accessible to those who need it most.
We are all living through overlapping crises: ecological, social, and spiritual. Across the world, wars and humanitarian emergencies are unfolding alongside natural disasters, displacement, and quiet personal battles with loss and despair. Systems meant to support us often falter, and the weight of care shifts back to families, communities, and those of us who accompany others through pain.
In the face of so much suffering, it’s natural to feel ill-equipped , to wonder what words could possibly help, or how to hold another’s anguish when our own hearts are breaking. Those of us who work in helping professions are not immune to this helplessness. We, too, can feel overwhelmed, uncertain, and tender from carrying so much. Yet it’s in these very moments that the practice of presence becomes vital , not as a solution, but as a way of staying human, steady, and openhearted when nothing else makes sense.
Because, even when we cannot change the circumstances, we can still hold space with presence.
Presence does not fix what’s broken , but it can hold what’s breaking. It is the quiet act of regulation that allows another nervous system to settle, a reminder that safety can still be found in connection. As human beings, we are wired to co-regulate , to steady one another through tone, breath, and compassionate attention. When we are anchored in our own calm, others feel it. In that shared field, healing becomes possible. Presence, then, is an active transmission of peace.
The Anchor Within
As a student of Dr. Gabor Maté’s Compassionate Inquiry, one of his teachings that resonates with the work we do through Inner Immersion is that our ability as helping professionals to hold space for others is only as deep as our capacity to hold space for ourselves. If we cannot sit with our own fear, sorrow, or uncertainty, we cannot truly be present with another’s.
So how do we stay anchored when the world is in crisis?
For me, that grounding comes from a profound faith in the continuation of consciousness. Over the past seventeen years walking alongside my husband, Jose, and witnessing the sharing of hundreds of near-death experiencers, I have heard again and again that death is not an end, it is a threshold to a space of wholeness and love. That understanding gives me peace. It doesn’t minimize pain or bypass the hard human emotions we all face, but it keeps me from despair. It reminds me that even when everything appears to be falling apart, all will be well. In time. In this world or beyond it.
We don’t all share the same ideas about what lies beyond, but we each have a choice in how we live our lives here and respond, moment to moment. When we choose presence over panic, love over fear, compassion over control, we become steady enough to weather what comes.
Mental Health in a Changing World
The crises we face are both personal and planetary. The Stockholm Resilience Centre recently reported that seven of nine planetary boundaries have been breached , a mirror of the imbalance many feel within their own nervous systems. As J. Krishnamurti asked in Commentaries on Living, “why should the individual adjust himself to an unhealthy society? If he is healthy, he will not be a part of it.” Or as it is often paraphrased: “It is no measure of health to be well adjusted to a profoundly sick society.”
His challenge still echoes: true health is not mere adaptation to disorder, but a clear, compassionate attunement that refuses to normalize harm. It is remembering our deeper wholeness , tending the parts of ourselves that still know how to be at peace.
This World Mental Health Day, may we remember that healing begins with presence, the steady and compassionate kind that restores safety and helps us entrain one another into balance. While we face a real crisis in access to professional care, we can still hold one another with kindness, listen without judgment, and anchor ourselves in love. Small acts of steadiness restore balance, and each moment of presence widens the circle of care.
May we find the courage to breathe deeply, to bear witness, and to trust that, even through catastrophe, life continues to unfold toward restoration. I pray for all of us, helpers, healers, and our entire human family, that we may keep tending what is ours to tend, anchoring in compassion for the long work ahead, and trusting that peace will find its way through us.
Suggested hashtags
#WorldMentalHealthDay #AccessToCare #TraumaHealing #EndOfLifeDoula #CompassionateInquiry #CoRegulation #CommunityCare #AddictionRecovery #MentalHealthAwareness #GroupBasedHealing #InnerImmersion
SEO keywords and phrases (for post text, title, and alt text)
World Mental Health Day; access to mental health services; catastrophes and emergencies; end-of-life doula; presence as medicine; co-regulation; trauma healing; addiction recovery; group-based healing; compassionate inquiry; nervous system regulation; community care; Inner Immersion
