The Healing Stage
There’s been a lot of talk recently around what people are calling “The Healing Stage,” and to be frank, it’s something I’m referencing a lot too, but what does it really mean?
I think healing can mean many different things to many different people depending on your personal experiences. However, I like to think that generally you might consider the following common themes: What are you healing from? Who is the person that you’re healing towards (what do you envision for your healed self)?
I don’t think it’s any secret on this blog, but I’ve spent a good portion of my year in the healing stage. However, many of you might not know that healing, for me, wasn’t just about the present pain in my life, but about years of unpacking and unlearning things that no longer serve me today.
For me, healing is about noticing the patterns that have been in place since I was very young and reconciling how I was supposed to act with how I truly felt, in a way that allows me to move forward without projecting my unconscious biases onto others. It’s about finding confidence in myself and learning to trust myself to make the decisions that are right for me—and also owning those decisions.
While I don’t necessarily allow my boundaries to be crossed that often anymore, it’s happened on a handful of occasions in my adult life, and my responses, based on my conditioning growing up, have consistently resulted in some of the most painful moments of my journey so far. Seeing this pattern play out over decades has made me realize that most of the pain I’ve experienced in my life is a result of not unlearning those habits and allowing others to disrespect my thoughts, values and boundaries, as well as me compromising on those beliefs.
When I ask myself what I am healing from, the two things that come to mind are respecting my boundaries and not tolerating disrespect for them or my person. It sounds obvious, but we all come across moments of weakness that, for whatever reason, make us question ourselves and this is what creates the opportunity for inches to become miles with regards to what we allow ourselves to tolerate.
As I reflect deeply on where I’ve been and what I’ve experienced, my healing is about giving myself permission to trust myself more. To not allow other people to tell me how I should feel about or how I should act in a way that’s right for me, and to prevent those inches from becoming miles, i.e. not granting people access to your energy or time when they show you they are not willing to respect your requirements for a relationship with you.
This is, in a way, a return to the baseline of who you are as an individual. So to an extent, I do believe that a certain degree of self-awareness is required to heal. If you haven’t come a place where you’re willing and able to tackle your traumas, you may just end up going through a “spiritual” phase, which is now a popularized term for simply finding yourself, which is fine, but it is a very different—and at times, much more confusing— point in the journey.
Healing is making peace with your inner you, or as some psychology texts would suggest, your childhood you, and that is what allows you to begin to complete the picture of your person.
It’s being able to look at the different yous in your life and understand that they’re all the same and yet different from who you are in the present moment, and then absorbing them into one whole “You” that becomes a “healed” or more complete version of who you envision yourself to be.
I believe we all have an inner light that we’re born with. We tend to lose sight of it over time, simply because of the trials of the world that we live in, but that light never fades and calls out whenever we compromise ourselves.
In reality, the healing stage, it turns out, isn’t about becoming something better, or someone you’re not, but more about giving yourself permission to greet the person you are deep down inside, becoming more aligned with the milestones and experiences in your life, and moving away from the behaviours that compromise your beliefs. It’s about reconciling the parts of you that you know to be true and not allowing others to creep doubt onto it and influence your beliefs, values or boundaries.
It’s about understanding that how you feel about the way people treat you is valid, and that no one should have a right to invalidate that or trample over your boundaries for their own satisfactions and agendas. It’s about giving yourself the grace to walk away from something that no longer serves you because of guilt, attachment or duty.
I’ve found that meanness or abrasive behaviour comes from the parts of yourself seeking for acknowledgment, that seek to feed the ever-hungry Ego, or to fill the Void. It causes us to lash out and cause pain to others from the incompleteness we feel within ourselves.
Though we have been through pain, we have the choice not to unleash it onto others.
Though we have all experienced disrespect, we have the choice to set it down and not let it define us.
Though we have all been cut, we have the choice not to bleed over people who never caused it.
The size and depth of our pain does not define who we are or the future we build. We all have it within us to return to the Light that we always were in the beginning.
It had never left us.
The choice is ours. It always has been.
If you’re also living a reality where healing is your journey right now, maybe it’s worth asking yourself: What am I healing from and who who is it that I wish to become?
