A Healer’s Journey
There often comes a time in life where we pause and question, ‘what am I doing with this life?’. This usually happens around the age of 40, give or take 10 years. Maybe we’ve followed society's norms through school, marriage, career, and kids, or maybe we’ve spent our younger years in discovery, trying on different things and seeking the right fit.
By the time we’ve learned, explored, discovered, and achieved, we have a little room to begin to look inward instead of outward. This often comes with an opportunity to challenge the status quo, to question what has been considered normal or expected of us up to this point. This is often when stumble across a form of healing work that speaks enough to our soul we decide to dive deep.
Dedicating oneself to a healer’s journey comes with its own set of seasons as well. This path moves a little quicker, depending on the type of healing, but there comes a time when another pause is necessary to reevaluate how we want to show up.
It is so easy to get caught up on a spiritual path, allowing the now recognized as negative life interactions (excess) to fall away replaced by power, life force, or enlightenment. We’ve had this connection all along but may have chosen substances, harmful relationships, or any other self-sacrificing behavior as a way to avoid the powerful experience this relationship with Spirit evokes.
It can be really startling without a community or teacher to guide us through the darkness, the shadow work, the circumstances, and the emotions that we deem negative. So when one begins this work and is supported through it, one may turn their need for comfort toward this community instead of seeking through previous behavior.
This is growth through building trust, asking for help, and practicing vulnerability.
As we are in a continual learning place in this life of play, we are constantly ebbing and flowing with patterns of addiction, codependency, blame, shame, joy, harmony, or peace. There is no constant, we haven’t reached enlightenment. We get to play with it, then feel catapulted back to reality with hopefully more tools than we had previously to help us navigate.
Learning to walk the healer’s path means learning to release the crutches, whatever they may be. We are lifelong learners but are we meant to have lifelong teachers? Ram Dass says we all reach a point where we grow away from our teacher — it may come in the form of healing, or in relationship.
Our true teacher resides within and only in stepping aside can one truly discover how to rely on themselves in this navigation. Going within allows one to discover the most important aspects of their spiritual journey. This chosen exile allows for continued learning in specific areas of one’s path, like the thesis of the soul. This is where we might adopt new teachers or master the practices learned.
There are many steps through the healing process and I’m only halfway there. What I’ve learned so far is that there is an evolution from the pause. There is an evolution in practicing integrity for the sole purpose of saving oneself. There is an evolution to becoming the teacher, the storyteller, or the observer while remaining a lifelong learner.
