How Do We Heal?
What does real healing look like? What does it mean to be healed, and how would you describe it in your own words?
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As a healer, life guide, and women’s transformational coach, I’ve been asked on many occasions if there is anything in my childhood that comes up for me, and I can assure you there is. I am always healing – myself, and others – because we’ve all experienced childhood trauma to varying degrees.
To clarify, a child will experience trauma in an environment where they perceive the actions of others as anything less than loving – not what the adult’s intentions are, but how they are received. As we grow into adulthood, we then choose whether or not to reenact and perpetuate this wounding when we are feeling triggered, and that’s where our healing really begins.
Healing happens when you are triggered and you are able to move through the pain, pattern, and the story and you consciously choose to have a different ending.
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Your shadow side never fully disappears – it is something we all need to learn to love and accept about ourselves. However how it affects our choices in life can drastically change. It takes an incredible effort to bring to light what has laid in the shadows all along. Our inner work--our soul work--is what creates our healing.
Over the years, I’ve acquired a deep understanding of myself and my trauma, which changes how I treat myself and others. I am able to consciously respond, rather than reacting due to being triggered.
Do I consider myself healed? In many ways, yes. I’ve released a lot of my own shame, pain, and blame so I can remain free. I have arrived at a place where I don’t feel the need to fight the dark in order to awaken my light.
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I’ve found that healing is living in pursuit of your own dignity. It’s reminding yourself that you are worthy of honor and respect, no matter where you’ve come from or all that you’ve experienced.
When we honor and respect ourselves we teach others how to love, respect and honor us in a way we may never have experienced before. This is the embodiment of self-love and compassion. And like a ripple effect, this now enables us to respect and honor others in a way they’ve never experienced before.
When we are healed, we treat others with dignity. We choose to make eye contact. We become intimate and can invite people in with our questions. We practice right speech, communicating in a loving, compassionate, and authentic way – where the purpose of our communication is about helping ourselves and others suffer less. We have the ability to say to the world through our actions, “I am still worthy of dignity, and so are those around me.”
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In order to heal, we need to respect the tragedy we’ve survived and endured so we are able to honor the hardships and tragedy that someone else has experienced. Real healing allows us to hold not just empathy for others, but also compassion.
Empathy only requires us to understand another person. Compassion literally means “to suffer together”. It allows us to gain emotional awareness around how another person has suffered, increasing our desire to alleviate their misery or distress. We're humans, we're evolving, and it has taken many generations to come to a place where we can be kind and compassionate to each other.
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When we meet someone, we must assume they have just survived their worst, and they will not have anything left for us. We could be confronting someone who is not fully embodied, and who has the conditioned impression of not being worthy of their own dignity. Inevitably they are incapable of showing honor, respect, and dignity to themselves.
If they are aggressive, frustrated, angry, or judgmental with us – it only means that their dignity has been stripped away from them. We are only experiencing the intensity of the adversity they have survived.
Our reactions to them depend upon how skillfully we embody our own dignity, regardless of the circumstances. As the wise Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. said, “Every man must decide whether to walk in the light of creative altruism or the darkness of destructive selfishness. This is the judgement. Life’s most persistent and urgent question is, ‘What are you doing for others.’”
So shall we be reactive or responsive?
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When we are embodying our own dignity, we can lovingly discern when a person is not appropriate or necessary for us to engage with, due to their participation in their own trauma. We are able to prioritize our dignity and neutrality without bringing criticism and judgment into the equation.
Discernment is not judgment. Discernment allows us to protect ourselves and provides an example of a compassionate choice.
Now we are able to internally make the following distinctions:
I am not bringing criticism and judgement into my existence.
I refuse to perpetuate your trauma by not maintaining my dignity.
Your pain will not hurt me and my light will awaken you.
When we choose to react out of ego, we are only mirroring where we feel unseen, invisible and unworthy. In that moment we have no awareness of the pain in others, only our own. Ego is where we hide from any intimacy and the ability of being present, aware and accountable for our lives.
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From my own experience, healing is the ability to be stripped away from our past experiences. It’s our opportunity to say goodbye to any abuse, neglect, or abandonment that we are still feeling from our childhood, or that we’ve inherited through our ancestral history.
Healing is the physical, emotional and spiritual release of holding others accountable for our experiences of the past, so we are able to move forward. It’s forgiving everyone involved, including ourselves. It’s the action of clearing out the density within our fields.
When you are healed you are resilient. You are able to rebound from traumatic incidences. You have the ability to quickly reclaim your dignity. When things happen you say, “this is all happening for me” rather than “this is all happening to me.”
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We are all survivors of trauma and also the restorers of dignity. May we heal the heart of the world together.