Sunday Sermon #6: Notes On “Healing”

Results of a two year healing experiment

Sunday Sermons are short essays on spirituality, delivered to your inbox every first Sunday of the month.

“Who were you before the world hurt you?”

Well, my mum said that when I was a baby I would just lie there and stare at the ceiling. I was the first born so she was learning on the job and you might think she would’ve been grateful for an ostensibly good baby but no, she thought me being that chill meant there was a problem. No crying, no screaming, not even a little murmur. She’d come in during the night to check that I was still alive and I was there, awake, looking up, vibing.

I recently had an essay in the Observer about the last couple of years I’ve spent in some kind of healing mode. I think my mission was to get back to a purer original self, who wasn’t fucking up or second guessing or constantly using something external to regulate myself. This idea felt possible because I had started to frequently experience a dual perspective or consciousness: the body keeps the score but the soul is playing a different game entirely. The baby on the outside was crying and grasping at everything but there was another baby in me lying back and staring at the ceiling.  

(This Observer job started as a reported long read and became more of a first person short piece. I wrote it in December, so by the time it came out in late March, I thought it was… mostly reflective of my experience. A weird thing with writing about yourself is that you have to hold it lightly; you change so much, so does what you know about the past, and all you can ever really do is let the words speak to the truest version of who you were and how you felt then. The result is, of course, that people naturally project onto the writing and onto you. They don’t understand that to you it’s deep and not deep. Some readers thought I must be sad or lonely but neither of those is right, really. A couple of people were like, hope you’re OK. Which is like, bro, I’m OK in the sense that I’m alive, which is amazing and interesting and terrifying and exhausting and yeah, sometimes sad, sometimes lonely, but how do you even respond to that. I believe that many of us are here to really go there with ourselves, and that’s always been my experience of life; I don’t have a choice but to do what is required.)

As the piece ended up being short and I got new subscribers after it went live, I wanted to share the main discoveries of this period of experimentation that made it worthwhile to me:

1. Your curriculum is your own
   
   You’ve definitely seen individuals saying, “I discovered mediation or x y z tool and it changed my life / cured my trauma” and then if you’re so inclined you’ll try it and be like, seriously? Which can only lead you to think that this person has no real problems to start with, they’re basic, the tool is basic and you’re too fucked for this to work. Then you keep looking for the methodology that will hit. Wellness and healing industries perpetuate this with all their big claims and gushing testimonials. But the hack or fix or retreat or lifestyle that works for someone else probably won’t work deeply for you. Not just because you’re a unique person, but you’re on a completely different path from them and it’s all a delicate matter of psychospiritual chemistry and invisible factors that can’t be known. What you need as a medicine at a certain point in your life is your secret route into the next phase. Even then, when you find your thing, tool, teacher, ‘it’ is not going to be the thing that heals you. That is always you.

2. Let life show you what the next issue to “work on” is, rather than you deciding
   
   You can have these grand ideas about what you’re going to heal or work on but when you’re doing a half-decent job of being present, life will offer up each specific issue one by one. It might be in the form of an cyclical argument you keep having with someone, or in something “negative” you realise about yourself (or even a natural shift that you have, in which case: nothing to be done). It’s almost like this is predestined and set out for you; again, your own curriculum. The one thing we can control is whether we engage with an issue when it arises or ignore it and push it away and take the easier path, which leads to more resistance in the long run.

   
   We’re obsessed with looking at all this external information online and applying it to ourselves, when we should be looking at ourselves and then finding the appropriate information.
   

Related to these first two points, trauma integration coach Ally Wise told me: 

“My clients experience massive transformation in their lives and why? They don’t read all the books, they don’t do any modality. But they might feel like, ‘OK that workshop, maybe this book now.’ But they’re not constantly searching. Because experience is the transformative power here. The moment you see and feel for yourself, not intellectually, that in itself transforms [you]. You don’t have to know so much about the Nervous System or trauma. Knowledge has the reverse effect. The more you fill the mind with knowledge, the gap between what the mind knows and the body experiences grows and that creates a pressure within the system.” 

3. Healing is slow
   
   Sometimes change and growth is fast but most of the time in my experience it has been slow. I think I have a breakthrough and then a little time passes and I realise I’m still dealing with this specific theme or tension or question that feels like it was forged in the fires of hell just for me. Because healing creeps along it can be boring, frustrating and agonising, but because of that I don’t have to focus on it all the time. To do ‘healing’ ‘best’ I had to start thinking of it as both a lifestyle and a minor side gig. Often I realised the most healing move I could make for myself that day was to throw myself into mundane life or deep focus at work or get my nails done.

4. “Connect and create” = an essential route to integration
   
   This was what healer Prune Harris told me was key to integrating what you’re learning and healing; rather than constantly trying to “do” healing, you should a) truly connect with people and b) do things that get you into flow state, like painting, dancing and running. If you don’t do these two things, it’s hard to let your mind, body and spirit integrate anything it’s processing at a deep cellular level. We’re very good at the intellectualising of healing but our lives mostly partition off the connecting and creating into rushed stolen hours. Maybe we’re more ahead in our self-development than we think, we just don’t have the time to do this bit of healing that actually makes up an enormous part of the process.  
   

5. Healing is a spiral
   
   There’s a point on the coil of the healing spiral where a certain issue or theme resides and all we’re doing as we move through linear time is coming back around to this point. I intellectually knew this ten years ago, longer even, but thought it didn’t apply to me and that I could bypass it by working hard enough, trying hard enough, giving over enough of my time to the bulldozing of problems. There is no escaping the spiral; I wish there was. But when you come back around to that same point again, it’s with a better perspective, and that can be very cool. It’s similar to that experience of walking along in public and a passing stranger is wearing the same perfume or aftershave as your ex and you get thrown back in time; you know this smell so intimately! You know its notes; you’ve been here before! 

   
   A more positive way to view this is: If healing was a straight line instead of a spiral, and you kept encountering new problems—though perhaps “smaller” ones—how would you know you’re actually making progress? How could you measure your growth and test if you’re becoming better?

6. There is no end to healing
   
   Until you’re dead, or looking to be some kind of ascended master, it’s going to go on and on and on. Michelle Prentiss said this to me: “Healing is life long—and some things don’t truly ever heal, yet get integrated into the process of being and used as a wellspring of experience that leads to…wisdom?” I liked it!
   

7. Healing can’t save you from being human
   
   But that doesn’t mean it’s not worth trying to heal. It makes being human better.