While looking through a heart wrenching story of poverty; innocence robbed by life's hardships and the most important humans to ever walk this Earth (children), I started to ask myself some unnerving, profound questions. Why is it that we cry at what we cry? What makes us ache? Where does the wound point you?
And ultimately...what is healing? We speak of healing so much these days. Indeed, for a good reason. There is a type of supermarket spirituality that has flooded the collective consciousness which is far from enlightened, specific, or even profound. It is easily digestible, consumable, edible. But not much beyond that. It is there for the same reasons other brands of entertainment exist. So much so that it uses terms such as healing willy nilly, it throws them around until they become slogans for the uninitiated, for those who expect healing to be the exact thing that a TV commercial promises: easily attainable. To be perfectly fair, it is not.
It is not easily attainable, and most of us, it struck me, do not even know what healing really is. Did we even try to define it before pursuing it?
For most of us, having embarked on a spiritual path (purposely or not), healing used to mean transcending. At least it did for me. However, through years and decades of self analysis, growth and, yes, pain, I learned something a bit more simplistic yet perplexingly complex. Healing...what is it? Does it mean I am over it? Did I heal it, meaning eliminate it? Did I get rid of it? Am I free of it?
These questions should naturally arise, and they did. Until I found the very essence of what makes you you. The truth is, sequelae exist. Scars will remain, and their memory too. Just like scars remain visible, and scar tissue has its own cellular memory (it feels pain now and then), so does our spiritual healing. Healing does not mean you never went through it. It does not even mean you are "over it", whatever that means nowadays. It means you have found your pain. It means you have been crushed to tears inside it. It means you have let it overtake you to the point of agony, and yet to the point of the ecstatic discovery of yourself. For what is pleasure without pain? (as another cliché says).
Skipping the asides, healing is not wiping out your motherboard, it isn't about erasing anything. It isn't even about coming to terms with it, or pushing for it to be over. It is simply about recognizing the wound, seeing it, sitting with it, tending to it. It is discovering your own parent within, the Universal Mother and yes, the Universal Father. Healing does not suggest your pain was never there, nor should it make you believe that it wasn't. It is about rebirth, but rebirth is different than birth. You are not eliminating your pain, you live above it. Any wound that heals leaves a scar, but it is considered healed. And that could be very hard for the human ego to accept, which is why we consume fast food fixes to it. Healing is you... inside of the wound, yet triumphant.
We should be cautioned not to make an identity out of our brokenness, as Gothically romantic as that may seem. It can be very easy to identify with that part of ourselves, yet being inside the wound, broken and triumphant, can still exist.
It is about discovering that healing cannot live without love. Healing does not come to fruition without love. It is the air it breathes, the water it begs for, and the nourishment it craves. It is about digging from within. It is a well you have to work for, to keep searching inside the inner dirt of your own being, to dig up the drops of water from the ground, and satiate a thirst. A thirst afflicting you, no one else. It is yours. No one else's. Your healing is your own. Your journey too. And yet we do have guidance, maybe a fellow soul, our intuition, and nature. But have no fear, one way or another, everything balances, and you too, shall find what quenches you.
*This concludes a personal, yet nonpersonal post. I foresee depending on your elemental constitution, this will reach the Water elements first. Let us not forget, music. Enjoy.
Heal
