4 keys on the healing journey
The healing journey can be hard work, but it also feels so good — this is why we do it.
As we deepen our capacity to feel the discomfort, we also expand our capacity to take in all the good because we aren't so busy holding our breath. The healing journey isn’t something that we necessarily choose to do, it’s a current that arises from life and pulls at us, and the journey begins when we choose to stop resisting and surrender to being taken by it.
The healing journey is not simple or black and white. It doesn’t happen overnight, and there’s no clear endpoint. There is no one way, right way, or wrong way. It’s shapeshifting and a constant evolution of the self — it’s a journey.
Even though there isn’t a clear endpoint, there is a tipping point where liberation overrides our suffering. There is a tipping point where a sense of inner freedom is found even if we don’t reach some hard end line. I say this because one of the biggest blocks in our healing journey is thinking that there is a hard end line, a certain manifestation of what our healed selves look like, and this in itself can cause more suffering than just about anything. It can blind us from the liberation present and leave us hastily chasing an infinite horizon that may very well be an illusion.
Before we move forward, I want to instill one thing in you: whenever you feel hasty and angsty in your healing process, grasping at a future imagined, stop and ask yourself What if this is it? and relish in the beauty you can see, all that you do have, and how far you have come. I do not say this to bypass anything, I say this as a periodic grounding cord to catch your breath.
From here, I will share four commonly overlooked keys that can provide us a great amount of support on our healing journey.
#1 What is the healing journey?
The first key is defining what the healing journey means to you.
What does it look like in your inner world, in your life, your work, your relationships, and most importantly, what does it feel like in your heart, your head, and your body? We cannot control the world around us, healing is about nurturing our inner world so that we can meet life as fully as possible.
Amidst the healing journey, if we don’t have our eyes on where we are going and why it matters, it’s very easy to get lost in a whirlpool, perpetually feeling broken.
The healing journey won’t look the same, or feel the same for everybody, but all in all, it means liberation in some form or another, and what liberation is for you will have its own details, its own texture, and its own qualities that make your life more luminous, while protecting what is sacred to you.
Maybe healing means finding safety in your rage, grief, or emotional vulnerability. Maybe healing means finding the courage to be in relationship or the courage to be on your own. Maybe healing means loving your body or stopping the undercurrent of addiction. Maybe it means calming and grounding your system, maybe it means lighting a wild fire of vitality and passion, and maybe it means relishing in pleasure and joy on a day-to-day basis.
You have the sovereignty to choose the target, and your boundaries, and whatever liberation and the healing journey means to you, is about making life richer.
If whatever you are doing is not making your life richer, it can be helpful to reassess where you are going, what you are doing, and why.
#2 Shadow work and the healing journey
When we embark on the healing journey, if we aren’t able to track the patterns engrained, it’s very hard to intervene, interrupt, and expand beyond them.
Shadow work is a process of inner excavation so that we can have the cognitive awareness of what is playing out in our behavior, thoughts, world views and perspectives of life, in our physical, emotional, and psychic world, and in our relationships.
Our stories and experiences pave pathways in our subconscious behavior that align in the moment, but these patterns, habits, and ways of being can live much longer than they are necessarily needed or of service at all.
Shadow work is the process of revealing the undercurrent at play.
It’s a process of illumination. It’s about tracking the roots of what subconscious patterns and habits are at play, what’s not working, and what is. If we simply have a story about where we want to go and how we want to feel, with no awareness of what’s making us feel and act how we do, it will leave us aimlessly wandering, wondering why we can’t get to where we want to go.
Shadow work is the map in the healing journey. It’s what enables us to track one step at a time where we need to go.
Shadow work can be uncomfortable because it’s weeding out our subconscious garden, but it's also liberating because it's done in the name of making our lives richer. It’s how we expand our capacity to shine brighter and live feeling more fully.
#3 The healing journey requires space and time.
One of the most common detriments we do on the healing journey is to suffocate the process with impatience and rushing.
Healing is not somewhere to get, it’s a state of being, and slowing down can be more productive than we think.
We can be so anxious to have a life we imagine, to become a person we imagine, and to get rid of feelings and imprints that we don’t want to have or feel, that we hastily grasp far away from reality and end up living in a constant state of stress.
Two shadows on the same coin in the healing journey is that some people avoid shadow work altogether, and some people obsess over it.
When we obsess over healing, we end up in chronic stress, thinking that we are intolerable as we are and that life is intolerable as it is. When this happens, our nervous system is often in a state of fight or flight, trying to fight or get out of ourselves.
When we obsess over healing, we can end up journaling up the wazuu, doing every modality possible, and putting every ounce of our energy into doing healing work, but we never pause to simply feel or live.
We can get so caught up in healing that we lose all presence and forget to the live the life right in front of us, it's helpful to pause, and again, reassess. It’s one thing to be a self-help, self-growth junkie because we enjoy the process of getting to know ourselves more deeply and find it satiating to bask within, but as soon as it turns to angst to be something we are not, or for our lives to be something that they are not, it's easy to get lost and swallowed by it.
#4 Joy, pleasure, and the healing journey.
Even if everyone’s definition of the healing journey and liberation is somewhat different, but we all want to feel good.
The healing journey is a process of rewiring ourselves to experience more joy, pleasure, and happiness. If we don’t prioritize joy and pleasure in our lives, and into the process, our system has no way of knowing what joy and pleasure are. It’s like longing to win the lottery without ever having bought a lottery ticket or wanting to get in shape or healthy without exercising or eating well.
The healing journey has to incorporate pleasure if we want to find more joy.
It’s common to consider happiness as an innate state of being, but it’s a practice to build our capacity to rest there. Just like gratitude practices, we have to practice pleasure, we have to prioritize doing things that feel good and bring us joy. It is a physiological rewiring of our system.
Pleasure is especially important for the healing journey junkies, who work relentlessly on themselves, have come so far, with incredible self-awareness, but they still don’t feel that much joy, relief, or ease within.
When we grasp and obsess, we can fixate so much into the healing journey that we end up mirroring a depressive or anxious state, even though the intention is pure. The healing journey requires a mixed bag of energy. It needs shadow work, rest, play, and pleasure, seriousness and intentionality, carefree waves, socializing, introversion, energetics, physicality, psychology, and physiology — and within that dance we need a balance of discipline and surrender.
Know your target and trust the waves. Trust the underbelly and the highs, doing your best to be present in both while knowing your boundaries that protect the intention of making your life richer and finding more joy.
The healing journey is not linear, it’s not controllable, it’s not predictable, but there is always a point where we can say no, and where we can make the choice to pause, rest, play, or dig deep.
The healing journey is learning to dance and be danced by life in the shapeshifting cycles of unfurling and reweaving, and pleasure will make the process more enjoyable.
Be gentle with yourself. Have compassion and let it be exciting. Have vision and respect for the mystery. Know that life is fleeting, that it doesn’t owe you anything, and that there is darkness, injustice, and a wild amount of magic, beauty, love, abundance, and pleasure to bask in.
More than anything, know the healing journey is about nurturing a love affair with yourself and your life.
With Marigold love,
Abby
