Rewilding Healing

“When does it stop being healing and just become experiencing?”

A wise friend spoke these words to me yesterday. They stopped me in my tracks. Phew, how many of us need to hear this? Or is it just me? Maybe it is just me but it definitely made me pause and consider how I am framing my life.

Yesterday I also left Poland after spending 10 days with another dear friend. We experienced a lot together in that short time and it was a very healing trip for both of us. I sent her a little note while I was on the seven hour bus to Lithuania and this is a little snippet from it below.

“As I see it, there are two ways to live. You can live trying to stand in one place your whole life, resisting everything that is trying to nudge you forward. Or, you can follow the nudges. You can quit wasting energy trying to stay in one place when life has and always will be about forward movement. Both are hard but one leads to progress while the other one gets you nowhere.”

I love when life works this way. I think a thought one way and someone reflects it back to me another way. These little synchronicities feel like magic to me every damn time. It reminds me that we need to say the things we are thinking. Because more often than not, someone else is thinking them too. And we don’t know how impactful one little sentence might be for someone else.

Maybe it is just my little world, but the idea of healing is everywhere. We are all on some sort of healing journey right now, or so it seems. Everyone is “doing the work” in one way or another. Whether that is by finally going to therapy, having more vulnerable conversations with loved ones, taking a sabbatical, absorbing all the self help information out there or simply getting curious about what healing even means. But what if it isn’t actually healing, it is just waking up and finally living?

I fully believe the words that I wrote to my friend. There are many ways to live but they feel like they could be split into these two categories; resistance or acceptance. We either fight change with every ounce of strength we have or we accept that life will always get extra lifey when we least expect it.

Living a life with high resistance has become the norm. In so many subtle ways we are taught that our life is not our own. We are meant to be on one path because it is the “best” one to be on. It doesn't matter how we actually feel about this path, because it is the only option. If we want to do life right, we stay on the path, even when everything in us is screaming for something different.

This screaming from inside manifests itself in many ways. It can be expressed physically as pain and health problems. It can be expressed by any attempt to control through a wide variety of addictions and obsessions. It can be expressed by dissociating and numbing from life as well. Any way you take it, it leads to suffering. This gap, between what you think life should look like and what deep down you sense how you want life to be, widens. This widening is like pulling a rubber band further and further apart. It will stretch a long way but the more it is stretched, the more tension is created. And eventually the rubber band will give up and snap. This hurts, a lot.

But there is another way. Some call it healing but perhaps it is just life. Again, life is meant to move us forward. When we accept that life will continually nudge us forward, the resistance lessens. I say this like it is an easy thing. There is nothing easy about acceptance, especially if you have lived a life of resistance. Tension has a funny way of making itself cozy within our being. This makes change uncomfortable, even when it is good for us.

For years now, I have been getting curious about what in my life is creating tension. I found many of these gaps, the ones between what I thought I should be doing and what my soul really desired. I was holding a lot of tension in many different directions. It became so effortful to hold onto all these rubber bands, stretched to maximum capacity. Eventually, a few of them broke. But what surprised me the most was that it actually felt good.

I realized how much work it was to hold onto that tension. A flood of relief came over me because my body could finally rest for a moment. It felt so good that I had to keep searching for all the gaps within me. I wanted to release all the tension, I didn’t want anymore resistance in my life. I wanted to follow the path of acceptance and see what it felt like.

Many of the things I’ve done over the past few years have been intentional but so many of them have also stayed below my conscious awareness. There is this funny thing that happens when you open yourself up to curiosity. In some ways, your body does the work before your mind can attempt to control it. This is the ultimate lesson in acceptance. This is where there is so much healing potential. But again, is it healing? Or is it just finally allowing yourself to experience life without resistance?

Labels can be helpful at times. To name something gives it power. There are points in our lives when we need to heal. Healing helps us to remember to rest and give ourselves compassion. When a child is recovering from a sickness or an injury we do not ask them to hurry up, we are patient. Sometimes calling it healing helps us find more patience for ourselves.

I also see the beauty in just calling it life. Acceptance of life rather than resistance. Closing the gaps between shoulds and soul knowings. A releasing of tension. Whatever you choose to call it, it is beautiful and magical. Life is always beautiful and magical, especially when we realize we get to choose what path we walk down.