Mind

What Does Healing Feel Like? A Reality Check

As someone who has been through a significant part of deep healing and the author of a spiritual journey book, I have some details to share with you.

Healing is messy, confusing, difficult, gut wrenching work.

It is the second hardest thing I have ever had to do. The hardest thing I have ever had to do is live unhealed. Wounds break a piece of you. They blur the clarity of how you see yourself and the world. They disrupt your mind, body and spirit. They are an inevitable part of life as we know it today.

Most of us have active wounds. You may or may not know that you have a wound. Once you are aware of the wound you need to learn about how you acquired it and why it happened. After all of that, you are one day brought to a place of being able to release it. In my experience, this is the most difficult part.

On a day when a wound is ready to be released I feel really awful. I feel tired, low, annoyed, frustrated and crabby. My way of coping is to lay in bed in a quiet room. I feel the bad feelings. I feel them and cry about the pain they brought me. The crying flips a switch and the wound presents itself. I surrender in venerability. As the wound comes closer to surfacing it stings and burns. I let it move through my body and it sends one last pain signal and releases. The release feels like a gray, cartoon cloud of something I want to leave my space. I feel better and can eventually move on with my day. As I continue this process over time, it moves around the body and leads to healing of other wounds.

The wound calms over days and weeks and I regain what I had before I acquired the wound. The wound fills with something new. Every time you heal a wound, you receive a gift. The gift can be living lighter, compassion, gratitude, a sense of peace, a new understanding or something else. The gift will allow you to live better. Avoiding wounds brings continued suffering. Suffering hurts not only you, it hurts everyone you come in contact with. It is our job to heal our wounds.

In my opinion, the most frustrating thing about living with wounds is hearing “grow up”. I knew I had wounds, I wanted to heal them. I read books, I tried all of the techniques, I meditated. It didn’t work. Healing wounds is not just changing your outward behavior to suit someone else or society. Healing wounds is a skill. Telling an unskilled adult to heal a wound like telling a baby to stop crying and expecting it to do what you say when it doesn’t understand. You have to create your own pathway.

As more people heal, it will become easier and easier to heal wounds and help others through their healing journey. This will create a better place for all. My advice to anyone trying to heal a wound is to read and watch information about healing, keep trying, hold patience and be willing to feel the pain.

Melissa Lewis is a Massage Therapist, Life Coach and Author of the book The Angel Wears Prana, The Journey of a Healer.