How do I heal?
The first answer that comes to mind is: it depends!
It depends on a whole myriad of things: your skillset, your development, your history and, most importantly, it depends on your motivation – what you focus on for your healing, is influenced by what type of outcome you are trying to create! Most people reduce this down to symptom relief – they just want to feel better, they don’t want to be in pain, they don’t want to be suffering. That is something important and very helpful – to have the least amount of suffering so we can move through with ease, but if we don’t go to the deeper understanding of what is actually creating the suffering, even if we get symptom relief, chances are we are going to encounter either a new flavour or a new experience of suffering, or the old ones are just simply going to return.
No other person – a therapist, a guru, a spiritual guide, a counsellor – they do not have that answer for you. Of course, there are many people who are intelligent, who have some sort of information or tools, people that can offer you some guidance and clarity around where to place your focus, but the ultimate conclusion, the answer to the question: “how do I heal”- that is going to come from within you. A path of self-healing is going to reaffirm and strengthen your sense of self so that you, in fact, are the guide, your own inner therapist coming from an intuitive wisdom place…
Here is a map that I use:
First of all, you need to commit to a healing lifestyle – think of a garden: if you plant seeds in a garden and then you ignore the garden for three months and at the end of the season, when it’s time for harvest, you expect to find nourishment – you will see that your garden did not produce any real fruits and vegetables that you would be looking for. That’s true of healing too – you need to adopt a healing lifestyle. This is not part-time, this is not when it’s convenient, this is not only when you’re in pain and suffering – this is a way of life. If you do not initially have that kind of a very honest conversation with yourself, questioning if you’re willing to enter a life-long healing process, if you’re not committed, then it’s not going to work for you, it’s not going to produce any real clarity, it potentially is just going to create more confusion.
Secondly, you need to cultivate your intuitive healer self. That is, you need to cultivate that part of yourself that can access wisdom and discern: do I turn left, or do I turn right? Not everyone has access to their intuitive healer part, but there are things you can do to court that, there are tools and exercises that you can do, so that you can drop into experiencing what is this wisdom part of yourself, what is this intuitive healer self, what is this inner guide we could call it… If you do not have this, or if you feel it might not always be available to you, you might need to sit in meditation to have some clarity come about, you might need to take up a contemplative practice to slow down, to distance yourself from clutter and distractions and constant entertainment. If you do not have this, then you’re not going to be able to move forward with what you need to do for your healing.
The third thing to focus on – collapsing the past and the future into the present.
This tool of using the past, the present and the future, is going to help you eliminate habituated thoughts and old narratives and also begin to construct in a very creative way who you want to be and who you’re becoming. When we are connecting to the idea of the past, we’re doing it through the present moment and when we are connecting to our idea of the future, we’re also doing it through the present moment.
Everything is present – how could it not be present? If I’m talking about the past, I’m still in the present referencing the past, I’m not actually literally in the past – I still have blood flowing through my veins, I still have a nervous system working, my fingers are still typing – I can think about some memory in the past, but I’m not in the past, I’m in the present. Same thing with the future – I can imagine who I am becoming, I can think about how I am maturing and growing and I can set goals for who I want to be or what I want my life to look like, but I’m not thinking about a real future, I’m just experiencing in the present moment my imaginary idea of what my future is going to be like. This is a key point because it can be really helpful to know that it is in the present that we’re changing habitual patterns and we’re changing old narratives and ultimately heal.
The past: when you slow down through some type of contemplative, meditative practice, when you think about the past and memories come in, stories come in – you can begin to reflect on your family, or on a previous experience, you can reflect on how you have changed over the years, etc – when you are doing that, you’re going to be able to identify habitual thinking and repetitive narratives of how you believe yourself to be in this world. You are basically identifying what are your habitual responses, the reoccurring ways that you are orienting or showing up to current situations of suffering, or how you’re showing up in relationships, or how you’re treating yourself… and you might begin to see – well, isn’t this interesting? There is a pattern here and, linked to that pattern is a narrative that is informing how you’re experiencing the present moment. This might be your very first true seeing: your present is coloured and influenced by what the old, habitual narratives are dictating! Notice that these habitual patterns, together with their corresponding narratives, are telling you who you are today and that they might not be true at all or not relevant today or not even yours… When you do this, you will be having a felt sense, a current bodily experience as you are confronting the habitual thoughts and the habitual mind-patterns.
While we are referencing these themes of the past, we’re simultaneously noticing what we are feeling in the present. This is a very important skill, this is how we are rewiring our brain, this is how we can have a new, corrective experience – in the present moment. When we are able to reflect on the past and integrate it into the present, we also integrate it into a discerning choice of how we want it to unfold today and in the future.
When we access a memory, when we notice some habitual thinking or an old narrative that is influencing who we are today, we’re actually consciously trying to find a way that activates the energy so that that narrative is alive in the present moment. If this is not done, then we are just telling a story about our life, we are just recounting an old stale memory. The purpose of doing healing work that incorporates the past is that that past has to be alive, it has to be active, there needs to be some electricity and charge around what we’re exploring, where we have a present moment curiosity to want to integrate it, to want to know more about: how does that piece of information from the past influence who I am today? How does that piece of information about what had happened to me influence Who I Am today?
Example here.
The future – when we think of the future, we are imagining who we’re becoming and that opens us up to some groundlessness. If you really think about who you are and if you think about who you’re becoming, you might have a kind of exhale moment, a kind of dropping into this feeling of “I Don’t Really Completely Know Who I Am” and I do not know who I’m becoming… and for some of us, when we tap into that, it’s frightening, there’s a kind of primal fear to realize we don’t really know who we are and, even more unnerving, that who we are is not a fixed self, but we are constantly becoming… that’s how life brings great morsels of excitement and moments of bright surprise, some of which scare the pants off of us and some of which help us feel alive.
I want to acknowledge that, if you have an aversion to entering the unknown, if you have an aversion to feeling the feelings that come with uncovering these little surprises as you start to explore your process, as you explore life, as you explore your wounds, as you explore the parts of you that are hurting – if you fundamentally are guarded and have an aversion towards feeling whatever it is that you feel in the present moment, then this tool, this beginning to integrate new aspects of how you’re orienting yourself in the world, is not going to help you at all. If you have an aversion to dropping into the places that scare you, then this work is not for you – it requires a skill to tolerate some of the intensity of what some like to call sitting in the fire. Healing work is profoundly courageous and the people who embark on healing work are actually the strongest people that I know. This is a paradoxical strength, a strength that comes from softening. It requires an incredible amount of courage to enter our weakness, to enter our tenderness, to enter the place where we are very soft and where we need to form a relationship with our wound. If you do not know how to do this, if you do not fundamentally are on board and willing to do this, then self-healing is not going to serve you.
If you realize that you don’t have this, but you would like to continue on a path of creating self-healing, then that answers your question how do I heal: you need to increase your skill to sit in the fire of the intensity of your emotions. That’s the next piece of the puzzle for you: to strengthen your ability to feel the intensity of your weakness, to work with the pain of uncovering your wound as you go into your healing process, where you’re able to find some centred place and move through the process so you can come out the other side.
Have you been inspired by this post?