The Healing Journey: A Brief Moment in Time

Early on, I grew curious about mental and emotional healing as well as physical and how it occurred. I don’t know exactly where that question originated, perhaps from reading scriptural stories of healing in the Bible or from children’s stories such as The Velveteen Rabbit. I became curious to know and understand, so I embarked on a journey to discover the true definition of healing, how it happened, when it happened, and how I could become a part of that process.

My journey led me to completing the third level of Reiki in 1999. Reiki is considered energy healing, and the practitioner becomes an open channel for Universal energy to flow through the practitioner to the recipient of the treatment. The clearer the channel, the better the energy flow. This took me many steps forward in my quest, but I still had questions about how the healing process actually occurred.

The same year I became Reiki master, I took classes in Divine Science and became a healing practitioner, learning how to administer healing treatments through positive, present-based affirmations. But still I had many more questions than answers.

Fast forward a few years, and I found myself completing my master’s degree in mental health counseling. When I was trained in EMDR (eye-movement desensitization reprocessing) that’s when I came closest to understanding how healing worked and the moment it occurred if one was alert to it.

Below are a few assumptions pertaining to healing that have evolved from my journeys and my work. They are the foundation of my approach to healing; however, it’s not necessary to add them to your own belief systems.

Healing Assumptions

• We are individual aspects of something whole that is much larger, more intelligent, and more loving than we can fully comprehend.

• That intelligence is pure life, love, and perfect health of which we are all aspects.

• We may feel disconnected from our Source; however, we are always in motion, evolving, changing, and moving toward wholeness and health. Always.

• This Source is the true healing energy within us and our loving companion on this journey.

• We all have everything within us to heal naturally.

We can learn how to heal our emotional pain

Experiencing life on the planet, sometimes a grueling, challenging mix of adventures and adversities, depending upon our perceptions, can produce a challenge to our processing systems. Ideally, our miraculous brain, the human body, and the mental, emotional, and awakening states, are balanced and process incoming stimuli, or energetic input, with ease and flow. In reality, that flow may get clogged or tangled when we become shocked, injured, frightened, or outraged by people and events. Differing life experiences and inherited belief systems can cause confusion or misunderstandings.

To be fair, we may also develop many positive responses to negative events and turn them into strengths. Anguish may be expressed artistically or through humanitarian efforts to improve the lives of others. Our pain can be transmuted into good and there are millions of examples to support this aspect of being human.

What Happens When We Get Stuck?

What happens when conditions of fear that may manifest as depression or anxiety

trip up our intentions to do good or to be healthy? What happens, despite our best efforts to be happy and healthy, we fall into the abyss of loneliness, sadness, or worry?

Through life’s twists and turns, we may develop escape and avoidance type behaviors. Physically running away, shutting down emotionally or mentally (or both), escaping through drugs and/or alcohol, gambling, shopping, talking, gaming, hoarding, sexing, or any other activity that used in excess distracts us from pain and suffering, especially emotional pain, are just a few of the creative behavior responses that we humans may adopt.

Escaping and avoiding responses, often triggered by memories of past events, are clinically known as maladaptive behaviors. Although these may be survival strategies to protect us from the pain, these behaviors may restrict the flow of energy and produce knots of pain on the emotional, mental, and physical levels. Research shows that emotional pain may attach to disturbing events and is then stored in the body’s tissues. We may experience that as physical tenseness or feeling on edge, feeling bombarded by thoughts that seem to race out of control, or any number of discomforts that seem out of alignment with feeling good.

Remembering Our Wholeness Is Key

“The word healing comes from the old-English term haelen, meaning “wholeness” and often refers to the process of moving toward a desired wholeness or achievement of cohesion.” The Proto-Germanic word khailaz, which means "to make whole" is the root of both heal and the closely related word health.” (Google)

Note that the common word in these definitions is whole. To return to a state of wholeness is the meaning of health and healing. Knowing that we are part of the whole often gets lost in ordinary life experiences that may lead us to believe that we are no longer part of the whole. Often, we may feel disconnected, broken or permanently damaged.

This confusion often is the cause or core of dis-ease and illness, whether it is mental, emotional, or physical. I am whole or whole I is the meaning of holy. To become holy, we have to come back together, to rebalance, and reestablish the healthy flow of energy. To become healthy, we need to release the maladaptive behaviors that keep us bound in cycles of pain and suffering, and move into adaptive behaviors, ones that help us to process the incoming with calm, grace, and wisdom. Not perfection, but acceptance of who we are, just as we are in this moment. No judgment, or at least as little as possible.

Healing Is an Alchemistic Movement

Moving toward opening consciousness or awakening awareness, gathering meaningful insights, gaining a broader perspective, and then experiencing the depth of acceptance, forgiveness, and compassion for ourselves and others are the tools of healing. The alchemy or transformation from an imbalanced state of health to this whole state occurs often without us knowing how or why.

But there is a brief moment in time when healing appears to click into place. Remember the last time you were miserably ill and then the fever suddenly broke? You may have felt wiped out but also relieved that the aches, pains, and nausea were over. The fever breaking was that moment in time when conditions transformed to support the return to health. But how do we know when mental and emotional healing have taken place? What are those indicators?

A Brief Moment in Time

I have a former client who in the past worked with neglected and abused horses that exhibited maladaptive behaviors, making them mostly unfit to ride or to be adopted. In her work, this client used healing methods of kindness, compassion, patience, and gentle retraining to help each horse move away from its fear and distrust and to relearn trust and to feel safe. She described a moment, standing close with one of these horses, when she suddenly felt intuitively that the horse had been healed. We discussed this moment, recognizing it as something very subtle, yet powerful. The moment appeared to be fleeting, like trying to capture the exact moment of sunrise, and something that was felt emotionally rather than felt physically (like a fever breaking). Seeing the new, healthier behaviors in the horse was the evidence that the healing had occurred.

Facing the Worst

I had another former client, who had experienced significant past trauma, and I treated him with Eye-Movement Desensitization Reprocessing or EMDR. In one very intense session, the excruciating mental and emotional pain erupted from him like a bursting dam, and the howls of pain and emotion poured forth over several minutes. Afterward, he expressed his embarrassment, having always considered himself to be this strong, in-control male. When it was explained that what he experienced may have been the very moment of healing, he was able to view his experience from a different perspective. The clinical term is called an abreaction, or a sudden releasing of emotion. He had faced his worst and survived. The key word here is faced.

When we debriefed his experience the following week, he expressed his astonishment that when recalling the painful memory now that it had held no more pain. With the pain released, his triggers connected to the pain also dissolved. With the dissolution of the triggers, the need to escape and avoid lost its importance and impetus. He still had the memory, but the pain had been neutralized. The ongoing work then was to embrace the new adaptive behaviors, which were balanced and empowered responses.

The Science

Francine Shapiro developed and researched EMDR in her work with people who came to her to be healed of their trauma. In her book, EMDR, 2nd Edition, (2001) she documented through research that at the moment of healing there is an actual physiological change in the brain that signals it to switch from maladaptive to adaptive impulses—that subtle but powerful moment when the pain detaches from the past memory or event. I’d witnessed it, and I also knew then what had to happen for lasting healing to occur.

Essentially, EMDR processes create a safe space to feel the pain of the event and to be present with it until the brain can process it fully. The pain stored in the body is now brought forward, faced, and dissolved. Staying present and facing the pain and the fear, the things that most of us try to avoid, are the two most powerful tools for healing.

Here are the essentials to activate self-healing:

• As abhorrent as it might seem, allow yourself to feel the emotional pain in the moment.

• Stay there. Be present with it.

• Feel the panic that may express itself as racing heart, difficulty breathing, or sweaty palms.

• Feel the knot or tenseness in your throat, heart, or stomach.

• Just sit with the emotion, the embarrassment, the shame, the helplessness or anger and just notice it in your body.

• Your emergency switch is designed to trigger you into finding safety. Remember that you’re safe.

• Notice your breath and breathing. Slow it down and remember that despite the bad news, you’re OK.

• Feel all of it, and you’ll find that it’ll run through your body in about 90 seconds. That’s the scientific-based time frame it takes an emotion to travel through your system and be dispelled (My Stroke of Insight, 2009, by Jill Bolton, neuroscientist).

• All of the distressing symptoms are the body’s way of telling us we’re out of balance.

• Use the butterfly tapping technique to help process the hard feelings. (Cross your arms across your chest and gently tap the soft area just inside the shoulder, alternating the taps.)

• After a few minutes, the discomfort should subside or disperse. (The more intense the issue, the more sessions you may need.)

• Insights may emerge as you think about the issue you’re processing. Pay attention to these. They are part of the healing process.

What I have just described is how to heal yourself in the moment. Experiencing life events, people, and situations and feeling all of the complexity of it in your body, is an ongoing path to healing in every moment. Allow your brain to take it all in, feel it fully, make no judgments or right, wrong, or negative attachment. It just is as it is. Acceptance follows. Relief follows. If we are willing to embrace healing, brace ourselves for the pain, and allow it to move through us, we are actively healing and becoming whole. We are returning to the state of grace and wholeness that is our true nature.

We reap additional benefits of gaining fuller understanding and insight into ourselves and others, that wonderful broader or wiser perspective. Potentially we may gain a holistic approach that leads us to deeper compassion, self-acceptance, self-confidence, and a deep sense of peace that calms our processing systems from emergency to non-emergency.

Self-healing returns you to a state of wholeness

Here are a few additional suggestions to support self-healing:

• Set your intention to embrace healing, wholeness, and health.

• Seek and experience states of higher consciousness through reading, studying, and meditation.

• Travel the road of self-acceptance and self-forgiveness, although often tough and uncomfortable, this may lead to the most insights and opening in awareness.

• Improve the relationship you have with yourself. Remember your value.

• A healthier relationship with yourself often leads to improved relationships with others.

• Consider the practice of challenging your belief systems, sorting through them to identify which ones support and uplift you and discarding the ones that don’t.

• Meditation, Yoga, Qi Gong, Tai Chi, and Reiki all promote energy flow and balance.

• Draw, paint, photograph, dance, sing, act, perform music. Expressive arts are healing.

• Practice the art of journaling. Writing out thoughts often leads to insights.

• Write and say powerful affirmations to reprogram old worn-out belief systems and habits.

• I am valuable. I am love, loving, and lovable. I am healed, healthy, and whole.

• Spend time in nature.

I also recommend seeking a massage therapist, Reiki practitioner, energy healer, acupuncturist, chiropractor, or other energy-type healers to help process the blocks of pain. Of course, you may also seek professional, licensed help from a therapist to guide you to improved health.

Find your brief moment, and heal.