hell is the healing
When we recognize in another that we all have had trauma and pain there is healing there. Sometimes it is difficult because the pain is not the same, there is no way it can be. Maybe we feel what the other experienced was worse or not as bad. We may think that the other has had more support or less, or maybe that we have come out on the other end more evolved. Either way, that recognition is the point when we can agree that we have both had our time in hell and that can draw us together. I was listening to a podcast on a run today. A new one for me, “So You Wanna be a Witch,” it was about spirituality and it’s role in business. It really got me big thinking about healing, the holidays and how much healing can be found in pain.
This morning as my brother packed up his family and headed back to Florida I thought about how much I was going to miss them and how much collective pain we have shared over the years. We have processed it so very differently, however. That being said I realized that all these years I have been thinking that maybe the point of life was to erase the pain, to avoid it to try to move it around it in a way that we do not have to experience it, to get past it. But as I hugged him I really felt a deep sense of connection and thought no, the pain was part of it, it was the part of the whole experience. None of us get through this life without pain and we do not get to erase it. What we can do though is know that it can be the actual healing. Just as it is. The discomfort the angst can BE the healing.
Zoe Wild says, “There are no blocks on the path. The blocks ARE the path.” I think for the first time this concept really has hit me right in the soul. This is it! This is all there is and that’s both wonderful and terrifying. Your own pain and your shared pain and the world’s pain IS the healing and IS the experience. That simple. We have all dipped our proverbial toes in the depths of hell, we have all as Lindsay Mack said on the podcast visited the, “Hell Hostel,” and came back up to be like, “hey how was that for you?” We have all been to the shadowed dark side only to emerge and hope to share our experiences and learn from them. We can notice that the path is not linear, it’s bumpy and windy and sometimes muddy. We can see that the path may in fact be spiral and that can be so beautiful. There is something in that camaraderie that can be a tool in our healing.
The point is not to escape it or to numb it or to hope all memory of it will disappear. Damn, why hadn’t I figured that out sooner? Everyone has pain, it’s part of the adventure. There is magic in the recognition and the recognition brings with it healing and the healing is the actual experience. How can we interpret it gently and accept it? Everyone has had some trauma so do we continue to seep and stew in it or can we use it as an outlet to feel and to heal? Outside influences and people will obviously always be tugging at and triggering us, but we must know it starts and ends with us.
Ultimately we are our own guru. But we are all also students and teachers and healers and mirrors. These moments, these moments of pain and discomfort are an opportunity to trust your intuition to move you in the direction that will propel you forward. When you feel like you can no longer live in the way you have been living, let life push you toward your next yes by accepting that all the things are healing. Meditate, move your body and breathe it’s all part of it. So will you crack yourself open and lead with your heart or will you strategize and try to control? Will you have the willingness to trust yourself without ego or ideas about how you think it’s supposed to look?
Put your hand on your heart, feel that? You’re one step closer to being in the know. I see you.
