What is “Healing?”
Healing (adj): growing sound; getting well; mending
In a culture that is (slowly) embracing wellness, the word healing comes up a lot. Posts saturate social media with it. Therapists offer it on their websites and Psychology Today profiles. Wellness gurus promise programs for it. For those of us who were born pre-internet, healing was something you did when you broke a bone or injured yourself in soccer. Even then, we put a cast on it and still swam in the pool.
So what exactly does it mean to “heal” or to be “healing?”
To mend is to “repair something that is broken.” What is broken? What needs repair? Even in this new-age era of mental health and wellness, where terms like Attachment and Generational Trauma abound, there is a stigma around what healing entails. Is it spilling your deepest traumas in a therapist’s office (or via Telehealth)? Is it breaking up? Is it staying and going to couple’s therapy together? Downloading a meditation app? Signing up for yoga classes? Cold plunging? Psychedelics? Bone broth?
It *could* be any of these things, but it seems that healing- true healing- encompasses a lot. It requires and engages your emotions. It expands your regular, even natural, behavioral responses. It encourages rest and play and curiosity. It involves creativity, getting out into nature, drinking water when you’re thirsty and avoiding caffeine if you’re sensitive to it. Calling a cab when you’re too tired to take the subway home, making extra time to get to that important meeting so you won’t be stressed out, buying yourself that thing you really want or that will make your life easier, calling an old friend, taking a nap, giving yourself the sugary treat, listening to music, dancing, taking the sick day, saying “no,” skipping plans if you’re not up to it, cleaning out the clutter…
It all adds up.
Paint your nails. Write a poem. Journal. Water your plants. Buy plants! Yes, download that meditation app and take a course. Add collagen to the smoothie. Punch a pillow. Cry over that jerk who ghosted you. Cry some more because you really liked them. These are all healthy things to do. Health. Heal. Healing.
The idea that healing is a concrete, specific idea is downright false. Depending on your situation, healing can involve lots of things. It might mean therapy. It could include a diagnosis or medication. It could also mean quitting your job or learning how to get along with a difficult co-worker. Sometimes it is reading a quote from a book (or on a teabag) that you relate to, that makes you feel seen. It’s learning the ways in which you self-sabotage and self-abandon within your life and relationships. It’s understanding your deeper patterns and inner blocks that keep you from blooming into the person you desire to be. It’s exploring why you keep dating the wrong people and maybe how that person you fell in love with reminds you (emotionally, subconsciously) of your parents. It’s sorting through your blueprints for relationships and love, then building healthier blueprints if the old ones are dysfunctional.
It’s learning how to let go of what no longer serves you: people, places, ideas, beliefs. It’s looking in the mirror and telling yourself you’re safe and lovable until it no longer feels silly or wrong to say it. It’s having the hard conversations. It’s meeting in person rather than texting those hard conversations. It’s no longer romanticizing or protecting the people who hurt you. It’s putting down the heavy backpack that was never yours to carry in the first place. It’s forgiving yourself for your life not turning out the way you wanted it to be. It’s not giving up on yourself, ever, even if you’ve felt stuck and lost for years…
“Healing” is the capacity to hold pain and discomfort, rather than trying to get rid of it or avoid it. It is facing your feelings, thoughts and behaviors with curiosity rather than criticism. It is, in the words of Dr. Marc Brackett of the Yale Institute for Emotional Intelligence, being an “emotions scientist.” It is also- often- entirely invisible, intangible. And because it takes place inside of us, and is specific to our unique biologies and biographies, this will look and feel different for each person. It also will take the time it takes- for some, more while for others, less. In addition, it is not definitive. You might be fine now but need healing later. Or, you might believe you’ve healed from something only to be re-triggered at some point later on. Life moves in waves and is never linear. And yes- every single person alive will have to heal from something. This is inevitable because change, loss and tragedy are unavoiadable.
Author and founder of Together Rising, Glennon Doyle asks herself, “What feels warm?” What feels good to you? What moves you towards the light and away from the dark? What breaks old, painful habits and carefully, attentively chisels away at inner blockages? What brings you towards love and connection and away from inner- and outer- turmoil and isolation? What will repair your closest relationships and lead towards deeper undstanding and connection- with others and within yourself?
A beautiful symbol from the psychoanalyst, post-trauma specialist and writer Clarissa Pinkola Estés is that of a Door:
If you have a deep scar, that is a door.
If you have an old, old story, that is a door.
If you love the sky and water so much you almost cannot bear it, that is a door.
If you yearn for a deeper life, a full life, a sane life, that is a door.
We are filled with inner rooms. Each of us has doors inside of us that we may not have unlocked in some time or perhaps have never even opened. Certain rooms can too painful, too confusing, terrifying. We do not know how to exist within them or how to even get into them. It can requirer tremendous courage to unlock a door, more to turn the knob, even more to step inside, and most of all, to stay. Yet these various inner thresholds enable us to cross from one state of existence into another, into a deeper and truer state of being.
In his interview with OnBeing, the brilliant poet/philosopher/theologian John O’Donohue spoke of thresholds and inner transformation. During his time as a Catholic priest, he noted that,
“You’d see somebody who would be dying over a week, maybe, and had lived maybe a hard life where they were knuckled into themselves; where they were hard and tight and unyielding, and everything had to earn its way to their center. And suddenly, then, you’d see that within three or four days, you’d see them loosen. And you’d see a kind of buried beauty that they’d never allowed themselves to enjoy about themselves surface and bring a radiance to their face and spirit. Because suddenly, like, there was a recognition that the time was over and that their way of being could no longer help them with this, and that another way of being was being invited from them. And when they yielded to it, it would become transformative. And it just means that, actually, when you change time levels, that something can transform incredibly quickly. I mean, I always think that that’s the secret of change: that there are huge gestations and fermentations going on in us that we are not even aware of; and then sometimes, when we come to a threshold, crossing over, which we need to become different, that we’ll be able to be different, because secret work has been done in us of which we’ve had no inkling.”
Furthermore, John stated that, “Your identity is not equivalent to your biography, and there is a place in you where you have never been wounded, where there is still a sureness in you, where there’s a seamlessness in you, and where there is a confidence and tranquility in you. And I think the intention of prayer and spirituality and love is, now and again, to visit that inner kind of sanctuary.” What a gorgeous, redemptive sentiment. There are places within us that have never been damaged, that reach up and through us towards light. There is a good wolf buried, perhaps for a long, long time, that hungers to be filled. Your unhealed parts are not your identity. You- the essence of you- is separate from the trauma, the grief, the wounds, the struggles, the losses, the mistakes, the bad deeds, the rejections, the sadness.
The real you is hidden within an inner sanctuary, and when you work through all the muck piled up over it, you will find that peace. This, of course, is “healing.” As is a warm bath, a cup of tea and your favorite tv show.
