What Does It Take To Heal?

What Does It Take to Heal?
By Linda McCarrin, BA, Certified Holistic Life Coach

Healing isn’t a science. There’s no time frame, control or variable as in an 8th grade experiment. There are no instructions that come with it. There are libraries of books on the topic, but when you get right down to it, healing happens differently for every person. Each of us has a different time table and different ways of expressing our pain. Often we feel powerless when we are trying to make sense out of a hurt. However, what we don’t realize, what most of us have not been taught, is what to do in the aftermath.

There are some simple things we can do for ourselves and others if we just get
“out of our own way.” By giving ourselves permission to FEEL the pain and
discomfort, we then stop resisting. It is when we stop resisting that the discomfort
will begin to stop. Think about when you have a headache, your neck is tight, your
jaw is clenched. But when you relax, breathe deeper, and let the jaw drop, the pain
of the headache begins to disappear.

Think of your relationship with someone that has been persistently annoying. Every
time you see that person, have to talk with that person you immediately go into
dis-ease. Your mind says “I don’t like her.” “He is always ‘that way.’" Your mind is
on an ego trip! It will keep you in a fear-based mentality based on previous
experiences…and it may not even be THAT person with whom you had the original
mishap. But in BEING with that individual, the original experience is repeated time
and again.

So, you ask, “What am I to do?” You allow yourself to FEEL the pain, FEEL what is
bothering you and USE it as an opportunity to heal what was originally hurt. For
example, if I stub my toe and it hurts for 5 minutes…all I’ve done is stub my toe.
But! If it hurts for 5 hours, 5 days, 5 months, 5 years…I have an infected toe!! I
have a wound that was not healed a long time ago. And as the Scottish priest was
said, “It’s the ting, behind the ting, behind the ting.” The pain you are experiencing
now is something that happened a long time ago.

But why does it hurt more during times of celebration, the holidays, the birthdays
and anniversaries? Personally, I think these times are MEANT to do that very thing.
If we didn’t have something to jolt us out of our unconscious states, we’d never
have an opportunity to heal ourselves, our families, our co-workers, our community,
our planet. More healing happens because more pain & discomfort comes up.

Just like a volcano that lays dormant or mildly active from time to time, so too do
we, human beings, act in much the very same way. We disallow ourselves to feel
the anger, frustration, and disappointment in our lives. We don’t give ourselves
permission to build healthy boundaries in order to keep ourselves from people who
we know may upset us or be in direct opposition to our values. We don’t go to the
right person, at the right time, and with the correct intensity to state our case.
Instead, we prefer to go to someone else, ally them with our thinking, thus “building
a case” for ourselves. And in so doing we now have our own army to help us defend
our positions, our rationalizations, our “right-ness.” Will we ever learn to communicate
willingly and diplomatically with one another?

That, my friends, will not happen until people allow themselves to Feel their Feelings
and let it be “okay.” That could take another several hundred thousand years while
warring peoples wipe one another out, or it could take only a decade for that to occur.
None of us can determine that so let’s look at the “aftermath.” Sometimes we can be
in the middle of a volcanic eruption and be “unconscious” to what’s really happening.
We’re so caught up with the drama of the intensity that we miss the real issue.
Our family, neighborhood, community, state or country can be in pain or crises and if
we don’t pay attention, how can we know what is really going on?

What about the climate of the relationship amongst the people involved? If we
unintentionally spew forth our wrath with others, if we say things at the wrong time
or place and with the wrong amount of intensity, we can do more damage and thus
take longer to repair, reinstate, and re-establish what had been there before.

I suggest this:

Feeling your Feelings. If you are angry, feel it. If you don’t you will go into the
emotional block of “Blame.” You will generally feel betrayed. Admit that you’re angry,
feel it and act on it in this manner:

1. Go to the right person
2. Go at the right time
3. Go with the right degree of intensity & explain your feelings
4. Use “I” statements…stay in 1st Party “I am so angry about…”
By using this method you will be more “conscious” of your own feelings and how
you use them. In time, the “The Law of Attraction” will ignite your conscious efforts
into ACTION by teaching someone else how to react appropriately because you
have given them permission to feel their own feelings by feeling your own. The
benefits are far reaching.

You feel better because you have built better boundaries for yourself. You “own”
your own feelings. You’ve taught someone else that it’s not so scary to say the
truth and you’ve taught someone else how to do the same. And in time, based on
the “The Law of Attraction,” your positive energy will have far greater success in
reaching people who are more interested in being “right” than in learning something.
Who knows, by putting our ego’s aside you may even impact the devastating
effects of one nation proving to be “more right” than the other. You could shorten
the “aftermath” of the volcano around this planet.