The invitation to heal

Lately many people have asked me how they heal, as if there is some secret recipe for a tonic you can take and be cured. It’s almost impossible to answer, because what healing is, is different for everyone. And everyones healing journey is different, although our invitation to the path is always the same.

This invitation is a gift, but our unwillingness to receive it is one of the biggest ways we avoid or sabotage our own healing. Because the invitation hurts.

Why? The invitation is pain.

Pain is alchemy. It incites you to do something different in your life, whether it’s end a relationship, resolve a past trauma, or remove your hand from a burning hotplate.

Pain isn’t always an emotion. Sometimes it’s that tightness in your chest, or that deep fatigue from sleep deprivation, or your joints aching. Sometimes it’s discomfort from living in a way that’s incongruent with your values.

Pain is an invitation to stop doing what you’re doing and to start doing something differently.

It’s inviting transformation, because the very nature of pain is change. Even witnessing pain changes the quality of it. When you are aware of pain, in yourself or in others, there is a transformation. Being witness to, holding and experiencing pain creates an understanding of our own divine nature.

We are always connected to everything that has, will or is happening in the universe. And we are always connected to every other living, lived or to live being in the universe. So when we acknowledge this connection by being aware of pain, we also connect by default to healing.

Let me put it another way.

Imagine you are a spider that has woven a web. Your web, like yourself, is a product of your surroundings. It is the tree that shelters you, the air that sustains you, the insects that nourish you. It is every spider that has gone before you. You are all of these, and none of these.

You hold a memory of being harmed when you travelled down a particular strand of your web. Perhaps a sharp gust of wind knocked you out of your web, or you were injured while trying to capture a hornet. Pretty soon, you are surrounded by strands you don’t want to travel on, for fear of getting hurt. Then movement itself becomes equated with pain. You are afraid of moving. So you don’t. Pain finds you anyway.

This is what we do. We close ourselves off. We disconnect from the pain of others: on the news, in our community, across the world. We cut out chambers within ourselves – memories, desires, thoughts and feelings – because they are painful.

We end up living tiny versions of ourselves, limited by our own unwillingness to move forward, because moving forward requires us to feel the very thing that will heal us.

And that’s the best answer I can give you for how to heal. Healing is reconnecting with your true nature, and that of everything around you. Healing is feeling.

And pain is always the precursor. You can’t detour painful things in the hope you can outsmart healing. It doesn’t work that way.

Pain must be felt. Emotionally. Physically. Spiritually. Psychologically. In as many ways as it requires, for as long as it requires, in order to be transformed.

The purpose of healing isn’t to remove the pain, which may continue. The purpose of healing is growth, and sometimes continued pain is required for growth.

You grow through what you go through.

See pain as the gift that it is, and you will be transformed.