When The Healing Path Puts Your Life On Pause
If you're going through it, you're not alone
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When I first heard the word “healing” in the spiritual context, I didn’t get it.
Did you cut your leg? Why are you calling doing an esoteric practice or talking about your life healing like it’s a wound on your body?
It all felt very woo-woo to me.
Now years later, I have a better grasp and appreciation for the concept.
Why Are You All Talking About Healing?
Healing starts with the idea that we spend a lifetime accumulating experiences where we suppress our natural human impulses. These impulses can be emotions like anger, sadness, fear, joy, or any other emotion that bubbles up in response to life’s situations. They can also be physiologically processes like speaking, crying, or shaking something off.
We start to accrue these experiences as early as in the womb, but they really begin chalking up once we develop a self identity as a separate body with thoughts which progresses through adulthood.
Take a look at the conduct of a 4 year old boy and a male in his 20’s. Who is more free?
Our natural state is not restrained. It is to experience the full spectrum of emotions. Emotions are part of the human experience, and despite what you may think even the most revered monks feel them. To not feel them, means you have just built an extra vigilant suppression mechanism or may be unconsciously spiritual bypassing.
I never knew I was even suppressing things. I was unconscious of the whole experience and thought my chaotic inner world was just what a normal mind felt like.
And when I did notice the welling of a sensation like anger or sadness, I never considered it a bad thing to temper it. In fact, I thought emotional restraint was characteristic of being a well-behaved member of society!
For the first 30 years of my life, I never spent a minute thinking about the implications of this. It seemed like crappy things just came and went, and life moved on. If you were resilient, you got over it quickly and pushed on. Doing anything else seemed psychologically weak.
What I know now is that these unexpressed impulses remain buried in your subconscious. The subconscious is 10x as big as our conscious mind and covertly shapes our perceptual filter that we experience the world through. The subconscious expresses in habituated responses to life in the form of our thoughts, impulses, and physical reactions.. When we are unconscious, we think we are these patterns vs. seeing them as an awareness executing learned responses.
Perhaps just as precarious, is that all the suppressed emotions create a toxic environment for our cells. Disease is caused by cellular malfunction. Science has come around to the idea that cellular function is more a function of the cell’s environment than your genetics1. And our emotional health, which is inclusive of your subconscious, has a big impact on the cell’s environment.
The latest research in psychoneuroimmunology and psychobiology, provides strong evidence how emotions impact neurotransmitter release, cellular metabolism, inflammation, immune response, epigenetic changes (gene expression), microbiome influence, and cell aging (telomeres).
So long story short, all this untended emotional suppression can make you sick and malfunction even if it happened to decades years ago. There is no expiry date on the emotional signature of emotions. Energy cannot be destroyed, only transmuted. So if you don’t do something about it, it just sits there quietly basting your cells.
And the crazy part of all this is, because you're unconscious that you’re even suppressing in the first place, you don’t even know all this happening.
I often wonder what our current culture of extreme self-censorship is doing to our health. My guess is that is wreaking havoc on us.
Back to healing.
My definition is healing is going into the subconscious and facing the incomplete impulses and emotions that were never properly expressed. I’m simplifying it, but basically all these emotions have energy associated with them which needs to be acknowledged so that they can be experienced as originally intended and eventually the energy can be transmuted into a more supportive form.
What Does Healing Work Actually Look Like
The morning of writing this, I did a bunch of “healing work.” Like most days, I didn’t intend to. The work thrust itself on me.
My particular situation might be unique. I had what is called a kundalini energy or inner fire awakened inside of me because of psychedelics. If you have the choice of this happening or not, I’d probably recommend against it because the process is so grueling.
The entire purpose of the kundalini energy is to bring the emotions that have been suppressed to the surface quickly. I like this ice block metaphor from Tara Springett:
Your suppressed emotions are like an ice block. Because you are numb you can’t feel them. When this energy is awakened, it melts the ice. As the ice melts, it turns into a stream of emotions that can flow freely which is what you must face. As you face the stream, the water turns into steam which is often experienced as bliss.
The challenge with this is that the ice can melt too quickly and the stream can turn into a raging river. This results in energetic overload and can often be incredibly uncomfortable physically.
Breathwork, sound, chanting - all these are activating practices that are intended to create an environment for emotions to come to the surface or melt the ice. I don’t need to do that because the raging kundalini energy does it for me. In fact, I stay away from all of them because I seemingly got more shit coming up than I know what to do with.
I don’t really bring this stuff up proactively in conversation but sometimes someone who knows my situation will ask me what all this actually feels like?
When something wants to come up, I can feel the energy move through my body and often there is lots of discomfort expressed as tightness or pressure in different areas of the body. The discomfort is indicative of a repressed negative emotion that is ready to be acknowledged.
When I feel this, I’ll quiet my mind, relax into the discomfort, and then whatever wants to be faced will pop into my awareness. Sometimes it’s some words like “I want some fucking respect!” and other times it’s a visual memory (or both together).
Today I probably experienced 5 different emotional imprints in my awareness. One was a girl that was in my elementary school who I probably haven’t thought of for 20 years. As she entered my awareness, there was a knowing that she said something mean to me. With this realization, I feel a surge of tightness where the discomfort was. As I relaxed into it and just sat in it the discomfort, I eventually felt everything soften. Simultaneously, I could feel my heart area start to open as the energy started to move upwards towards my crown.
After this, there were more things that came up and eventually, I started to feel more peaceful, open, and blissed out. Though most of us seem to have fallen quite far from it, this end result is much closer to our natural state before we started our respective suppression masterpieces.
This experience is what healing work looks like for me. This may sound terrible to some people. It’s definitely uncomfortable, but kind of like going to the gym, I’m always happy after I’ve done it.
I'd rather pay the bill now than accumulate debt and have these random life events quietly control my interpretive filter of the world around me. The more I do this, the more at ease I am with life. My self identity, perceptual filter and emergent features like intuition just keep shifting in a more compelling way.
All of this makes the reward far greater than any temporary discomfort and motivates me to keep working on my consciousness. I don’t really need to seek it out at out this point. Life just kind brings me what I need and the things that must be faced some up in perfect order.
When Healing Puts You On Pause
There are many immensely challenging parts of this process. The one I wanted to talk about today is how it can put your life on pause.
There was a time where I would wake up on a Saturday and I would will myself to do whatever “I wanted.” Usually this would be grabbing a workout, slamming coffee, working, and then having a very social day/evening.
Once the healing process starts in your life, it takes priority over everything. If you don’t let it, it will find a way to take over. For me it had its way with me through physical discomfort and persistent health challenges.
I went to sleep last night with grand plans on how I would spend the first half of my day today.
And then I didn’t sleep much because I got woken up from the feeling of a ton of energy surging through me. I got up and tended to it for an hour which included observing lots of rage about things I had completely forgotten ever happened. I woke up this morning tired and then there was more energy that wanted to move through. So I had another hour or so of processing that.
Despite my grand plans for things that I was excited to work on and do today, I was completely spent. I felt tired and emotionally raw. Though I could observe an inner impulse to go grab coffee and force my way through the day, the soft voice in the stillness of my mind whispered “just be.” So I find myself sitting here on my couch with half the day over relegated to just relaxing and a compulsion to write about this.
This derailment from my original agenda would have drove the old me nuts. When this started happening earlier on in my process, I would have gotten down on myself for “wasting” a day and not experiencing some form of progress. I eventually learned that this really did me no good. Moreover, that this frustration was indicative of a complex that correlated self-worth to achievement and productivity to some illusion of control in order to feel safe.
There are still remnants of these impulses, but the “pusher” has quieted down and there is enough persistent separation that the impulses can be witnessed for what they are: a survival impulse acting irrationally.
This morning is really just a microcosm of a larger experience of no longer being in control that can dominate the healing journey
I’ve had to forgo countless planned days, social activities, and opportunities I’ve wanted to pursue because my healing process put me on pause over the years. While seemingly everyone out there was enjoying life, I’ve spent many days just recovering on my couch. I used to resent this and think it was unfair. It can make you want to cry out “I just want my fucking life back!!!”
But the irony of the whole thing is that you would never trade your current experience for your old life. The inner texture, expansiveness, deeper levels of truth, and increasing levels of peace are just way too compelling. Not to mention the revelation experienced during the process itself feels like life’s greatest adventure.
Learning to be at peace with the healing process and kind to yourself during it is its own process. It can often feel lonely and you may feel unseen; like no one around you has any idea what you are going through which makes it all the more difficult.
For a long time, I tried my best to power through the healing process as fast as possible. I was determined to will my way through and get enlightened. This frankly caused more harm than good. I now see the more effective strategy is to try your best increasing let go of the resistance to the pace and unfolding of the process. This means letting go of the idea of your old life you sometimes wish you could go back too and the way things used to be. When we fight the experience, our suffering just persists. The only way out is to just trust and do your best to relax into it.
I often think about the Buddhist principle of impermanence. That all things will pass. It gives me peace and makes relaxing into the “hard days” much easier.
If anyone else out there is going through it, know that you are not alone!
I wish you all support and ease in your process.
If you like my writing, feel free to click the ❤️ or 🔄 button on this post so more people can discover it on Substack 🙏
The body keeps the score as they say and our day to day existence creates endless opportunities to add to the score. My own catharsis process has been a practice of extended fasting, 5 - 7 days, four times a year to coincide with the solstices/equinoxes. The physical process of allowing my body to heal and repair seems to have a refreshing and rejuvenating effect on my mind too, without any special intent, it just seems like a natural pause of mind and body that brings things to the surface and helps me to integrate my experiences.
It's very encouraging to read what you wrote about feeling ''wasted days'' and Saturdays not going to plan when a healing process takes over. It really helps me identify, understand and accept similar patterns in my life. Thank you!
I see how striving and being able to crush it is not necessarily more ''advanced'', spiritually or humanly, than letting go of plans and letting healing happen while cultivating inner stillness, even though it's hard on my ego to accept it.
I still want to be striving and I still catch myself mentally valuing it, because a big part of me still perceives this attitude as my primary source of safety, even though through meditation I've seen how this is not fundamentally stable or real safety. So, reading someone else go through these changes and reflexions really helps. :)