Healing

In my experience...

Healing is becoming whole. It is participating with our experience, rather than opposing it, allowing for transformation into a deeper sense of peace, connection, and freedom within ourselves.

In my experience, healing often begins with turning to meet what we have formerly run from, denied, rejected, suppressed, or made wrong within our experience: our fears, our pains, our losses, our doubts, and our resentments.

Healing involves connecting with and digesting the energetic or felt sensations beneath our conceptual understandings, stories, and narratives around our experience.

True healing—or ‘wholling,’ as I think of it—is going beyond just talking about our experience. It’s about connecting with the felt sensations, allowing the waves, and becoming the ocean underneath.

Meeting Our Experience

Healing—or ‘wholling’—requires courage, fortitude, strength, love, and trust. It’s not for everyone. Healing is for those who hunger to know and embody a deeper sense of connection, peace, freedom, and okayness within themselves—and to live that.

Healing is not about escape or avoidance or even feeling better; it’s about turning toward our experience and better feeling—developing a greater capacity to be with and become one with our experience, whatever that may be. Through allowing our experience, a different kind of feeling better may emerge.

The kind of feeling better I’m referring to is not the kind that comes from a Band-Aid over a wound—though this kind of comfort may be helpful and necessary at times. The kind of feeling better I’m referring to is an ever-deepening sense of ease and okayness within ourselves, in relation to our experience and our lives, independent of circumstances.

A Choice Point

For many, the way chosen in response to uncomfortable or painful experiences is ‘away.’ ‘Away’ from what we do not want to feel or look at in ourselves.

‘Away’ might look like avoiding situations, circumstances, or people that trigger experiences we are uncomfortable with, using entertainment to distract ourselves, alcohol to numb ourselves, people, sex, and drugs to escape ourselves, or meditation to transcend ourselves. Anything can be used as an ‘away.’

‘Away’ is a strategy that may work for a time. Like eating cake to avoid feeling sad, our ‘away’ strategy may feel like a welcome blanket over rising feelings and sensations we don’t like, don’t want, and that seem to threaten us. Until, for some, ‘away’ no longer works.

When it seems there is no place left to run, and every ‘away’ has failed to keep us from what we’ve been running from, we may be faced with the opportunity to make a different choice—the choice to turn toward our experience.

The way to the ‘I’ that is more at peace with myself and my experience has been through. The way to the ‘I’ that is more connected, joyful, and okay with what is has been through. The way to the ‘I’ that is more healthy and well has been through.

Through what? Whatever has been right here in my experience that has been in the way of my sense of wholeness.

Through the Body

Unmet experiences lie in our subconscious and are often felt or sensed in the body as tension, contraction, pain, numbness, or symptoms of illness. We may not be aware of these sensations. We may numb them, avoid them, or project them out onto others, but they don’t go away.

Undigested experiences are just parts of us looking to come home to wholeness.

One of the ways I have found helpful in my own healing is somatic exercises. This involves connecting with the sensations in my body through touch, breath, movement, and sound. Sometimes, this is as simple as sitting with my eyes closed and asking 'What is here?', placing my hands on where I feel energy or sensations, breathing gently into it, and allowing it fully. Sometimes tears come. Sometimes anger, fear, or grief. Sometimes more resistance to it. Whatever arises, allowing what is here has been my way through.

It’s like allowing the arm I once spent 10+ years trying to pull off to be a part of me. Now that I’m not fighting it, that arm is much healthier. Plus, I now have two arms to use! So I feel more empowered.

The same can be found when we allow fear fully, grief fully, rage fully, confusion fully, and doubt fully. Not acting these out in a way that hurts ourselves or others, but rather, fully allowing the sensations to move through our body.

With Love

To heal requires love—both unconditional and conditional love. I can love a person unconditionally, and simultaneously set healthy boundaries and conditions for what kind of behavior I allow in my life. Both aspects are necessary.

Love and acceptance from others as we go through our healing can also be profoundly helpful in helping us connect with the love and acceptance we need to give ourselves. Simply a kind word and a tender touch can help us connect with our own hearts and give love to the parts of us that need it most.

My Turning Point

My healing and coming into greater wholeness was catalyzed one day on bended knees, in a moment of deep surrender. It came after the end of another relationship that mirrored the same destructive patterns of my primary relationship with a narcissistic parent. In hindsight, that moment was like a lid popping off over 30 years of undigested life experience. This precipitated many years of those undigested experiences coming up to be met and integrated.

It was as if the floodgates opened, and there was no going back—like the light I had once chased began chasing me, and there was no turning away from what was being illuminated. It was during this time I was diagnosed with CPTSD and began the deeper work of integration.

I’m so glad I didn’t know what I was in for during almost the entirety of my thirties. It has been both a great revealing and a great healing. Importantly, I was ready.

My way through has been to completely surrender to and allow my experience as it has come up—including allowing resistance. The pain in my body was at times excruciating, as I allowed and moved through the felt experiences.

My symptoms did not show up as physical illness, as they do for some. I haven’t had a cold, fever, or headache in over a decade, except for a bout of Covid a couple of years ago. I attribute this to my processing in other ways.

My experience of life has transformed significantly during this process. As a result of allowing and moving through much of what has been stored in my system, I have also met extraordinary experiences on the other side: heightened perception, bliss, and joy.

And through it, the emergence of a more secure and happy sense of my true self—'True Lu,' as a friend recently described. What is also here is a greater capacity to be with whatever is here in my experience. This is a strength I’m deeply grateful for.

Moving Forward

I have such compassion for people who choose not to engage with healing—I understand completely. I would not wish the pain I have experienced on anyone, but I do wish everyone the peace, connection, and wholeness on the other side, which is why I’m sharing some of what I have experienced and learned here. For those who are in the process of healing and integrating, I hope my sharing helps support a more loving relationship with your own experience.

Thank you for reading. I welcome your comments, feedback and experiences.