Have you spent years on the spiritual/healing journey obsessively trying to seek, change, and weed out everything that is wrong with you? I have. For a long time I saw (mostly unconsciously) a lot of my humanity as a shameful problem that needed to change or go away, and called this mission my "healing work".
It is not that we do not have "healing work" to do, but how we approach this work can either help or hurt us more. When we approach the healing journey from the angle that there is something "wrong" with us, we just become more entangled in our wounded ego. This tells our system that we are the enemy, and that in a sense we are in danger and need to attack ourselves, instead of heal ourselves.
Picture a mother with a small child at the grocery store: the child starts throwing a tantrum because they cannot get the candy bar they want. The mother is embarrassed and frustrated with how the child is acting and starts yelling at the child to be quiet and stop behaving badly. The mother feels a great deal of shame and anger at the child for their behavior and wants to control and change the child by yelling at them. The child feels more stressed by the mother's angry energy and either acts out more or shuts down in shame.
We tend to approach ourselves in the same way. We feel ashamed and frustrated with our behavior and want to take a pair of psychic scissors and cut it out of our existence. Sometimes we also feel so overwhelmed with our suffering that we want to figure out how to get rid of it right away, and we forget to slow down and have compassion for our suffering.
We are not bad our wrong for having human faults, making mistakes, having strong emotions, reacting to trauma triggers, or having human needs or desires that may not be perceived as "spiritual". We are all just human, struggling to get by in this world that makes life difficult in many ways. Our humanity just wants to play itself out and be witnessed with full love and compassion. From this place of unconditional love and compassion, the trauma, the wounds, and the pains unravel more gently and easily as they sense the safety of being witnessed as OK.
It is helpful to recognize that our spiritual nature is beyond all the ups and downs and ever-changing experiences of our human nature. The spiritual nature is untouchable and cannot be harmed. There is always this part of us that still knows love, peace, goodness, and harmony. It is hard to access when we are just focused on what is "wrong" with us. This over-focusing on what is "wrong" makes it difficult to really heal, because we are locked in a limited perspective of who and what we are. But from the shelter of our spiritual nature we can look out at the storms of our humanity with a more objective love and peace.
Simply put, love and peace heal because they make us feel safe in body and mind, and our systems naturally reorganize into a state of harmony. This is our natural state, whereas we are conditioned and traumatized to believe that there is something wrong with us. Healing is essentially the re-remembering of this natural state and allowing the light of harmony to shine on the parts of ourselves that forgot.
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