Healing as a path of return (Copy)
Healing is a word that is often associated with illness, injury, trauma, or recovery. We seek healing after loss, heartbreak, betrayal, grief, disease, and hardship. Yet healing is far more than the resolution of symptoms or the repair of what has been damaged.
Human beings are born into a sacred web of being and belonging. We are expressions of the divine. We are nature and spirit, matter and mystery. We are self and other selves, shaped by the people, places, stories, and experiences that touch our lives. Life unfolds through relationship, and it is through relationship that we come to know ourselves.
Experiences of trauma, loss, neglect, abandonment, violence, illness, betrayal, and suffering can challenge our fundamental human needs for safety, belonging, trust, meaning, and connection.
When these needs are disrupted, we adapt in order to survive. We avoid. We distract. We isolate. We numb. We become hypervigilant, defensive, controlling, reactive, perfectionistic, angry, fearful, or self-protective. We may seek comfort through substances, work, achievement, consumption, or endless busyness. We build walls around the parts of ourselves that have been hurt. We guard our hearts and, in doing so, can gradually lose touch with our capacity to love and our capacity to receive love fully.
Many spiritual traditions teach that suffering is rooted in separation. Separation from ourselves. Separation from one another. Separation from the living world. Separation from the sacred.
Separation narrows our awareness. It convinces us that we are alone. That we have been abandoned by life. That we do not belong. It obscures the deeper reality of our interconnectedness and our participation in something larger than ourselves.
The wound may be real, yet separation can cause us to identify so completely with the wound that we forget the wholeness that remains beneath it.
Healing is the process of remembering what separation causes us to forget.
Despite the illusion of separation and the narratives of brokenness, we are whole and we are holy.
And so we return.
To presence.
To relationship.
To love.
-Jade
