Letter to a Reader

I get emails from readers at times, asking me how I healed myself.

To be clear, I have not healed myself. Although I kinda take issue with that statement because I know first hand how clinging to the fear-based belief that I was/am hopelessly fucked up and in need of major healing kept me from doing just that.

I prefer the ideal/idea that I am already whole and complete, there’s just some dark side programming muddling up the inner waters, convincing me, at times, that I am fucked and in need of healing.

I am, and we all are in need of clarification. Clarity. Unmuddled inner waters. Generally speaking, I have a pretty solid understanding of how to do that these days. Unless I’m in the middle of a transformation which happens a lot and makes me feel like a newborn when it comes to understanding how to hack life and fear.

All that said I am still a work in progress, I just happened to have done something very difficult: healed myself of addictions that were going to end up delivering this good old avatar of mine to the morgue and me into having to do this whole life thing all over again. What we don’t deal with in this life carries over into the next and fucked if I want to repeat my early life, especially my childhood, teens, 20s or 30’s for that matter.

So yeah, people sometimes email me asking what I did to heal. It’s always an affirmation of how far I’ve come and also my ego likes it. When I used to reply I would bully myself, thinking I shared too much info. I’m a writer with a lot to say and sometimes I’d feel embarrassed and ashamed of my drive to be so thorough in my responses. This comes from a lot of past overshares with the wrong people, which still pop into my head at times, reminding me that I need to make sure the people I share with are capable of honoring what I have to offer/say. That’s actually a life hack of mine I welcome you to ruminate on – the idea that the people who don’t value what we have to say aren’t assholes, they just haven’t earned the right to know so much about us. Works for family and friends, BTW.

So I’m a writer and the words flow VERY easy for me, but I’d always assume I went overboard when I replied to readers, particularly if the person didn’t reply. Also this:

⚡️You run the risk of being perceived as crazy when you share your inner journey with strangers.⚡️

People also seem to want a quick and clean response – a clearly articulated process that makes sense to their human brains, and is easy to integrate into their current lives.

Rough pumpkins part: There is SO much involved in the healing process, and the majority of it requires us to live beyond our comfort as well as the limitations of our ancestrally conditioned ideals.

Nothing simple about any of it. Well, sometimes it IS very simple, but simple concepts aren’t always easy to integrate and execute within the landscape of the human brain which is heavily conditioned with fear-based narratives.

I realized recently that behind every one of my long-winded responses to a reader’s request for answers is a drive to help people, and there is no space for shame in the presence of that. It’s a beautiful thing – a soul led thing – and I celebrate it, while also trying to be mindful of how I articulate myself so as not to confuse the shit out of people. 😂

The moral of the story is I cannot reply to people who ask me how I healed myself in a simple way, because there’s truly been nothing simple about it.

And as I said before, I’m not healed. I am a work in progress like everyone else. I just happen to have an inner constitution that is wired to do inner work.

I am tenacious AF and have to schedule time outs from the work I do because of the fire within me that tells me to keep going.

If I don’t pause I get run down and sick.

That said, I am a good resource for people who want to do the work required to heal themselves, or unburden themselves of toxic conditioning because I treat healing like it’s my full-time job.

I’m always learning something new about the complexities of the human experience, and I am forever in search of holistic wellness – of inner cohesiveness and balance.

With all that said the following response to a reader caught my eye in my email today. After giving it a read I realized it might be helpful to other people. It might spur someone in a direction that will serve their healing journey in some capacity.

Also: it’s healthy for me to share this because it’s one of the replies I bullied myself for previously, ie the reader didn’t reply to it.

In re-reading it months later I see the value in what I offered in my response. I wrote it from my heart and I honour my efforts and my drive to help others by sharing it with you today.

Letter to a reader

Thanks for reaching out. 🙂 I would normally take some time to reply to this but I feel like I want to share a little bit right now. Err, maybe it will end up being a lot. We’ll see. 😂 Also, this is a little woo so be warned. Take what resonates, leave the rest. 🖤

Starting off by saying that right now there are a ton of people experiencing intense feelings and emotions, which I associate as being the result of major shifts in the collective, IE stuff that we as humans need to process and sort through and figure out is poking it’s head out, asking to be processed by us all. 2020 is all about unveiling what needs tending to and seeing it – feeling it. This means traumatic experiences from the past that may be resonating, attempting to be seen and witnessed in what we perceive as right now. In order to allow it all to be processed (and go smoother) we need to lean into the feelings that come up without trying to change them. Think, “Oh hey – I see you,” rather than, “How do I stop this.”

It’s really about energy. This energy comes up we don’t like the flavour of. How do we make it go away? We witness it and then it transforms. And when we witness it and it transforms we prove to ourselves we are capable of self-healing.

A nurturing mother quality works best with this. I often ask myself when I default to thinking that I’m being ridiculous and that the feelings coming up within me serves no purpose, have no place within me, and need to go away asap, “What would a mother do? If I was the mother of myself, how would I react to these feelings? And how would I respond to myself as I struggle with these intense feelings of anxiousness and depression?”

Divine Feminine techniques are required over the masculine, at least as far as the masculine is played out in our society. READ: push away, down, ignore, compress, and dismiss doesn’t work. It’s time for those techniques (they aren’t even techniques bc they don’t work) to be put to rest.

In saying all that I realize I am beginning to answer your question about what I did to relieve symptoms in full at this point. What can I say, I go with the flow.  😂  Answer = I had to start to see my feelings as messengers instead of doing what everyone taught me to do with them: try to outrun them.

And wow did I try to outrun them. I was an addict in the truest sense, constantly attempting to escape the reality of how I felt inside. I had ideas of why I felt the way I felt, but until I started to get to know my true feelings – to feel them – I only had surface explanations. My dad abused me. My mom stonewalled me at times. Hmmm. Logical mind explanation, and true – my parents’ inability to love me the way I needed them to did have an effect on me. But these surface explanations aren’t the end all be all with this kind of healing. I can’t focus all my effort on blaming them, I have to be able to witness the way those experiences affected me – the feelings and beliefs born of my experiences. And top of the list = I had to learn how to be there for myself in all the ways my caregivers never were for me. Reparenting is key.

Plant-based? Heck yes. Mind the toxins in the foods we eat? Yep yep yep. But we must honour ourselves in every capacity. There are all these thoughts and beliefs floating within us that don’t honour us. And actions born of them. Humans get it twisted – a lot.  We were taught unproductive ways, and we need to unlearn them. 

I got caught up in thinking the food and supplements would make it all better. But there were these feelings within me related to self-worth and so much darn shame – I was taught to deny myself happiness and love and kindness. And so as much as I can honour the crap outta myself with organic celery water I still have to be able to honour the feelings within me that need their time at the mic. The ones that are trying to tell me I’m still in pain about the cruel thing an ex-boyfriend did – any moments when I didn’t know how to give myself the time or space to mourn the traumatic stuff that happened back then. Also, my right to acknowledge what is and isn’t traumatic. People have a lot of opinions about trauma. Opinions don’t help us heal from it. 

Sometimes I have to take time to notice and say: “Oh wow – ok – you feel jealous of that person who has parents that love them. That’s why your throat feels tight and your stomach is in knots right now. This is reminding you of a moment when your parents violated you.” Just one example but the more we learn to sit with ourselves as we are, in the absence of trying to force a change on something that has the right to exist, we peel back the layers on our own healing.

Broken record perhaps but I had to learn to allow myself to feel my feelings. And to see the power in them. To see that there was a purpose to them, and honour that purpose by learning to be with my feelings. The opposite of everything I’d ever been taught by my caregivers and society. It wasn’t easy and it’s still not easy. I feel lambasted with messaging and energies that tell me to deny and ignore what my feelings have to say all the time.

I am a full-body physical empath. I don’t enjoy it all that much. I feel inundated with intense feelings a lot. And I try to escape the stuff I absorb at times. 😂 moment: Do you know how many pairs of earrings I bought this week while I had the flu, which attacked my spine so badly I couldn’t move for two days? 😂 I need to make light of it because shame runs deep within me. I crave laughter. But suffice to say that as much as I don’t do drugs anymore or drink or smoke, darn it if I don’t find the lure of an online purchase inescapable when I feel vulnerable. Especially in a society that teaches us to escape, and that to feel anything beyond the spectrum of “good” is in fact, bad.

Broken record for sure now = I believe our feelings exist for a reason, even if we oftentimes don’t understand why. I know from experience that every time we allow ourselves to feel how we feel without fighting with our right to do so, or letting our strong feelings make choices for us we heal. This can be very challenging, especially if PTSD is involved. But it’s all those moments where we try to allow what is to exist, that layer on top of one another and culminate in profound healing.

We might not see the culmination of our efforts for some time. But every little bit we contribute creates a foundation for the freedom we crave to come to light, even if we can’t quantify or see the value or progress in whatever is occurring below the surface of our efforts.

xo

A