Time and a quiet place to heal.
Eventually, you come to a point in your life where you realize you have to change. The really big changes are often started as a result of something painful and difficult arriving on your emotional doorstep, and you experience a moment of understanding that you can’t go on being the person that you currently are. But the thought of changing scares you…
Because to change is to heal, and to heal…is going to hurt.
All of us have experienced trauma, and we spend so much of our lives trying to avoid that feeling again that we warp and distort our lives and our passions in order to escape what we were always going to have to face. But when the moment arrives, and it’s time to start the healing, most of us have no idea where to begin.
It’s not like they ever taught us this in school.
So to start, I want you to understand that emotional healing, just like physical healing, takes time. Even when someone has an emotional breakthrough, they usually have to work through many patterns of learned avoidance behavior that will come back time after time to sabotage and undermine their progress.
Healing is very rarely a single moment in time, but a continuum stretching out over your life.
So the first component of healing is patience.
But once you have the time, then you need the peace in your soul to be able to unlock the feelings that you don’t want to face. It’s going to be hard, and sometimes it can be made easier by the presence of a good friend or a trusted guide who can help you traverse the hidden paths of your soul, carrying their light into your darkness, and allowing the beauty and wonder of the true you to come forth.
But even with a guide, you are still going to have to struggle through the process.
Which means you are going to have to face fear, pain, loss, loneliness and heartache. It’s to accept things that you find hard to understand, and to learn new patterns of behavior that will feel alien and uncomfortable.
You may have to remove people from your life when you desperately want to hold onto them, and you will have to learn to give up some expectations.
And none of those things are easy.
Which is why it takes time, and a quiet place to heal. But what I’ve found is that often the only quiet you need is a space inside of your mind. Carved out through meditation, and lit with compassion for yourself, you can discover your own universe of the soul, and within that timeless and infinite place begin the process of healing all the pains you carry within you.
The more you heal your soul, the greater capacity you will discover to heal yourself.
Until you are free, and then the fun really begins.
— Dr. Alan Barnes
@maddrbmusings