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The Path of Healing

The Path of Healing

by | Feb 24, 2020 | Anxiety, Depression, Depth Psychology, integration, Mental Health, Relationship to Self, Self development, Shadow Work, Systemic Family Constellations | 6 comments

Art by Aitch

Art by Aitch

In the West, our understanding of the processes of repair and regeneration has been conditioned by the medical model and its inbuilt treatment paradigm. This paradigm has spread beyond the medical profession, becoming the dominant model of how we relate to all discomfort, illness and health. Due to this internalized value system, healing has been a shamed and exiled word in psychology and most of psychotherapy, despite its relevance to these fields. Denied as primitive and incompatible with the realms of science and its inherent status and power that these fields aspire to, healing’s intuitive wisdom has been replaced by ‘clinical knowledge’ and ‘evidence-based’ practices. But when we attend to matters of the heart and the soul we need to work in greater depth. Scales, generalized measures and questionnaires do not penetrate deep enough to reach a person’s soul on its unique journey.

Treatment rests on the principles of exclusion while healing relies on the powers of inclusion. In treatment, what is seen as painful and undesirable, bothersome or even un-dignifying is fragmented from the whole and treated in isolation. Symptoms and ailments are medicated out of existence while the rest of the person is to carry on unchanged, as before. In healing work, we follow the movements of inclusion. We take symptoms seriously and embark on a relationship with them. We animate them and give them voice to converse with. We give them their space in exchange for their messages and wisdom. Rather than bothersome or superfluous, they are honored as messengers of the soul, in service of our own unconscious depths.

The way of approaching symptoms in the treatment model is aligned with an individualistic worldview that sees parts of any system as separate and autonomous from the whole they belong in. Healing follows a systemic worldview, where every part of the system bears an impact on the whole; any individual movement will affect the wider network it is an intrinsic part of. It recognizes the cause and effect of interconnectedness within the wider ecosystem of the Self and its surroundings. What is suppressed and excluded does not simply disappear, it returns in different forms. Until we receive and process the messages of our symptoms, the messengers will keep on coming. The process will need to repeat itself until we support the necessary changes that will allow a deeper order to be formed; a deeper sense of Self to emerge.

In the treatment paradigm, the agency is located primarily outside of us. It rests with a doctor, or a pill, or a course of treatment that we hope will free us from our unwanted symptoms. However, in the healing paradigm the primary agency rests inside of us. We might use pointers and guides from the outside, but the keys remain inside ourselves and the healing journey takes place firmly within. While entering our process of healing, we have to tread the paradox of retaining our agency whilst surrendering to the process within. This surrendering summons the inner healer that exists within the depths of us all, the one that knows what is truly needed and what is ready to be discarded, the one that carries nature’s wisdom through our bones. In the healing process, rather than stay who we were, we must shift and grow in new directions, becoming other aspects and versions of ourselves, rooted in greater service to our wholeness.

Treatment modalities render the emerging inner movement incomplete. Whatever has risen to meet us has been suppressed never to be truly seen or known. Whatever unconscious fact has been carried by our symptoms into consciousness has been silenced and its integration into consciousness remains incomplete. In healing, inner movements are followed through to completion as we strive to receive the guidance of our unconscious through our symptoms. Whilst in treatment the unconscious remains a separate and excluded part of the process, healing rests on a firm collaboration between our conscious and unconscious selves, with input from both and integration of the two.

Treatment engages the superficial layers of our being whereas healing engages us in much deeper ways, integrating the embodied, cognitive, emotional and spiritual dimensions of the Self. It often requires us to undertake a journey of deep inner transformation, as we move through to our core and undertake the treacherous journey back towards the surface. While the treatment paradigm follows a mechanical and linear path of progression that aims to keep the person as they were before, minus what they are treating, healing modalities embrace the cyclical nature of the inner journey and require of us nothing less than entering the cycles of death and rebirth. Death is not to be kept at bay, it is to be allowed as a natural and necessary part of the process; as a guide for awakening to a greater wisdom of how to live our lives in greater truth and fullness.

A treatment informed process rests on an overarching diagnostic story that moves towards specific goals and outcomes. It emphasizes remaining in control and moving through a set of certainties. A healing informed process rests on the interweaving of multiple and multilayered stories and works on a much wider scope. It is not aiming to remove our wounds, it is seeking to bring them back into a fertile state that supports further growth and life to spring out of them. This is an ongoing process, and whereas treatment exists at a fixed point in time, our engagement with the movements of healing is a lifelong journey that requires us to engage with the fullness of Self throughout our lives and its various cycles. The goal is the inner unfurling that occurs during the journey rather than the destination. It is a path that holds no certainties and rests on surrendering and on deep inner listening to what is ripe to emerge. A process that moves organically through both seeker and guide.  In contrast to the treatment modality that holds a clear boundary between patient and expert, the healing process is a joined journey between seeker and healer and has to move through both of them. Carl Jung has said:

“The meeting of two personalities is like the contact of two chemical substances: if there is any reaction, both are transformed”.

When life shakes our sense of wellbeing on any level, treatment might well be what is called for. Alongside treatment, healing might also be a necessary part of our way in and through. To keep engaging with the symbolic layers of life and the meaning making function us humans can thrive on, is to engage with the intuitive and the non-linear wisdom that lays within us. So far, the two modalities have been territorial and defensively dismissive of each other. Despite their differences, they both spring from a desire to be of service and to find ways to restore the human capacity or spirit, which are never really that far apart from each other. They need to work in close proximity as they are both of the world of repair and regeneration, but like the yin and yang, their different offerings bridge the opposites of this world. While treatment smooths over the cracks, healing is of the cracks. While treatment carries the burdens of its work in the container of certainty, healing trusts what emerges in the spaces of vulnerable uncertainty. This is not a call for integration between the two modalities, it is a call for respectful collaboration based on their particular remits; an acknowledgement of their individual limitations and strengths and a recognition that one cannot replace the other.

Nature’s Cyclical Wisdom: Autumn

Nature’s Cyclical Wisdom: Autumn

by | Oct 1, 2018 | Anxiety, Depression, Ecotherapy, integration, Nature and Self, Relationship to Self, Self development | 0 comments

Image by Daniel Taylor

Image by Daniel Taylor

Modern life has alienated us from nature and that has cost us a disconnection from our own inmost nature. The seasonal cycles are life-sustaining and attending to them can enrich us and resource us for meeting life’s demands. The cyclical rhythms of the seasons reflect the movements of change, transition, loss, death, grief and regeneration, the universal and most ubiquitous challenges of life. Living a life informed by the cyclical wisdom of nature’s movements is to live mindfully in connection with the world around us, weaving the threads between inner and outer, finding reflections of us outward and outward reflections in us. We are, after all, made of nature and its rhythms and wisdom reside deeply within us.

Autumn is a season between seasons, a transitioning space between what was before and what’s ahead, between summer and winter. On one end autumn is the season of the last harvest and on the other end it is the season of letting go and dying. It is the dance between gratitude and grief, life and death. It holds the tension between light and darkness, as the days are getting shorter and the nights are getting longer, crossing the threshold of holding the two in perfect balance during the equinox. It is this tension we are called to attend to in our lives during autumn, by finding ways to harness the nourishing dimensions of life, as well as death. By honoring and embracing both for their fertile powers.

On one end of its spectrum autumn is a reflective season. It is the time when earth gives us the last harvest that will sustain us during the dark winter months. In our lives, this is the harvest from the seeds we planted and the dreams we built throughout the year. This is the time to reflect and consolidate on what we have achieved so far and assess what fruits of life have matured enough to nourish us in exchange for our efforts. It is the time for channeling contemplation and gratitude into creative inspiration for the months ahead.

On the other end of its spectrum autumn is the season that begins the great letting go. Earth releases what has completed its cycle, to become the fertile soil for life to come. For us, this is a time to relinquish what we might carry that no longer serves us, or holds us back. To create space for new growth, for attitudes, projects, people, relationships that will nurture and support us in our life ahead. What we let go of, becomes the compost of things ahead. We let go in service of life.

If we attend to the cycles of life, death and rebirth in nature its important lessons about these edges of life can infuse in us through our senses. In autumn nature speaks to us through the rustling of leaves, the cool dry air, the golden colored trees, the woody smell of earth. It tells us that death is part of life and the path of regeneration. It supports us in surrendering to our own shedding. This shedding is a process of separation and autumn is the season of grief and a time that can evoke our own grief and calls on us to attend to it. This might be grief that has accumulated throughout the year or in some cases throughout a lifetime.

Grief is not to be done with and disposed of. Grief is to be allowed to move in us, through us, with us until it is ready to give way for new life to grow around it. Grief is to be felt and lived, until it too becomes compost for our personal growth. Because as long as we live, life will call on us and it is on us to listen. As the seasons well know, there is a time for life and there is a time for death, there is a time to bloom and a time to wither. Nature can teach us how we can open our hearts to shedding our leaves, in trust that when the time is right, new ones will come to take their place.  

Find some space in this season, within yourself, to acknowledge the growth and death that has moved through you from the beginning of the year. To harvest the last ripe crops of the year and to create space and rituals to let go of what no longer serves. And like the plant world, to put the energy in your roots, your foundations, while you prepare to go deep into the dark months ahead.

Tending to our Connection to Self

Tending to our Connection to Self

by | May 1, 2018 | Anxiety, Depression, integration | 0 comments

Art by Jiwoon Pak

Art by Jiwoon Pak

In our fast-paced societies and busy lifestyles we have lost the art of inner stillness and deep listening to ourselves, to who we are or who we are becoming. We  tell ourselves we don’t have time but the real obstacle is in our discomfort of being intimate with ourselves, our thoughts, our needs, our true essence.

We tend to fill our time alone with screens and phone calls, with to-do lists and future plans, and we have unknowingly mastered the art of distraction. We operate from a state of doing avoiding the surrender to a state of being. When was the last time you took yourself out on a date? When was the last time you sat yourself down for an honest talk about how life feels? When was the last time you created the space for conscious self-intimacy? Deep knowing comes from a place of connection. This is where we get to know ourselves a little bit better, where we calibrate our inner compass of right and wrong, of true and false, of light and shadow.

We have learned to value the outer world at the expense of our inner riches. We get engrossed in how we look from the outside with little compassion or connection from the inside. And in that state of internal alienation it is no wonder that the mind, body and soul send us messengers to reach our disengaged attention. These messengers often come in the form of symptoms, accidents, diagnoses and misalignments of all sorts. They move us in the presence of things we realize we don’t know about ourselves and have little control over.

In a society that hasn’t taught us how to trust and attend to the difficult parts of the human experience we have developed a collective muscle of instinctively trying to push discomfort away. We want the depression to go, anxiety to vanish, life to go back to how we think it ought to be. And in that ‘no’ movement we deny the most precious gifts of life. Because to follow life’s treacherous paths is to learn a lot about ourselves and how we exist internally and externally. To trust our symptoms as our guides and teachers into the inner unknown is to be edged nearer to who we truly are. And to be the self we truly are is an enormous act of liberation from the tyranny of the false self.

To love oneself is the start of a life-long romance.

– by Oscar Wilde

Our personal crises are always meaningful and serve a deeper purpose than what the surface of their symptoms let us see. They pave the way for transformation, taking us on a journey towards a new path in life. Tending to our connection to Self allows us to become that little bit more solid, that little bit more grounded, that little bit more rooted into the soil of our true self.

In our communities today, we need safe spaces that can support us in the challenge and practice of slowing down. That can teach us how to trust our wounds and vulnerabilities and tend to them with honoring compassion. Safe spaces that can initiate us in the art of self-love, self-care, and self-intimacy, opening us up to a deep appreciation of who we truly are and of the path we are treading.