Some Things I’ve Learned About Healing
I’m sharing a few things I’ve learned after weathering several years of healing from chronic illness. Healing is incredibly individual, so take what’s helpful, ignore what’s not! I’m sharing this in hopes that it may help someone else out there.
1. Healing is a highly individual process. It brings to light long-standing patterns, fears, and traumas so they can be addressed and let go of. This means that no two healing experiences are the same, since all our life journeys and challenges are different. Something that resonates with one person (diet, medicine, modality etc.) may be useless to another.
2. As the internal landscape changes, so do the external circumstances. In fact, all changes in the physical sense are preceded by changes in the energetic field. As values shift internally, there may be external changes mirroring that shift: perhaps a change in career path, or a shift in friend groups. People often find change threatening, so there may be a natural chasm in some relationships. However, as one lets go, it always allows space for welcoming something new. Trusting your path, knowing that what is leaving is meant to, and what is arriving will be to your favor can be very powerful.
3. Healing takes time, and it takes place on its own timeline. With chronic conditions, symptoms build over time, in addition to often being ignored for years before being addressed. Something so long-term isn’t going to be healed overnight. Rushing healing can also be very damaging. There’s a process to healing that involves breaking down, followed by rebuilding. We know rebuilding takes time, but so does the process of breaking down the old. The body does this as it feels ready to do so. Too much, too fast can flood the body with more than it can handle.
4. Things tend to get worse before they get better. Speaking of breaking down the old, and then rebuilding, that’s exactly how the process goes. So, when long-standing patterns are confronted, it may bring up a host of issues that someone had managed to keep mostly at bay for many years. This may be why many people ignore symptoms for as long as they can. Healing takes a lot of work, and is highly inconvenient.
5. Only you can heal you. One of the gifts of healing is that it forces you to listen to yourself and get to know yourself in a new way. You may seek out many healing practitioners to help you in your process, but only you know which ones you need at which point, and for how long. Practitioners can hold space for you, but your own body and self is doing the act of healing.
6. On the other side of control is freedom. It can be very tempting to want to control the healing process, or to be attached to certain outcomes. But, if you give that up, you can just be in the moment, with whatever is present now. Healing is very humbling, in its nonlinear fashion. One week you may be improving, just to regress the next week. It’s all part of the process. As long as the general trend is up (whether that be over days, weeks, or months), you’re on the right track.
7. Things can evolve quickly. What may have helped you for several months may suddenly not feel useful anymore. Healing is literally growth and change, so as that happens, it’s important to ask what you/ your body needs in this moment.
8. What you tell yourself is important. Labels may be important to help with understanding, but I see them as a stepping stone that should be set aside at some point. Finally admitting that I had a chronic condition was helpful, so that I could finally give it the attention and weight it demanded. (As with most things, awareness is key.) However, as I got better, I had to set that label down, and start telling myself that I was “healing” and eventually even “healthy” and “strong”. The words we use internally are very powerful.
9. The process is a gift. The healing process encompasses getting to know yourself, relying on yourself and trusting yourself; staying grounded in uncertainty, and facing old fears. Though we often want to jump to the being better part, going through the process is an essential learning opportunity. It will change your life if you let it — and if you embrace it, it may just lead you to a better life than you ever thought possible.
10. The body and emotions speak in metaphors; symptoms are clues. I’ve found Traditional Chinese Medicine to be very spot-on in this regard. Western medicine looks at structures, mechanics, and symptoms (which all have an important time and place). TCM looks at the body in harmony with your entire life experience and patterns of nature. Getting curious about symptoms, and asking questions like: “when does this arise?”, “what’s happening in my life that might be prompting it?”, “when does it get better/when does it get worse?”, can all be very illuminating. Essentially, “what is this trying to teach me”?
As an example, I’ll quickly share that for a time I was having episodes of panic on the subway – most reliably on the run between Brooklyn and Manhattan. Once I got curious about that, I realized that being underground in a subway car under the East River is the most “trapped” that I could physically be in my day-to-day life. It was a real-life manifestation of my fear of feeling powerless. Understanding this let me begin to work with those feelings and limiting beliefs.
11. Movement is essential... The body remembers our emotions and stores them. This has been researched perhaps most notably by writers like Peter Levine and Bessel van der Kolk (of The Body Keeps the Score). To unleash those stored emotions (and traumas), movement has to occur. The body and emotions are linked, so you can either start by unraveling emotions (often through therapy) and tuning into the corresponding body’s releases, or start with the body (bodywork), and listening to what may arise.
12. …as is stillness. Listening to the body, and giving it your full attention lets you tune into subtleties. Meditation has been essential for me, but your experience may vary. Many chronic conditions can take hold because we’re conditioned as a society to ignore the body so strongly — to value productivity over all else. The body does speak in subtleties, so it takes some practice to tune in. The good news is that it quickly gets easier once you make the intention of listening. Even just setting the intention can be very useful.
13. Having a goal can help. How will you use your health? Answering this question allows you to have an intention for your healing. Think about any goal in life: the intention behind it is the thing that motivates us. Of course we’re all human, so we naturally want to feel good and healthy – but is there more? Do you want to be more present for your family, start a business, or give back in some way? What goal can you remind yourself of when you’re having days when you feel scared, or exhausted, or in pain?
14. Health is dynamic, not a fixed state. We’re always in a flux of moving toward greater health or away from it. There’s no destination to attain, it’s just a matter of evaluating where you are in the present moment, and where that falls on the health/illness spectrum. The decisions and actions we make daily add up and shift this needle in either direction over time.
May you remember that you are limitless.