What an important, personal, layered question. If we are striving to feel better, more ourselves, it's a question that is worth asking. It helps to bring clarity and truth to the murkiness of leaving things behind, and an impetus to move forward day by day. I’ve always felt this process starts-and it's quite possibly the biggest step, one that is often repeated—with admitting, bringing consciousness to a desire to have things be different in some way. We go along being who we are, living as we do, experiencing what shows up, and at some point, it dawns on us, that something, or many things are out of alignment—“problems”. Some people seem to accept ‘that's just how things are…’,’ it's just how I am…’, and carry on, living in the usual way at various levels of resolve, ranging from dutiful, to apathetic, self-destructive, or socially destructive.
I am going to posit here that one cannot experience true happiness—which is generated from within-without taking the helm of selfhood consciously, learning/choosing to direct the course of one's life and reaction to life within intention. To become awake to the aspects of who we are and all that has contributed to how we live. I may be able to distill the concept into a couple of sentences here, but it is a process that unfolds as it needs to. Some things are hard to get to. The things buried very deep in the psyche from times that seem to live out of reach from our memory—yet still inform how we live and see ourselves.
It's been called ‘the hero’s journey’. It's been described and experienced by many; and Odyssey, a pilgrimage, a descent into and then out of the shadows of the psyche. A singular experience. An idea we can all relate to, but an experience as unique as the individual. We heal from what has happened to us that left us feeling less than the divine, perfect beings that we are. Love incarnate. Simple.🙂 Actually, I don't say that with any sarcasm at all. It's lofty and idealistic, but I believe it is true, and believe it is what life is about at its core. Everything revolves around this idea. Everything we choose, is in relationship to this central concept.
This is all well and good for the theater and an 800 page novel, but what does it have to do with daily life? As life unfolds minute by minute, we have the opportunity to interact with our thoughts, feelings, sensations of the body as messages. Momentary truths. What is true in each mundane moment? Once we've embarked on the journey to reclaim the quality of our life experience, we start working with each truth, rather than ignore, distract, reframe or deny.
There are factors that accelerate the desire to heal. Age. Traumatic events. Pain in the body. The natural evolution of maturity, in which new ideas and possibilities become known. To heal doesn't necessarily require a rejection of the past. But it does require an ability to consider the effect the past has on your current state. So much happens to us before we understand the impact of our experiences. At the risk of sounding trite or obvious, we have all have an inner child that needs attention. There are parts within that simply did not get the attention, support or nurture that needed. That need lives on.
We are healing from the fallout of how we made sense of, and adapted to the holes in our experience at the least, or the abject trauma that ensued by direct or indirect experiences in the extreme. Being a parent isn’t easy. Being a human isn't easy and everyone is a victim of a chain reaction called family. It's built into the system. We each drop into a set of circumstances and challenges, and yes, mercifully we are installed with a compass to navigate the path no matter how buried it is. Ideations and publicity around perfection, superiority, glamour, and material success have done us no favors as a whole in the pursuit of healing, and feeling good and enough. We each respond to and are motivated by all the inner and outer influences to find ourselves here, wherever it is, meeting each moment on auto-pilot, or with consciousness about each little truth in the moment.
There are a lot of moving parts. Pendulums swinging all over the place. Overwhelm and disappointment lurking around the corner. But if we can agree that there is no purpose in the intelligence of life organizing around misery and failure, then perhaps it motivates us to view our very own life, and struggles through the lens of potential, rather than hardship. What if healing is a demand made by Mother Nature—a directive built in all the time. After all, if we are not growing, expanding, and contributing to the ecosystem of humanity, then what? Are we a fungus? A blight? And it's not about contributing in a way that everyone can see and agree that you are a good contributor. No, it's inside you. One can live in complete solitude and contribute gold by being loving toward himself and life around him. The beauty of it is no one can make you do anything, really. There are no rules, and very few absolutes about anything, but we all know what it is to feel. We know when something isn't right, and certainly when it is. If we can suspend judgments about what is good or bad, then we can begin to observe the inner landscape as a place that is meant to feel good, and then we inquire and wonder about the parts that don't and take steps to understand and heal them. Recover from. Make healthy again.
We heal from unkindness, limitations, and neglect that we interpreted as being not worthy of care. We heal from abandonment, dissociation from anger—witnessed or directed at us. We heal arbitrary pressures designed to keep us from feeling like the failure we can never be. We heal stomachaches, and rashes and lumps in our throat. We heal loneliness, shame, self judgment, lethargy, and indecision. The path to healing is anyone's guess. Remedies are found as you walk. Again, trusting that the part of us beyond life's pettiness that wants to operate at a higher level. We give ourselves a gift of space and time and do what is asked for in the healing.
