Healing: The most misleading word when healing

The past several months away have provided me with the time and space to reflect, grow and move toward a future that feels more aligned with my true and authentic self. I want to share honestly about what I’ve learnt along the way, opening up a little in the process. So here's blog post number one, a reflection on my thoughts about ‘healing’.

The word ‘healing’ is often used in relation to our physical bodies- it describes how we can miraculously fuse two bones back together after a nasty break, or how our skin cells work to renew and repair if we have had surgery or have an open wound. I've told children multiple times in the classroom, that their small paper cuts or grazed knees will be “healed in no time at all”. ‘Healing’ in this sense implies that something broken or not functioning becomes like new after a period of time, like the damaged part was never there in the first place. Which is why, when we use the term ‘healing’ for our emotional health, I felt really misled and confused. 

I was under the impression that ‘healing journeys’ were a process of eliminating the confronting illness, pain and suffering and being left with a shiny, new, levelled up version. Sadly, I’ve been victim, as I'm sure many of us have, to the enticing quick fixes and simple portrayals of this process in self help books, across social media and essentially woven into the tapestry of our society. They convey the idea that once we are ‘healed’, we won’t have to face our pain ever again and life will be simply glorious. ‘Live anxiety free’, ‘Leave it all behind’, ‘Cure your mental health’. I constantly received messages confirming that I indeed, needed to continue the quest of getting rid of everything that I was struggling to accept within myself.

On deep reflection and over the course of the past decade or so, I've come to realise that healing our emotional pain is quite the unpopular truth. Perhaps, it doesn’t mean living without it, it's the opposite. In fact, maybe it’s a homecoming. A homecoming of all parts of ourselves, being acknowledged, welcomed and eventually loved. No quick fixes. 

I'm now re-learning that we must become more comfortable in lingering in our discomfort in order to reclaim fragmented parts of ourselves which are integral to our wholeness as a human. It’s about making room to deeply feel emotions that we have learnt to reject and silence: our anger, rage, embarrassment, need for love, our desire to want more, our guilt, shame, or desperate fear- because it’s those feelings that hugely contribute to our sense of wholeness and aliveness. It's having an awareness of how our whole being casts light and shadow simultaneously and it all needs our acknowledgement and care. If we continually stub out the flame of what our social context deems ‘undesirable’ self expression, we essentially end up stubbing out who we are as people- we lose our aliveness and our love for life.

It can often even feel like going backwards when we are diving into the depths of our souls- really feeling is heavy, intense work and makes you question how on earth you could be healing when you feel so desperate and sad. But that is it. Feeling the sadness, sitting with the sadness, allowing it to move and flow through our bodies and be released. The word ‘emotion’ quite literally means ‘energy in motion’. If we are able to experience the truth of our experience e.g acknowledge that we feel sad, angry, jealous or whatever else it might be, and actually allow ourselves to feel that feeling instead of suppressing it or even just talking about it (there's a difference), we allow these emotions to rise and fall away as they are biologically intended.

But this is where it gets hard. And totally unique to everyone. Feeling can hurt and in itself be scary, as for some, our feelings may be the result of trauma we were or still are experiencing. Or for some, they were never taught how to manage emotions, to ride the wave of intensity, learning that it's temporary and regulation is just around the corner. As a result, we may have suppressed these hard to feel feelings or parts of ourselves. Perhaps at one point, it wasn’t safe to behave or feel the way we work tirelessly to conceal and our miraculous bodies came up with a way to help us cope. It’s embedded deep within our subconscious, and imprinted into our nervous systems. Our primal brains work to keep us safe, even if that security system is outdated and no longer needed. 

Additionally, lurking beneath this, are the systemic values, beliefs and ideologies that our culture, religion or society has fed us that may have caused this tearing apart of our wholeness and influence our ability to express ourselves. Our society can make us sick and then perhaps doesn’t allow the forum, space or freedom to heal. I can get quite overwhelmed and exhausted by the complexity of it all - yet still hold a perpetual, flickering flame of hope and an undying commitment to walk the path of coming back home to myself. 

I'm realising that the experience of ‘healing’ has golden threads woven into it's essence that might just merge together to create the richest and brightest of landscapes for living. The past eight months have been an adventure for my soul, set aside my physical body. They’ve taught me that inviting opportunities into life that allow us to grasp our wholeness, in return, fosters authenticity that is grounded in truth. Truth about who we are- in every aspect of our being. And it's the truth that allows us to feel peace in who we are, a place where we are no longer at war with ourselves. Healing requires an openness to feel all of it which I believe to be one of the most brave and heroic acts humans can do. So in the future, when I speak of ‘healing’ know that I don't mean eradicating- I mean quite the opposite. 

So, how does this sit with you? I'll leave you with these quotes from two of my favourite books which I highly recommend if you're curious about anything I've shared. I really appreciate you being here and would love to hear any thoughts or feelings you have in the comments below.

“As long as you keep secrets and suppress information, you are fundamentally at war with yourself…The critical issue is allowing yourself to know what you know. That takes an enormous amount of courage.”

The Body Keeps the Score by Bessel Van Der Kolk

“We can't avoid the painful things we experience through our bodies without sacrificing the good, the beautiful, the rich.”

The Wisdom of Our Bodies by Hillary McBride.