Healing Hurts

Right now everyone is talking about self love and healing. Truthfully, it’s become a billion dollar industry often drawing off of people’s vulnerability and need for certainty and answers in their lives. The past few years have heightened the need for this because a lot of us have been experiencing pain and feeling like we have lost power and control of our lives.

Yes, these things are important and they are necessary, but what doesn’t get talked about as much is the pain this process of healing causes. It hurts to heal because to truly heal something you have to determine the cause of the pain to start with. That is a journey of self discovery that leads you into dark corridors, winding roads and blockades that seem 100 feet tall. It’s not comfortable at all. In fact, it's hard as fuck and one of the most uncomfortable and painful things you can experience.

Which is why most people would rather find a way to avoid the growth and use a band aid mechanism to get through it. As a friend recently mentioned to me, it’s like the song “Crane’s in the Sky” by Solange. We are compelled to drink it away, dance it away or fuck it away and find some way to numb ourselves so we don’t feel the pain. Even throwing ourselves into work and creating or building is not healing, it’s overcompensating and avoiding the truth.

I have been known to do the latter. In the hardest moments of my life, I threw myself into academics or work. Spending extra hours in the school I worked in to avoid the reality of my life at home, or taking on more projects than I could truly handle as a way to keep my plate full and not focus on what I was feeling internally. Those were not unhealthy vices and they got me through the past 22 years of pain and challenges, but they never healed me. It was just a way to store the pain in a box buried deep in a dark closet.

The challenge with this decision is that karma and the universe do not accept our band aid choices of “healing” as lessons learned in life. So that pain will resurface in another form with another situation in your life until you have addressed it. And the longer we wait to acknowledge that truth, the harder and more painful the fall.

So like I said, it has been 22 years of blocking and moving forward without healing. So this past year karma came back like a bitch and no holds barred. And now for the past three months, I have been freefalling with no net while being stabbed across my body from every direction I turn. This hurts like hell. And then it’s wash, rinse and repeat. Just as I emerge from a day or two of deep debilitating pain thinking I am healed and ready to move forward to a brighter place, it hits again.

I am not a psychic or medium, I don’t know why I keep moving into these cycles repeatedly or even how to move through them to a peaceful place. As soon as I think I have found the solution, I am hit with the reality and higher powers laughing at my naivety to think it would be that easy. At this point I should know that the patterns in my life have shown that few things are.

The only thing I have become certain of is that healing hurts and it requires us to dig into aspects of who we are that are not our best selves to undo the crap we have brought onto our selves and into others’ lives. It humbles us and stops the tendency to lean into our ego for comfort, pushing us to release ideas we rely on in life like certainty, control, and hope.

In trying to take back my power through my healing I have found one remedy, trusting in the process. I am now walking in this space and pain of healing with just one thing, trust that at any given time I am where I am meant to be in my life. So when it was the pain of the experiences, that was meant to happen. Now that it is the pain of healing, this is also destined to be. Which gives me some solace that it cannot always be night and once I have moved through this process and uncovered all the broken parts that need to be put back together, I will be the person I am meant to be and stand in that power. Always remembering the stages of this journey in all the peaks and valleys I have visited.

Healing hurts but as my son’s therapist once told him, it’s up to you to decide, do you want to fix the problems in your life now as a 16 year old, or when your life has impacted others in your 40’s? I am in my 40’s beginning and hopefully closing out this process, still it’s where I am meant to be in this moment and soon I will understand what I was trusting in.

Heal the pain, don't fight it, ignore it or avoid it. I promise by delaying the process you are hurting yourself and the people who may be unexpectedly on the journey alongside your unhealed wounds. Do not fear the discomfort, lean into it and trust that it is present to bring you to a better place and find your peace.