Getting Stuck in Healing

At What Point Can We Just Feel Good About Ourselves and Call the Rest Growth?

For most of my life, I’ve belonged to various communities that got their druthers from feeling broken, wrong, sinful, sick, etc., and then chasing wholeness.

The irony I’ve observed in many, if not all, of these communities, is that the pursuit is never-ending; the goal is ultimately unattainable.

But, damn, the dopamine from pursuing the goal sure is good, and often keeps people real wrapped up in the culture.

In my life, this communal trend began with Catholicism. Christian dogma is centered around the idea that humans are sinful and require the assistance of a savior to experience redemption and the ultimate reward of Heaven.

Now, I would argue that this was not necessarily the teaching of most paleo-Christian cults, but it has certainly been a cornerstone of Christian philosophy for most of the past 2,000 years.

Catholicism has a particularly sadistic emphasis on the suffering and death of Jesus. You might notice that Catholicism heavily leans towards the use of crucifixes (crosses with Jesus’ body on them) instead of the cross by itself, which is preferred by most Christian sects.

There are benefits to this emphasis, yes, as there are light sides to every facet of the human experience. The dark side of such a philosophy is the need to pursue self-worth and personal security from an outside source. In the case of Christianity (as well as many other religious philosophies), this outside source is often fairly abstract and covered in allegory.

Moving on…

When I was a teenager, I began experiencing high levels of anxiety for the first time in my life. I have a list of possible catalysts for this new emotional state, but none was as pivotal as the messages I received in response to the anxiety, as it began to manifest.

Doctor after doctor told me that the anxiety was essentially inevitable- the result of genetic determinism- and my best option was to take medications to fix my imbalanced brain. I was told that the anxiety was a false flag that my body was giving me because it was sick. I was told that there was very little I could do to address such an imbalance and that I would likely live with the increasingly debilitating symptoms I was experiencing for the rest of my life.

Unsurprisingly, these messages I received cultivated feelings of helplessness, hopelessness, victimhood, and depression. Doctors were more than happy to prescribe more medications for these symptoms and therapists were more than happy to listen to me bullshit and whine to them for an hour or two a week.

And the disempowering messages I received continued to pile on the neuroticism I was experiencing, resulting in a positive feedback loop of negative messages from my inner and outer experiences.

After some years, I found respite in mindfulness practice (initially via dialectic behavioral therapy) and from 12-step program communities. Here, I felt more freedom to be with the messy parts of myself without making them wrong.

This spaciousness…the allowing of all things present to be as they are without hiding any of them…permission to be more deeply vulnerable with myself and other humans…was wildly supportive in my process of unwinding all of the ‘wrongness’ I had built up to that point in my life. The parts of myself that I had been suppressing started to surface, feeling they would be given space and room to breathe.

But still, I reached a point in those communities of therapy and 12-step programs that felt like conditional love, a ‘making wrong’ of certain parts of the human experience; I saw people getting high off the pursuit of happiness more than I saw people actually experiencing happiness.

And so…

I moved on to healing communities based in more ancient practices: the ceremonial use of entheogens, various yogas, and philosophies rooted in oneness, or the witnessing and transmuting of duality.

These communities had various faces, from psychedelic churches to life coaching groups to hippie tribes to new-age Christians to sex-positive communities to new-age Buddhists to naturalism; I played with a variety of peoples. In each culture I was fed by my experience: different parts of myself revealed and accepted, and oftentimes other parts shut down, avoided, or rejected.

My ongoing internal practice through this time (and to this day) is to unconditionally love all of myself, in an increasingly honest, courageous, and compassionate way. So, when I discover that part of me feels validated by an external source, I’m grateful for that mirror. And when I discover that part of me is avoided or rejected by an external source, I’m also grateful for that mirror.

Both reflections point me towards what is true for me, and how I can deepen my relationship with myself. Each of our relationships with our own self is the most direct experience, the most honest, present, rich, potentially fruitful experience we can ever hope to have. We can amplify this through cultivating relationships with others, yes, but only to the degree that we honestly know our direct personal experience.

At present, I find myself unwinding from leaning into this most recent layer of healing communities, as they are still, just that, healing communities.

And I invite you to ponder this: through a lens of unconditional love, what needs to be healed?

This is the recent nuance I’m parsing…at some point, we can allow ourselves to let go of the idea that we are healing what is broken and embrace that we are expanding a self that is already whole.

We can grow from a place of already being perfect. We can open to the somatic experience of having all that we need, which alleviates the search, the pursuit, of anything.

We journey, yes; not from lack, but from desire and excitement.

Once we are confident in our foundation, we can stop looking for cracks in it.

I feel it’s easy for humans to get stuck in the need to heal. There must be something left to fix, right?

Of course, it’s essentially impossible to leave this personal pursuit of healing behind if one is caught in the perception that the world is broken. We will always perceive what we see outside on our insides, and vice-versa.

Once we have left healing behind, we can truly begin to grow…

This is a threshold that each must cross as an individual, as much of it requires skillfully navigating the messages (from the outside world as well as old internal programs) that say that there’s something to fix about yourself and/or the world.

What if everything is perfect, just as it is?

What if we have everything we need, all is exactly in place, for the best possible future outcome- an outcome we can’t even imagine yet?

That’s the message I’m cultivating, harvesting, feasting on, and sharing.

It’s a process, yes. And here’s a pragmatic way to start…

Ask yourself: “What’s wrong with me?”

And, treading lightly but honestly, through the programs that arise (over time, not only in the immediate), reframe the ways you’re perceiving wrongness into inspiration that’s pointing you towards the direction you’re growing in.

For example:

When I ask myself “what’s wrong with me?” the subject most present is the chaos I feel in my personal business ventures.

I can feel (for the umpteenth time!) shifts in my focus as an entrepreneur, and the outcome isn’t clear yet. I’m sitting in many unknowns. And paralleling this experience, I recently accepted a job offer doing a “normal person job”, which is something I built up a lot of resistance to while enjoying the freedoms of running my own businesses.

What desires can I glean through the arising thought patterns and actions?

I desire greater financial freedom, more expansive communication skills, and to be involved in a larger human community.

When I focus on those desires, I can see clearly that the way forward is to push myself out of my comfort zone, to hold the dialectic of both entrepreneur and employee, to expand in new ways instead of trying to force a square peg into a round hole.

I’m no longer a failure for pulling attention away from my personal businesses, but my own hero for being willing to do whatever it will take to expand into the next level of me.

And in holding this duality of both failure and hero, I can witness both and they transmute into a sense of neutrality; there’s no charge behind them. This is simply the next step in the process.

At the point you feel curious about this venture, I invite you to entertain what it would be like to let go of any compulsion towards healing.

How would it be to transmute all remnants of wrongness into reflections of beauty?

How would it be to cultivate appreciation for everything that exists, even if you don’t understand it yet, and even if it seems to be hiding behind ignorance and fear?

Can even those parts of the human experience be met with curiosity and compassion?

When they are, they will probably start to make more sense…