Bernie Lim: Healing to the People

Healing Conversations from the Front Lines of Activism

Greetings Friends. With this month’s Healing Conversation, I am delighted to introduce Dr. Bernie Lim. As we navigate these traumatic and tender times, Bernie is one of the people who gives me hope.

Dr. Bernadette Lim, better known as Bernie, describes herself as a creator, a healer, and a warrior. The daughter of Filipinx and Toisan immigrants, she recently graduated from the UCSF School of Medicine and UC Berkeley School of Public Health. She is the first in her family to become a physician and has received a long list of honors and awards for her work.

Bernie serves on the faculty at San Francisco State University’s Institute for Holistic Health Studies. She is the creator of the Woke WOC (Women of Color) Docs Podcast, and was part of the founding team of the Institute for Healing and Justice in Medicine. Bernie is also a Reiki master, yoga teacher, meditation instructor, a professional classical pianist, a salsa dancer, haumana of hula, and a budding herbalist.

In 2019, at the age of 24, Bernie founded Freedom Community Clinic (FCC) centering whole-person healing for Black, Indigenous, Brown, and immigrant communities. (The project was launched under the Youth Impact Hub program nurtured by Gino Pastori-Ng, who was profiled in a previous blog post.)  FCC started by offering pop-up healing justice clinics at community events, under freeway overpasses, and in public parks. Now in its fifth year, Freedom has opened two Community Healing Sanctuaries (one of which is a pharmacy/apothecary), a farm growing traditional foods and herbal medicines, and has established 50+ community partnerships with schools, businesses, and organizations. They provide direct healing services and offer numerous classes and workshops—all free of charge or for a sliding scale donation.

Their website explains, “Whole-Person Healing to the People is the basis of our work at Freedom Community Clinic. We honor the interconnection of mind, body, and spirit united with culture, community, and social justice. We are establishing a new paradigm that honors and uplifts the wisdom of Ancestral Medicine with the strengths of Western medicines and technologies… imagining beyond the limitations of the dominant disease-focused and profit-centered Western medical system.”

I first learned about Freedom Community Clinic in late 2021, when my organization OneLife Institute was in the process of winding down operations. For 17 years we provided spiritual care and collective healing spaces for folks on the front lines of social change and community service. Discovering this vibrant youth-led collective let us know that as we “sunsetted,” the work—and the community—were in good hands. Bernie and I have developed a beautiful friendship over the years since then.

I began our interview as I often do, asking Bernie what comes to mind when she hears the title for this blog, Healing Conversations from the Front Lines of Activism. “For me,” she says, “it brings up a lot of feelings of gratitude, of standing on the shoulders of giants that have allowed us to really come to this place of activism. I think about you, Liza. I think about so many of our ancestors, and our living elders who have allowed our generation to realize and embody the intersections of healing and activism. To recognize that when we fight for social justice, healing must be a center point, because our struggles are not only interconnected on this physical scale, but there’s an inner transformation that we need to have in the movement. The collective struggle for liberation is a reflection of our inner need to confront our own oppressions and our own injustices that we hold in our body and in our spirit.”

She continues, “Without justice, we have no true collective healing. And without healing, there is no true justice. We're part of this big fabric. It's all an interconnected system, and the healing of myself, and the healing of my family and my community, has a huge role in sending waves into the collective. Our movement towards justice has no more time for incongruence. And I think what the younger generations are really saying is that we're tired. We see that there is a lack of alignment, and we need you-all to really talk the talk and walk the walk. And that's what healing and justice is: the talking and the walking.”

It's easy to see how this perspective is embodied in the work of Freedom Community Clinic. “We really originated by bringing healing clinics to the streets,” Bernie tells me, “and we still continue to do that in partnership with organizations in the Bay Area. We're out on the streets three to four times a week. Two or three times per week we're at middle schools, high schools, and universities throughout Alameda County and Oakland. And then our two brick-and-mortar locations are open every day, offering free healing services or free consultations, free seasonal tea blends and tinctures for the community. We also have our Freedom School for Healing and Justice, which is a summer apprenticeship program for Black and Brown young people to learn healing practices. So it's really about providing a way for people to tap in in whatever ways they feel safe and comfortable. I think what's so special about our work is that we are reclaiming a lot of our ancestral medicines and healing practices that have been commodified.

“Seventy-five percent of the folks who come to us have never tried a holistic healing modality due to financial barriers, racism, or lack of trust. And we take that very seriously. We see ourselves as a safe space for people to explore what it means to engage practices that connect body, mind, and spirit.”

One of the things I know from our work at OneLife all those years, is how much organizing and outreach it takes for people to actually show up at your programs. You can have fabulous free offerings, but for people to come requires building relationships over time, and being a consistent trustworthy presence in the community. Bernie and Freedom Community Clinic have been amazingly successful in their high levels of participation across generations and cultures. I ask what she sees as the key to that success.

“There's so much hunger for people to be connected to their bodies and have ownership over their healing,” she says. “And I think, honestly, thanks to that foundational work that OneLife, the Healing Clinic Collective, and so many folks in the Bay Area have done, it's really brought us to this point where we just see the enthusiasm. I think for me, as one of the primary holders of Freedom Community Clinic, I don't see this as my baby. I see this as helping other folks in honing their own visionary and leadership skills to co-vision it with me, and have the vision of the community be a critical input in how we move forward.

“Yes, I was the initial seed bearer, but to have that vision beyond me, I think, is really what has brought so much momentum, and continues to bring us momentum, because we do it with integrity and just complete joy in service to community. Half of our team is under 30. Half of our team has never done this before, but they have a very authentic and pure passion for community healing.”

That is a total organizer move: empowering the leadership of others who, for the most part, have not led before. That's movement building. It gives people a space to believe in themselves, to stand in their own authority, to see the fruits of their vision being manifest. And then they have that skill set and that self-confidence and the relationships with one another to keep doing visionary, leader-full, collaborative, community-building work—even beyond the walls of Freedom Community Clinic.

Bernie agrees, “We're making sure that we ourselves are whole, that we're healing, and that we get to be present and connect to who we are outside of the struggle. I think that's what has allowed our clinic to thrive—because healing is really heavy. Social justice stuff is really heavy, and it is like an ongoing barrage. Especially now. It is just so... It's a lot. There's a lot of evil and injustice that is happening in the world. And I think for us, we have cultivated the practices, the rituals, and the rhythms to be able to sustain that supportive network for each other, knowing that we have to nourish ourselves in this movement.”

Bernie is a beautiful example of embodying balance in the midst of the work. She accomplishes so much, and yet she is committed to the practices that nourish her: time in Nature (especially the tropical beaches that are central to her ancestry), breathwork and yoga, playing piano, dancing hula and salsa. I’m curious how that commitment shows up in the organizational culture of FCC, and if there are institutional best practices they have developed to sustain them in the midst of so much collective trauma, as well as the personal traumas that many of us are navigating. Her answer is revelatory—

“We organize according to the rhythms of Nature. I think that's it in a nutshell… and of course, there are nuances to that. But what we see in Nature—its rhythms, and its seasons, and also its phases—we mirror that on both the individual and collective level. There’s a very specific reason why the grand opening of our pharmacy/apothecary was the weekend of the spring equinox. We are very intentional about when we launch something. Or as we're building something, it’s usually during the time when nature does that.

“And when Nature rests, and does a lot of deep root work that is not highly visible—during the winters, I would say late November to February—when winter is resting and doing deep inner work, that's what we're also doing as a team. We're doing deep strategy work. We're not launching, even though it's the Gregorian New Year. Nature is hibernating, so we ourselves are hibernating. We’re processing and integrating. On the tangible level that means we’re doing a lot of big picture work, and review of what has happened in the past year. Really feeling into what worked, what didn't, and how is that going to frame our launches for spring and summer? Because spring and summer, wow, we’ve got a lot launching. But we don't feel so burnt out already at this point, because we have done deep foundational work. And I would also say systems work.

“As an organizer, you're creating something out of nothing. We are creating systems that don't exist for us. It's a constant birthing process, very different from the 9:00 to 5:00. We do a lot of that during winter and early spring, so that by later spring and summer, when we're having all these big launches and people ask, How are you constantly doing this? It's because we have those foundations. We have deep root work—not only strategic, but relational work within the team—to hold all of it. That's the work that people don't see. So, that's spring and summer. And then we continue through the fall, having the harvest. It’s a collective rhythm.”

“Internally, with our team of seven, I'm tapped into not only my rhythm, but everyone's rhythm. There's always this inhale and exhale—some of us are inhaling, some of us are exhaling. It's a dance. So that's why it feels like, wow, Freedom is constantly active, but we're not all active all at once. We take turns. While some of us are out, are more forward, some of us are a bit more back. Being spirit-rooted and being aligned with Nature, abundance always follows us. When we are true to that inner knowing, we receive an ease and a joy and abundance that is unmatched. And we receive that over and over again!

“The capitalist model of everyone needs to constantly be on, or be a martyr for the cause… That's just not it. Especially for us as women and gender non-binary organizers of color, we feel that, so we're really in tune. And I think that's what helps us. Also, we're all best friends. We're all just beautiful friends outside of the organizing. I think that's what allows us to find so much energy and have it be sustainable because, again, it's not dependent on my energy. It's a collective thing. We take turns; we inhale and exhale.”

I’m curious whether team members make a point of receiving some of the healing services that the clinic offers, or if they seek their restoration elsewhere. Bernie tells me that they have created a fund for folks on the leadership team to explore whatever practices they choose. “We're so different,” she says. “It has ranged from someone taking a trip to their ancestral lands for the first time, to someone participating in a new movement/embodiment practice, or one person does horseback riding.” Bernie is using the fund to create an album of her original piano meditations. She works with each person to help them identify the deeper calling for their own healing. She is adamant, “I don't want you to work on the clinic all week. I need you to engage in hobbies and connect with other parts of yourself that maybe you haven't done. And I know that always brings in beautiful new ideas and new energy to their role, more energy into the movement.”

As I visualize Bernie sitting down with each member of the team to help them tap into what the restorative, creative, generative practices for them would be, I imagine her having this conversation with each person reading this blog. I ask what questions she might offer to readers to guide them in their own reflection.

“I always start off with, what has your day today felt like? How are you feeling as you move through the different activities, responsibilities, and groups of folks? What about that has felt really energizing? And what about that has felt not so good? Where are you feeling like: this sucks? And then, how can we create more time and more opportunities for you to engage in those spaces where you are feeling alive, and how can we mitigate those places, those people, those things where you're not feeling so energetic. How can we restructure so there’s less of that, more of the aliveness.

“And then from there, I would ask, are there any specific things that you haven't explored in a while or that really excite you, but you're afraid to try? Maybe because you're a beginner, maybe because you haven't done it in a long time, but deep in your heart you want to. Like one team member is learning Arabic for the first time. Another is doing a solo trip, and is scared out of her mind, but really wants to do it.” Bernie confesses, "That's actually why I decided to do the piano meditation album and the hula dancing, because I felt a fear.”

Every year she challenges herself to step outside her comfort zone and remember what it feels like to be a beginner, to feel that fear and resistance. She explains, “Because not only is that what a lot of people feel, but I think that's also the key to our freedom, and a key to our most authentic self. Because why, right? What are the layers? Wherever those feelings of guilt, shame, anxiety, and energy drain are, we need to shine a light on it. Hold it with tenderness and see what it's trying to tell us.”

She concludes, “We talk about the body, mind, and spirit approach. And I always ask folks, how are you tending to those different areas? How is that alignment of body, mind, and spirit? Because that's the healing process; it's not just one modality. It has to be a mix. Everyone has their own mix. And it's just a matter of what is your unique recipe and how do you allow yourself to evolve with that and also honor what you need right now in this moment.”

As we come to the end of our time together, I ask Bernie what inspires her to do the work that she does. She thinks for a moment, then responds, “I feel like what is really giving me energy right now is doing what makes me feel alive in the different facets of my identity, and my personality, and my interests. And aliveness doesn't necessarily mean happy. It does not necessarily mean everything's all rainbows and butterflies. But really, alive means sensitive and tender to the human experience, and with an energy to be awake and conscious.

“My goal is to have everyone give themselves the permission to do that for themselves. Really creating a world where people are seen, loved, and cared for, and above all, remember who they are. Every time I witness that at the clinic, I feel a happiness that I can't even explain, because I see so many—especially young generations, especially as we connect them with elders and ancestral practices... There's like a light. There’s an awakening. They're like: Wow, this is who I am. This is my people. This is where I come from. These are the plants. This is the land. I'm reclaiming that for my people. I'm reclaiming that for my parents. I’m reclaiming that for my future children… It's just so beautiful because then they get excited and they realize that they themselves are the visionaries, and they are key to this movement. And I'm like, yeah, you are. You are that person that was chosen. And I think people need to feel that you are chosen… you just have to awaken to that."

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To learn more about Dr. Bernie’s work visit:

Bernie’s website: https://www.drbernielim.com

Freedom Community Clinic: https://www.freedomcommunityclinic.org

Freedom IG: https://www.instagram.com/freedomcommunityclinic

Institute for Healing and Justice: https://www.instituteforhealingandjustice.org

“Whole Person Healing” - interview on “Be Well, Sis (2024):