For most people the word healing describes a goal-focused process akin to the healing of a cut in our skin: a localized process of hurt, inflammation, scabbing over, creation of new skin and retaining a faint or obvious scar.

Healing to me has a more layered meaning and is absolutely process-oriented not just goal-oriented.

In an interconnected web of existence, a world made up of on quantum particles and their potential for entanglement, as an organism within a complex interdependent ecosystem – healing is not limited to the individual being or organism nor solely dependent upon them. In other words, everything I do to heal myself feeds into the web of our shared existence, our collective consciousness, and affects my relational systems and engagements with All That Is. Equally all that is done by other aspects of the All affects and influences me via the field of consciousness.

Healing in my understanding is a life-long practice – it is not something that can be done in a few months or years (unless you look through a purely reductionist lens at localized physical ailments).

To me it entails being aware of our woundings, early childhood traumas, and what is often overlooked what was missing to support our healthy development. The trauma and developmental impairments afflicted on us through neglect are the hardest to notice and become aware of and yet their are often the most important aspects of our woundings in need of healing.

We need a certain level of psychological knowledge and developmental understanding to attain to our tender and wounded aspects skillfully, while also practicing being gentle, compassionate, and loving with all aspects of self. Gently ending internal wars, divisions, and other self sabotaging or self harming patterns we have learned.

It means questioning all we have learned and belief, researching and learning more about the things we hold strong beliefs on, contemplating and critically reflecting on our life experience and trying to find other ways of perceiving or framing our memories and stories.

In the process of healing we will find aspects, traits, skills, parts of us that we lost along the pathways of trauma, adaptation, and conditioning. We need to recognize, reclaim, nurture, and cultivate these to integrate them into a more whole and integrated version of ourselves.

Our perceptions are changed by this healing process as distortions from trauma lose their hold over our mind, and with new perceptions new layers of reality become visible and call for our awareness in engaging with them. More discernment makes itself available to us. And what once seemed black and white to our conditioned minds and hearts suddenly has multitudes of nuances of grey and colors.

Healing reclaims feeling. We feel more, we learn to engage with our emotions wisely, never suppressing them, nor fueling those which may burn or harm us. Learning about the pitfalls of being identified or lost in our emotions, to respect their power and bring in consciousness and intuition to help us channel and utilize their energy in service of our path and life as a whole.

We become appreciative observers of life within as without as life now reveals more and more of its subtle magic, humor and playfulness to us. Fear loses its grip over our thinking and feeling to regain its function as a navigational signal.

Learning to feel and think without identifying ourselves with emotions and thoughts, becoming more detached and yet more engaged. No longer being hijacked by tsunamis of emotions, blinded by limiting beliefs, we can be fully and sustainably present.

Healing is deeply relational. I concur with the notion that many of our woundings have been created in relationships and necessitate corrective or healing relationships to fully heal, as there is only little that can be done in the absence of relating in terms of healing. Being a mystic I would count all kinds of relationships as potential sources of healing, not just relationships with humans. One of my most powerful healing and corrective relationships is the one I have cultivates with Self (or higher self) and which is my most nurturing, loving, and joyful relationship.

Allowing energy to flow through us with less obstructions, having more spaciousness in choosing what to engage with and what to let pass us by in order to protect our wellbeing and expansive trajectory.

Healing is an ongoing process and journey for multidimensional beings, whose every change to one aspect of inner being affects all other parts and thereby calls for recalibration, adaptation of skills and practices, or cultivation of new skills. It is a premise for true growth, expansion, greatness, and change.

Once we have attended to ourselves enough, an inner knowing lets us know that moment, we will not only desire to share our tools, experiences, and knowledge but also be able to do so with the necessary awareness, discernment, and knowing to minimize potential obstruction or harm to others, while remaining open to keep learning and showing up better.

I feel myself transitioning from primary focus on personal healing to making collective healing my focus. Whatever form that may take or which adventures beckon along that new pathway are still unknown to me. But I hear the call clearly and delight in following it as intuition guides me.

Photography by Unknown

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Slowing experiences down to a crawl, sending them through new layers of inquiries into subconscious perceptions, subtle projections, and distortions. Acknowledging meanings of my creation and the feelings these cause, observing feelings about the caused feelings. Analyzing and clearly naming defensive behaviors and their underlying stories or fears. Giving the subconscious visible and tangible form to observe, know and play with consciously. Adding new layers of awareness to the original meanings and watching them transform, reframe, and create new feelings which no longer create internal conflict or blockages.

Aspects that were vague come into focus and are more susceptible to transformation through new data and the compassionate and loving gaze of consciousness.

I am gaining more clarity about what exactly triggers my survival patterns and have more choices in responding to them from a more congruent, integrated, and whole state.

Now I see why for the longest time the words of people too afraid to take a stand, have boundaries, express their principles, beliefs, and opinions carried little weight in my perception and feeling. Their praise often weak and inconsequential, their words feeling strangely empty and not worthy of attention. Lack of integrity and self love translates as a lack of truthfulness and trustworthiness to me.

How can someone who doesn’t love, stand up for themselves, live in true integrity or wholeness?
How can someone like this be trusted as a friend or more?
Will their capacity to abandon, betray, manipulate and lie to themselves not inevitably become the way they relate with me?

The child in me was surrounded by many incongruent people and could not have survived without several survival patterns. Yet survive she did- and has grown stronger and wiser from struggling with incongruences.

It feels great to have new tools to dismantle the mental and emotional residues of this aspect of past trauma. Intuitively guided and paced I am unpacking patterns ready for change. Teaching myself new practices to resource myself well for these inquiries and seedings of more congruence. Congruence, I have always sought and appreciated wherever I found it, even if expressing in ways I do not concur with.

Incongruence, even when expressing values and perceptions I share, has always set off my warrior into a protective or hostile stance. My senses are acutely attuned to picking up on incongruence, as my system sees it as the hallmark of the worst of relational harm and pain I experienced. Even if I do not comment on it, I pick up with ease when the spoken words are in conflict with the body language or the frequency of another has the distortion of contradictory or conflicting stances expressing concurrently. I might not interpret their meaning correctly but I do sense the lack of congruence, which takes away from my trust in the person and lets me take their words with a huge grain of salt. Thinking to myself I shall believe your words when I see them in consistent embodied action.

Now I also realize that incongruence was not addressed and healed in most NVC practitioners I have met. It might be helpful to get some there eventually or serve them in gaining a practice of empathic relating. Yet it misses its point to me when the underlying incongruences of the person stay invisible and unaddressed. And the formulaic approach- using another layer of artifice to rectify what at its core is an artifice just does not resonate or make much sense to my being. Don’t get me wrong, I support people’s choice in their tools of growth even if it does not resonate with me. As long as they abstain from attempts at coercing or manipulating me into lifeless artifices and what feels like stilted inauthenticity to me, I am good.

Now, I get to choose how I want to meet incongruence.
Do I even want to respond to it, and if so how?
Do I ignore it, while noting the incongruence, and move on with my life?
Do I engage in a process of making the incongruence visible to the other?
When is it appropriate to do this emotional labor, for and with another, and when is it better, for both of us, to bow out?

To do this emotional labor means to open myself up to deeper intimacy with the other.
Do I really want more intimacy with that person?
Will said intimacy cost me down the road?

Currently I do not see the need for depth of intimacy with everyone I like or love.

Which is surely owed in parts to aspects of my being who are avoidant and see intimacy as potentially dangerous, or as burdensome when intimacy is expected, coerced, manipulatively invoked. Yet there is another aspect to it for me. Time and social energy are limited in my human experience and I like to consciously choose where to invest these in alignment with my purpose and evolution. Social contracts among humans make intimacy into a sort of contract of fulfilling other people’s expectation or needs whenever they arise or hazard harming the connection by not being available for it.
For the past years I have only selectively been willing, and resourced enough, to be in deeper intimacy with people- selective on the people and the moments I am open to it. And it has done me a world of good to be deliberate and deny automatisms of habit or social constructs. I am not ready to give away this hard earned spaciousness and freedom without prompts from Spirit or seeing true value in doing so.

This is a period of stepping into a novel chapter of life for me, new skills want to be gained, integration and cohesion want to be upgraded to level up to what comes next. Not everybody can be a part or witness of this process, only select energies are supportive or aligned with this becoming.
Healing needs it protected spaces, growth needs conducive surroundings, expansion needs spaciousness. Some parts of the path need to be walked alone, some fellow travelers cannot accompany us on new paths as they have diverging paths to walk.

Maybe somewhere down the road I will be open for this depth of intimacy with incongruent people without a need for congruence on their part? I quite like that evolutionary idea…

Until I get there I shall side-step external incongruence and its draining effects on my wellbeing, while attending to transforming inner incongruence into greater integrity, wholeness and balance.

Image by Venuskind

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