Perhaps it has been a dominant theme throughout my lifetime, On one level or another this idea of healing.
As a child I think it appeared in the social and cultural realm. Growing up, as I did in the midst of the civil rights and then the anti-war movements.
The decade of the 60s, which framed my childhood, was certainly full of specific and deeply impacting personal and social events shaping my outlook toward this idea that there was and is always healing work to do.
No doubt my still-clear memory at age 5, of riding atop my father’s shoulders in a vast sea of people as we marched across the Arlington Memorial Bridge singing along with Pete Seeger striding beside us with his banjo to Woody Gurthrie’s “This Land is Your Land”” has shaped a lasting impression of the goodness and power of people committed to an idea of freedom and egalitarian society.
And the memory of hearing Dr. King’s “I Have a Dream” speech later than day as I floated paper boats across the reflecting pool at the Jefferson Memorial can still bring chills through my body. This was a world and a time of reaching for something better, surely.
The tragic events of the years following these sparkling memories may be partially responsible for the long building insistence within me that healing was necessary for transformation. There was a lot more that came along the way to convince me of this…
While the personal tragedies within my family of origin were set in place very early in my life, leaving only brief moments of memory and awareness, the trajectory of those personal tragedies played out in ways I only began to fathom as I navigated the years after my mid-fifties. I had enough work to do to work through the healing required of my own life path through early parenthood, divorce and a nearly decade long stint as a single parent.
Working to instill a sense of wholeness and well-being in your children when your own is lacking is a serious challenge, and while I won’t say I’ve failed as a parent, I will say that my children have all come through into adulthood in brilliant form that far outshines what I was able to provide as a role model of a healed human being.
On the other hand, my healing work has never stopped, and has ranged so far and wide as to have begun in traditional psychotherapy and move through multiple layers of dream work, shamanic work, and all manner of inner healing work along the way – and it is this, I believe that has helped me to reclaim myself and step into the world I am choosing to inhabit and to co-create with the kindred souls I have found along the way.
I bring all of this up because I do believe that more than anything else in the world we are currently navigating it is our inner work, our inner healing journey that has the power to free us, to free our world and to give each other the power to free each other.
Why? Why is inner healing so much the only real work of our time? Because the outer world is broken beyond repair. Because the further down this road of our current world trajectory we travel the clearer this is becoming and because the only way to bring healing to a broken world is to heal ourselves first.
We cannot heal anything outside of us when we are still not whole. Why is that? Because the healing that is required of us in the world is a healing of the relationships we have with the world, with each other and with ourselves. It is all fundamentally built upon our relationship with ourselves.
When someone says to me that it is not possible for someone who understands oneness to hurt another being, I know that the truth is that so long as that person is capable of hurting themselves, they are capable of hurting others. It is that simple. And most of us are masters at hurting ourselves. We know precisely the right words to take ourselves out, to put ourselves in our place, to remind ourselves that we are not worthy of the good that we so desperately wish we could find in the world around us. It is our own lack of inner well-being which reflects directly out into the world around us. Whether that is reactive behavior in traffic, intolerance of those unable to manage to care for or appropriately express themselves, impatience with those we love or consistently demeaning self-talk, the level of unresolved tensions and unresolved historical traumas in the average person is running at an all-time high.
The good news is, healing is possible – and it’s even probable, when we make the connection to understand that all the outer challenges, atrocities and pain we see in the world is nothing more than an outer expression of that unresolved inner trauma expressing one person at a time all over the planet.
It gives us a road in. A way out – a path through what confounds us as a species – because what confounds us is simply the multiplication of the symptom which comes upon us one at a time. There is a way. When we learn the art of gentleness with ourselves. When we practice conscious parenting not just with our children but with our own inner child. When we stop and breathe and remind ourselves that there is joy in the world. There is beauty and it is there for us to find if we will but remind ourselves, we are worthy of having it.
One of the most powerful tools I ever encountered on this journey of inner healing was a shamanic journey called The journey to Nephthys’ Garden of Forgetting where you travel to let go of, or ‘forget’ some negative inner behavior trait that has not served you. For me, the journey was to release negative self-talk, a trait my mother, God love her, had demonstrated flawlessly throughout my childhood. I was not even aware of how completely it was controlling my life until that journey.
Within a week I suddenly realized it was gone. The self-berating, endless criticism and even more astonishingly, the silent inner voice that had always accompanied it – just gone. My husband noticed it first, actually. He observed that he could work in his office and I could be on my computer and there were no self-deprecating streams of words coming his way to distract him from his work! When he pointed this out to me, I realized how much more productive and calmer I was feeling, and how much happier. It was the beginning of a series of changes over the last decade and a half that have served me very well.
In my current life, I am a happy person. I am still doing a good deal of deep healing work, as I am still rooting out those buried beliefs and traumas which do not serve me. But overall, I am joyful. I am peaceful. The state of the world does not have me in an uproar. I have discovered the truth that I am the one who determines my own outcomes in life and that the deeper I go on this journey of self-healing and inner exploration into that which I choose to create and become in this world, the more of that I experience.
My world is not perfect, no one’s is. And by all means, humanity is on the threshold of a major transformation and healing at many levels – but I would argue it is our own inner healing work that is going to take us there – and nothing else will do it.
If you’re ready to start dropping some of the negative self-talk or other internal programming that no longer serves you, we’ve made a new recording of the Nephthys’ Garden of Forgetting shamanic journey, and you can get it for free here.
