Healing Is Always Available.
Trust the ground beneath your feet.
Truth: Healing is always available.
We were born with the healing power of the cosmos stored in the fibers of our muscles, infused into the marrow of our bones.
The physiological mechanics of healing are knit into our neurons and dendrites. The complex recipe of healing is baked into the neurotransmitters constantly traversing the synapses of our nervous system. The neural pathways are ready to be laid down, their grooves primed to be worn smooth with repeated practice.
We arrived on this earth possessing all the ingredients for regulation we will ever need.
Yes, healing is always close enough to touch. It’s inside our bodies, pulsing through our blood, in the air we breathe, and the ground beneath our feet. An undeniable birthright.
No, healing may not always feel accessible.
The ability to grasp the potential for healing depends on a complex combination of capacity, resourcing, willingness, and ability.
The opportunity to access and integrate the sort of regulation our bodies were made for isn’t guaranteed, or even possible.
I’ll never toxic positive or spiritual bypass that very real truth.
But yes, healing is *always* available.
If I skip yoga for six months, my mat does not disappear, nor does the muscle memory of the shapes my body takes in vinyasa or the ocean throat cadence of pranayama breath vanish.
If I don’t write for weeks on end, the words and all they lead me to are always waiting for me to spill them onto the page.
If I go a long time without planting my feet on the desert mountain that is my church, the trails will still remind me how to pray as soon as root myself to the earth, no matter how long I’ve been away.
If I can no longer feel love (from myself, from another, from the collective) the universal balance of love has not diminished in the slightest.
If my nervous system has been dysregulated for longer than I can remember, I can trust that my body still holds the codes for regulation and recovery.
Even when I cannot see or sense the path anywhere around me—when it’s obscured by a haze of my own making, or blocked by the rubble of the collateral damage of living—it still exists.
Healing (and by this I mean the opportunity for continually increasing regulation, resourcing, and intimacy with and remembrance of self) is an infinite resource.
A steady and reliable pulse.
It is inherently count-on-able in potential and possibility.
No. That doesn’t mean it’s easy to reach out and grasp it. Nor is holding it close a simple matter, even once you’ve felt it in your palms.
Healing is a slippery and elusive element, to be sure. Sometimes frustratingly, achingly so.
And walking the path even when you’ve found it and managed to stay on it for a bit? Ridiculously, agonizingly slow.
Two steps forward, one step back, are we ever gonna get there?
(Answer: no. That’s not how it works, not unless you plan on calling a halt to this whole experiment of living).
There’s no X marking the spot for OFFICIALLY AND ETERNALLY HEALED on the treasure map of life. No holy grail of final arrival at our destination all fixed and patched, never to be wounded again.
(If only).
But, sometimes it is enough to remember that the possibility of healing exists eternally. Unchangeably. That this is the blueprint of our existence.
Despite the poetic truth of all of that, the actual dance is equal parts chaos and grace. It is missing steps and tripping over our own feet and landing on our asses, dazed and confused.
How the hell did we do all that work only to return HERE again?
Truth: 46 years into my journey and I likely grapple and flail and fall apart just as often as I ever did.
I get messy and insecure and moan and wail my woes to the universe.
I feel needy and uncertain and seek reassurance from the outside instead of sourcing it from within.
I get painfully attached to my own angsty storyline and spin into rumination.
I become far too invested in the utterly foolish notion that I can control the future by obsessing on the present.
I get so damn afraid of losing the good that sometimes it might look like I’m the one pushing it away.
God, how achingly human I am.
How achingly human we all are.
But still, I trust in myself.
I have faith that the healing pathways I have walked countless times continue to exist, even when obscured (by trauma or anxiety or self-sabotage or just my own stubborn insistence on my own misery).
I have a deep-rooted knowing that the home I have built for myself is a safe one, with a strong foundation and open doors. There’s a bubbling pot of soup on the stove, a mug of hot tea ready to go for all who are invited in, and piles of cozy blankets perfect for cuddling and co-regulation.
I know that when I can’t sense the way home at all—when I feel like I can’t feel the ground beneath my feet and the waters are rising until I’m neck-deep in the raw totality of it all—what I really need to do take a deep breath, dive deep, muster my strength and swim.
Last week I had a tarot card reading that reminded me that often when I am kicking and panicking in the deep end of life and I feel like I need to swim with all my might just to stay alive, I am actually called to stretch my toes to reach for the bottom. To understand that no matter how convinced I was that I was about to be sucked into the undertow, safety was within my reach all along.
The truth is, we’re not often so much in danger of drowning. We just get caught up in the panic that we might, no matter how strong of a swimmer we really are.
Fact 1: I’m a damn strong swimmer. So are you.
Fact 2: Panic can take down the strongest of swimmers, even in shallow water.
Quite often, processing our way through the things that hurt has less to do with holding strong emotions close or fighting to move against the current (of grief or fear or trauma) and more to do with naming, honoring, and releasing it all to the current while we invest ourselves in the important work of finding the ground beneath our feet.
Once we find ground on the bottom of the ocean, the floodwaters often recede—taking with them the panic and the anxiety and all that need for outside validation of what will always be an inner journey.
So this is me, touching down.
And as I do, I remember how this goes—because I’ve done it before.
I’ll go from flailing to wobbly. Wobbly to trusting my breath. And then it’s just a matter of placing one foot in front of the other.
Trusting the grooves worn by subsequent journeys.
The breadcrumbs I left for myself to help trace my way back.
The steady beat of my heart that always guides me home.
So right now (after a clusterfuckery of a few weeks that knocked me entirely off my moorings) I am doing exactly that.
I am showing up on my yoga mat, without berating myself for all the days I didn’t.
I am meeting my edges and pushing into them to do things that scare me.
I am having solo living room dance parties and moving stuck activation through and out of my body.
I’m starting therapy and getting some gentle and tough love, along with concrete tools I can put to use right away.
I am making plans with friends who know how to hold me so I won’t be alone on the hard nights to come.
I am taking myself to the mountain as often as I can and letting her teach me even more about my strength and tenacity.
I am holding things lightly, letting go of what is done, and intentionally leaning into what I wish to build with sweet and sacred devotion.
I am trusting my knowing, my integrity, and my contract with self to guide me and teach me and carry me through.
And I’m not doing any of this because I’m a mistake in need of fixing or an error in need of correcting.
I’m not trying to make the broken pieces whole or make the fault lines invisible.
What I’m doing is caring for myself in the very best ways I know.
I’m reaching for what is available and accessible, and using each moment to resource myself to access more opportunities for regulation along the way.
What I’m doing is healing, which is what I’ll be doing as long as I’m alive.
There’s challenge here, and deep beauty and a soft sort of surrender to a very real truth:
Intentional healing is the work of a lifetime.
And though healing will sometimes be hard-ass work, it doesn’t always have to be.
Truth:
The work of healing can become its own sort of constriction, a narrowing pathway. Turning the miracle of us into a full-time job of patching and fixing and dismantling with the hope of one-day building again*.
*But like, right this time. Better, more whole, or complete. Less messy. More pulled together. Not so subject to the relentless pull of the tides.
(Secret: I call bullshit on the above).
There’s a temptation—and a real danger—on any healing journey, the potential to get stuck in the perpetual loop of imagining there is always something to heal.
That there is always something to be fixed or processed or ruminated upon until a picture-perfect and fully formed solution arrives.
Always something new to learn or a growth point to push into or an ache we have to excavate or a wound that must be exposed to the air in order to heal.
And yes, sometimes we have to do all of those things and so much more.
Sometimes healing requires we muster all of our resources and dig deeper than we imagined we could.
Sometimes life will require that we sit with the raw and achy parts and dance with our shadows far longer than we’d like.
But more often than not, accessing healing—on a daily basis—looks more like finding the safest, easiest, and quickest path to move closer to what you already know.
Starting a conversation with the muscle memory of your own beating heart, which has saved and served you for the entirety of your time on this earth.
Returning to the spaces, places, practices, and people who have proven to be a conduit for joy and regulation and movement.
Coming back to your breath.
Back to your wisdom.
Back to what is clear and easy and within reach.
Back to right relationship with your own wild heart.
On most days, healing doesn’t require we lay down an entirely new pathway. We don’t need to dig up the dirt or pour cement or build protective walls to keep the wolves out. We aren’t required to chart an entirely new course and begin from scratch every time we lose our way.
It’s the first step on the easiest and most accessible path we are looking for. The one right in front of our eyes.
What we really need, love, in the midst of the flailing, is to trust the ground beneath our feet and the steps we’ve already taken.
Think about a tantruming toddler.
They might stand and yell and scream and kick and wreak havoc on the space they are in as they insist on the righteous sanctity of their emotions and their experience.
But usually, if left alone, they will get themselves to the earth. They will, in their own infinite knowing, touch themselves down to what is solid enough to hold the immensity of their emotions. They move all those feels through their tiny bodies and hold themselves until they come back into some sort of alignment.
When I’m activated and triggered and flailing the fuck out, I’m not so different than a toddler in full-on breakdown mode.
Turns out though, that when I get out of my own way, I also know how to talk myself back down. It just takes me a minute sometimes to access the memory that guides my return.
Truth: it’s okay if it takes you a minute.
Truth: It doesn't always have to be that hard.
Often, we just need to slow down, breathe deep, and go back to what we already know.
To lay hands on our medicine, whatever it is.
To trust in our gut.
To unroll the mat, to pick up the pen, to seek the co-regulation of a human who knows how to hug way longer than the world deems appropriate.
Sometimes it's not really about walking a path at all. It’s just about pausing our flailing as much as we can when all we need to do is test out the ground beneath our feet.
To trust that the water isn’t as deep as we imagined, to stretch our toes and find the ocean floor and plant our feet firmly knowing we can still pull air into our lungs and trust into our hearts to continue to beat.
To know we can be surrender to the pull of the ocean and cease the fight, without for a second restricting our own breath.
To practice, in every way we can, to return to holding ourselves well.
Truth: We don’t always have to be moving forward to be healing. We don’t always have to be moving at all.
We don’t always need to be diving to the depths.
We don’t always need to be dancing with our shadows or be intentionally processing deeply held trauma.
Sometimes (many times) healing looks—from the outside—like not much is happening.
It looks like the smallest and simplest of practices.
Less new learning, more accessing ancient memory.
Less building entirely new infrastructure, more learning to trust the roads you’ve already built to carry you forward.
Less needing to know all the steps that lie ahead, more trusting yourself to walk those steps in entirely new ways.
Trust the ground, my loves.
Rest when you need to rest.
Push forward when it feels right.
Let it be easier than you imagined it could be.
And, when you find yourself flailing (and you will) don’t forget to take a breath and a pause, and check and see if you might be able to plant your feet on the ground of your own knowing after all.
I’m guessing, more often than not, the earth beneath you is more solid than you think.
And when it’s not, Dearheart, calm the panic in your body, release the fight, and remember you have ALWAYS known how to swim.
Journaling Prompts
How do you best access healing?
What have you learned on your own journey of healing?
What are the ways you touch your feet down to the earth when you feel the flailing begin?
I loved this. Men has the healing process been hijacked by patriarchy and capitalism. I feel so reinvigorated from this post and I'm going to keep claiming what's mine every damn day!