All Healing Begins with a Desire for Change
All healing (whether physical, mental, spiritual, or relational) begins with a desire for change. Sometimes that shift needs to be a huge leap and sometimes just a slight movement. Either way, desiring change and healing in an area of your life is a wonderful first step towards healing.
Everyone’s healing steps differ. What might be healing for one person, can be harmful to another. Once you desire change, the next step in the healing process is, therefore, learning how to listen in to your own feelings and wisdom. Your emotions inform you about so much in your life and they need space to move through you. Your ideas, imagination, and creativity show you a path to take but need time and space to be fostered. Learning how to listen in to yourself and create spaciousness respects your inner world.
The outer world is very noisy. Most health conditions (physical, mental, and spiritual) are caused or worsened by stress. Stress can be an external factor, such as a loss or change in our life, and can also be an internal factor, such as our emotional reaction and nervous system hijacking from what we see around us. We can’t live in a bubble, and, even if it was possible, it would prevent us from feeling connected to others and our world. Learning how to work with the outer world and learning how to identify stress, and how it is affecting your body and mind, deeply affects your health.
If you are ready for healing in an area of your life, begin by limiting the external noise around you and take some time and space for your emotions and ideas. As you get more information about what is happening in your inner world, let it guide you towards healing. That may be more alone time, more community, taking a class, working less, working more, changing a relationship… there is no one answer. Let the ideas and guidance sit with you for a bit to see if it feels continuously aligned. If it does, make that shift. Healing can only occur when you are honest with yourself and so knowing how you are feeling and doing may seem quite simple in theory but can be quite challenging in practice.
Lastly, if you feel that you are needing guidance, ask for help. Reach out to the people in your life (family, friends, neighbors, colleagues, as well as therapists, teachers, and guides) to assist you in deepening your understanding of what change you are thinking about making. Honest conversations about your struggles can be powerfully validating of your experience and, often, can help you to redirect your energies to a more healing and loving place.