It has taken me a long time to arrive here. To become more of a person that is healing and so thereby, has more to offer others on the path. I used to just be that hurt person that hurt others...
I am certainly not healed. I don’t think that is even a goal. I accepted a long time ago that a complete healing will not be possible for me. I am always going to have remnants of my traumatic past. Always. And it is somewhat ironic that when I refused to accept this inevitability of lack of completeness in my healing journey that I actually really and truly began to heal.
When being “all better” was the goal, I found myself completely unable to own those parts of myself that lagged, stalled and delayed. Those parts that remained locked in habitual patterns and cycles. It wasn’t until I could see that even if I live to be 120 (please God no) that I will never be completely healed and that is the best news ever.
For me, it has to be a constant seeking of more, better, deeper. I have to continue to move through life in my constant in flux ratio of healed/unhealed. Always willing to see where the healing is happening and where the damage is still running my life. If I deny that there is this damage, then I am completely owned by it. It takes over and pretty soon, actually really fucking soon, I am gone again, lost to self destructive patterns and cycles and traumatic responses and survival skills. And anyone who has ever been involved with this kind of person knows that not only is it incredibly painful to engage in any kind of relationship with this person, it is also impossible. Intimacy requires, in fact demands, a certain level of vulnerability that can only come once healing is taken on as a life mission and not just a situational transaction.
The longer I am sober and evolving on my spiritual plane, the more I feel like people seek me out for advice, counsel, comfort and an empathetic ear. I won’t lie, I was the kind of that person people sought out before, but that really just gives you a strong indication of how fucked up the people who were seeking me out were to think that I had anything to offer them. I was a good bullshit artist and a master in the art of deception, I mean mostly of myself, but in my day I did a pretty good job on others too.
But today, in my evolving state of healing, I feel like I am lighter, cleaner, clearer and more willing to share what I have learned by walking my path, sharing the journey, all of it with whomever might be interested.
Healing is not easy. It takes tenacity and courage and a resplendent heart. But more than anything else it takes brutal self honesty about who you are and what you do. And a sincere willingness to look at that person and find some way to find something within the dumpster fire of your current being that is worth salvaging from the scrap heap of your current dysfunctional way of living...or dying. I know that I lived to die for a long time. Today I live knowing that I might die at any minute. And I really want when that time comes to be clean, clear and good with whatever benevolence exists in the hereafter.
Looking at yourself honestly, "warts and all," as my mom always says, is the beginning. But it doesn’t end there. I know that I just wanted to do enough to reach the conclusion that I wasn’t a complete shitshow anymore or a horrible, no good, very bad person. And I could have stopped there but I would have so short changed myself. The best, the very best, part of being on a healing path is sharing that path, your experience, hard sought and fought wisdom with others who are struggling. That is the way I have accessed healing in those hard to reach areas that seem overgrown with self interest and selfishness. Only a true desire to peel back the layers of denial in order to help others has given me the courage to look into those very dark recesses of my past and do the work needed to heal again...still.
Healing people, heal people is as true, if not more true, than hurt people, hurt people. I think the main difference is in the intention. Healing is never just for ourselves, whereas hurting really is. Healing opens you up, allows life, love and companionship in. Hurting bars the windows and doors to our lives, our hearts and ability to connect with others.
The most revolutionary thing that has happened to me on my healing journey is realizing, on a very fundamental level, that the only way to truly connect with another is by practicing connecting. Practicing every single day to stop trying to connect by disconnecting. It doesn’t work, but my delusion that someday it will is strong and seems to grow back overnight while I am sleeping. Which is why I start each new day with this mantra:
Let me open my heart to myself, to others and to God. Let me practice connection to all I may encounter and do my best to love even when hard situations or people are in my way. Let me see the egregious error in my thinking that causes me to believe that the only way to be safe is to disconnect. Let me instead finally and as completely as I can, open up and do the very brave and terrifying thing of connecting to others better than I did yesterday and with more completeness so that I may make my little part in this world a better place for all that I encounter. Let me remember this as I walk through the day and find whatever it is I might find in this day.
Namaste. Keep healing...the ripple effects are endless.
Kommentare