The Do's and Don’ts of Healing
EDespite what you see on the gram, attending a two-day yoga retreat in Bali will not cure a lifetime of trauma, disappointment and baggage.
You know what facilitates healing? Giving yourself permission to feel.
I mean really get into the nitty gritty of your feelings. Heck throw a pity party while you’re at it. Go ahead and have a full-on ugly cry. The one where your eyes are swollen, snot all over the place, and your nose all rosy from using an entire box of Kleenex.
Be human.
Take your L, but don’t take it as a loss, see it as a lesson.
Get down in the trenches and sit in it, allow yourself to feel on a cellular level, but don’t stay there.
via Giphy
Extend yourself some grace, and bathe in forgiveness for not knowing that you deserved better, from you.
A few years back, I decided to see a therapist after battling Generalized Anxiety and Depression. As a high functioning individual, I was so used to operating in autopilot I didn’t realize that I was going on a downward spiral.
A month or two prior I was diagnosed with an autoimmune disease, and it triggered my anxiety and depression in ways that I could not imagine. Aside from the physical symptoms of the disease, I was also dealing with the mental and emotional ramifications that came with it.
As President of the “doing too much” ministry, I figured I could go to my regularly scheduled programming and bounce back like I never left, but my body had other plans.
I was on the phone with a close friend, when I started to feel my entire body shaking. I begged her to keep talking, so I that I could focus on her voice and keep myself focused. The feeling that came over my body was all too familiar and mimicked the same signs that I had experienced the day after I gave birth to my son, when the doctors told me that I had a seizure. I tried to keep it together, like we always do, until I couldn’t hold out any longer and had a full-on panic attack.
My pride was crushed because I had allowed myself to get to the point where I loss control.
I wasn’t familiar with giving myself the mental and emotional space to feel. Feeling made me feel weak, and helpless. Numbing the pain was easier than dealing with it. I kept telling myself that I was strong, and that I didn’t have the luxury of breaking down. Everything else and everyone else was my priority, and when I had energy left over, then I would make time to breathe, process, and rest, just not now.
See…what happens when you don’t listen to your body, this sacred, beautiful temple, your forever home; it gives out. It gives out to the point where you will have no other choice but to surrender.
Stress kills, and we aint going out like that…not without a fight…
There is nothing more self-sabotaging then one’s unwillingness to do the self-work to heal.
How can you master your emotions, if you don’t take the time to identify them, better yet, try to understand them? It’s nearly impossible. You’re doing yourself a disservice if you don’t get to the root cause of your issues, and why certain things, types of people, and/or situations are triggers. We gotta stop brainwashing folks into thinking that healing is a linear movement.
Everybody’s journey is different. The healing process for your best friend may be far different from your own. Though some of the process is external, much of it is an internal journey. We will never truly know the the realities of someone else’s process and if we try to recreate another’s process for ourselves, we will only end up more stuck.
In today’s culture we hear frequently ideas of protecting one’s energy/peace. But how often do we look at the ways in which we ourselves are the culprit of our own toxic experiences. Do you cover yourself in sage and lavender with crystals down your spine or do you put yourself on timeout?
While you’re stopping generational curses and balancing your frequencies, did you care enough to help a Sista out or acknowledge her growth?
No shade, but shade.
