By Miniya Williams (’25SPS, Narrative Medicine), 2025–2026 Narrative Medicine Postgraduate Fellow
I founded Mind Body Soulstice in 2021, with the intention of creating space to support the health and well-being of BIPOC women. As a facilitator, full-spectrum doula, and narrative practitioner, my work centers on embodiment, storytelling, and health justice. I design workshops, retreats, and collaborative programs that support individuals, communities, and organizations in cultivating more relational and culturally responsive approaches to care.
In 2024, I arrived in New York City with my seven-month-old son to begin Columbia’s M.S. in Narrative Medicine (NMED) program, carrying a mixture of excitement and uncertainty. I was not only beginning a graduate program; I was stepping into a new chapter of motherhood, scholarship, and purpose. In those early days, as I walked across campus pushing my son in his stroller, I felt both nervous and hopeful, exhilarated by the city’s promise.
There were moments when my son sat beside me as I read, wrote, and reflected, reminding me that the questions we were asking about care, justice, and relationality were deeply personal and generational. Being a new mother while studying narrative medicine made the work feel urgent. I was not only learning for myself, but also imagining the world I hoped he would inherit.
This period also invited me to turn inward. Through narrative reflection, I examined my own pregnancy and birthing experience, asking difficult questions about safety, trust, and agency within healthcare systems. I found myself writing about the fear that shaped many of my decisions, including driving four hours in search of care where I felt my life would be taken seriously. These reflections became a site of learning, revealing how structural inequities are lived in the body while also illuminating how resilience, intuition, and community shape our choices.
My encounters with healthcare systems, both as a witness and as a patient, have shaped my deep commitment to health justice. My intellectual curiosity continually returns me to the possibilities of embodied and relational care. For me, the classroom became a site of experiential learning, where close reading, reflective writing, and dialogical engagement moved beyond intellectual theory into embodied knowledge. Outside the classroom, the work centered on generative application: How do we translate academic theory into transformative, justice-oriented practice?
The program allowed me to better understand not only the systems I hope to change, but also myself. It clarified the importance of embodied knowledge and affirmed that individuals are often experts in their own experiences of care.
I served as the 2024–2025 Narrative Medicine Social Justice Working Group facilitator alongside my co-facilitator, Malaika Jawed (’25SPS, NMED). Together, we drew from our different lived experiences and curiosities, strengthening our facilitation practice. As we explored our own identities in relation to power, care, and justice, we became more intentional about how we showed up in the space—learning to listen more deeply, hold complexity, and create conditions in which multiple ways of knowing could coexist.
The Social Justice Working Group created a dialogical space to explore these commitments collectively. Together, we wrestled with complexity, held space for difference, and practiced listening in ways that honored lived experience without flattening it. Facilitation taught me to cultivate trust and curiosity rather than provide answers. Drawing from my holistic wellness background, I incorporated grounding practices to emphasize shared humanity and interconnectedness. In the midst of global turmoil and injustice, our small group became a space of collective care, where individuals were invited to show up fully and explore how deeply connected we are.
Alongside this work, I expanded my understanding of narrative medicine by sharing my scholarship in global spaces. I had the honor of presenting at the Medical and Health Humanities: Global Perspectives Conference at Weill Cornell Medicine in Doha, Qatar, and at the Second International Narrative Medicine Conference: Building Consensuses and Advocating Practices in Beijing, China. Engaging with scholars, clinicians, and community leaders across diverse cultural contexts deepened my awareness of both the universality and specificity of health inequities. These experiences reinforced my commitment to approaches that are locally grounded while remaining globally informed.
Upon graduation, I was honored to receive the Narrative Medicine Postgraduate Fellowship for my proposal, Birthwrite: (Re)claiming Embodied Birth & Postpartum Healing through Integrative Narrative Medicine and Somatic Abolitionism Practices. This work continues to inform my fellowship project, Birthwrite, which centers narrative and somatic practice within birthwork as a full-spectrum doula. Birthwrite is a collaborative workshop series that supports reconnection with the body through narrative expression, movement, and shared storytelling. Designed to support birthing people throughout the perinatal process, the program creates space for participants to honor their embodied knowledge and navigate birth as a profound narrative and relational transition.
Through this work, I am committed to challenging unjust structures while also expanding narrative medicine frameworks that place individuals in the driver’s seat of their health and healing. Narrative medicine, at its core, is about shifting power, honoring embodied knowledge, and creating conditions in which people can author their own experiences of care.
Looking back, my time as a facilitator in the Social Justice Working Group was a practice ground for the kind of world I hope to help build—one rooted in collective care, cultural humility, and relational healing. I continue this work through facilitation, teaching, and community-based programs such as Birthwrite, creating spaces where individuals and institutions can reimagine care.
Narrative medicine has not only changed how I understand care; it has changed how I move through the world.
About the Program
Columbia University’s Master of Science in Narrative Medicine prepares health professionals, writers, and scholars to apply the skills and values of narrative understanding to improve outcomes for both patients and caregivers. It offers a rigorous and in-depth study of close reading of creative texts, illness and disability narratives, narrative ethics, philosophy, creative writing, and other perspectives. The master’s program is available for part-time or full-time enrollment. Learn more here.
