The Spiritual Journey

The spiritual journey is individual, highly personal. It can't be organized or regulated. It isn't true that everyone should follow one path. Listen to your own truth.

It is as though some old part of yourself wakes up in you, terrified, useless in the life you have, its skills and habits destructive but intact, and what is left of the present you, the person you have become, wilts and shrivels in sadness or despair: the person you have become is only a thin shell over this other, more electric and endangered self. 

The strongest, the least digested parts of your experience can rise up and put you back where you were when they occurred; all the rest of you stands back and weeps.

Triggers are like little psychic explosions that crash through avoidance and bring the dissociated, avoided trauma suddenly, unexpectedly, back into consciousness. 

Healing is messy, as well as beautiful. It is heart wrenching and uncomfortable.

Healing takes courage and strength.

Healing is moving from feeling like a victim to knowing we are a survivor.

Healing is finding our voice, even after it was stuffed down for so many years.

Healing is not a lovely ascension into comfort and wellness to be experienced once and forevermore. 

Healing yourself is the most uncomfortable, disruptive, important thing you will ever do.

Healing yourself is returning to your most natural state, which is hungry for personal freedom, irreverent to the suffocating opinions of others, creates without doubt, shows up without fear, and loves without stipulations and agreements and conditions. Who you truly are is at once the best version of yourself you might not have ever imagined, and the most essential version of yourself that you have always been.

And getting to that place?

It requires a lot.

Healing requires you to take an honest inventory of your grudges and aggressions and the wells of longing and fear you’ve been ignoring all this time. It requires you to take stock of exactly, precisely what is wrong with your life, so you can work to make it right. It requires you to be completely honest about how you really feel, and then it requires you to actually feel it. 

Healing requires you to feel the deep heartache lingering in you, instead of subconsciously re-creating the experience so you have an outlet to release it. Healing is no longer trying to sanitize your experience, to cleanse it until it is made perfect. Healing requires you to go through the full expression of every emotion that you cut off and buried when you decided you were no longer comfortable with it. 

Healing requires you to face every ounce of darkness within you, because just beneath what appears to be an impermeable barrier is complete, radical, total freedom. When you are no longer scared to feel anything, when you no longer resist any one part of your life, something magical happens: you find peace.

Nature is constantly remaking you, yet you hold onto old energy through your emotions.

Your mind, your thoughts, aren't physical and nature can't heal or recycle them.

Only you can do that ... when you're willing to let go of them.