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Healing the world by healing ourselves
It’s hard to live in a world where suffering can’t be ignored. War, division, inequality, loneliness, addiction. It all weighs heavily on our hearts.
Our instinct is often to fix, to rise up, resist, and offer ourselves in the hope of healing others. Yet beneath this urgency lies a gentle truth we rarely acknowledge.
The pain we feel for the world is intimately connected to the pain we carry within ourselves.
This doesn’t mean we wouldn’t care if we healed ourselves. We absolutely would. But our care would come from a steadier place, a presence that is the calm in the eye of the storm.
We don’t rise to our whys
If you’re trying to shift a behaviour or addictive pattern, you may have tried, as part of the process, to connect with your “whys” around the desire to change.
This is a useful exercise, but what often happens is that you do this work, feel motivated for a while, but then find yourself speedily gravitating back to the path you swore away from.
This is because generally, we take the addiction to be the primary pain, and we work hard at trying to fix it, when it’s actually a PRODUCT of that pain.
We often haven’t taken into account that there’s a depth of pain that we’re trying to move away from with the scrolling, chocolate, alcohol, drugs, or whatever else is your choice of soothing.
Thinking & feeling beings
Here’s what a lot of trauma work gets wrong.
We are both thinking AND feeling beings. Not one or the other - both.
When trauma (big T or little t) happens in childhood, our divine essence is thwarted. The trauma isn’t simply stored in the body. It creates a fingerprint-specific experience that touches every part of who we are.
Our mind gives it meaning - creating vocabulary, stories and beliefs about what happened.
Relationship pattern breaking
As children, we often hold back from speaking about what matters to us through fear of losing love and connection (essential to our very survival) with our caregivers. This fear can arise from prior experiences of shame, blame, alienation, abandonment or abuse. The experience of losing love and connection can feel life-threatening, and will often lead to the internalisation of the belief that something must be wrong with us. We will then suppress our true selves in an innocent attempt to avoid this pain.