Unshaming Your Healing Journey

Image from paigebradley.com

Words like progress, increase, prosperity, growth, upgrade, expand, and improve dominate the current healing and psychological paradigms. 

However, these words express only one slice of the soul’s energy and our healing paths, which include moments of regression, decay, feeling worse, depression, falling apart, and even dying. 

This one sided “positive” paradigm is not only rather adolescent and entangled with capitalistic fantasies (e.g., more is better), it also insults the soul, shames our actual healing journey, and makes it more painful to truly transition or transform – processes that always include both directions. 

Consider not only light and shadow, but shadow in the midst of light and light in the midst of shadow. Sometimes we fall down to get up, lose our riches to find our true gold, become ill to heal, fall apart to become more whole, die (at least a bit) to be reborn. 

Comparing this to conventional thinking about healing can be confusing. 

When we witness our symptoms, our difficulties, the conventional mind says, “I need to get rid of you, fix you, remove you. You are the cause of my troubles.”

“No”, the deep voice of symptom replies, “I am your energy. I am your gift. I am your intelligence. I am a messenger. I am the medicine, not the illness. I am you.”

“Then why do you cause me so much pain and suffering dear symptom?”

“Because I am unfree. I am suppressed, oppressed, put down, marginalized, dissed, neglected.”

“Ah, you mean you are not the problem. It is the forces against you that create suffering?”

“Yes!”

What keeps this confusion, this blindness going? What keeps us thinking that the illness is our addictions, eating habits, tummy troubles, anger, anxiety, etc. instead of thinking that our illnesses are our lack of freedom, our suppression?

SHAME

Shame says, “it is not your nature that needs to be freed; not your intelligence that needs to be listened to, not your beauty that needs to be seen, what needs to be seen is that something is wrong with you.”

Most of us believe shame’s voice and take our symptom to healers to remedy. But it is shame that makes us sick. 

The wisdom, the deep intelligence that lives inside you is the medicine. 

Let’s look at your wounds / symptoms as the place that the light gets in (Rumi). 

Homage to one of my teachers, David Bedrick,   https://www.davidbedrick.com