The Process of Healing

When you follow the crowd you lose yourself, but when you follow your soul you will lose the crowd. Eventually your soul tribe will appear, but do not fear the process of solitude.

- Unknown

This has been a longing for me for quite sometime: to put on the brakes and venture into the solitude, the deep sense of connection with myself that my soul or my being was calling for. And yet, some of my prevalent strategies have kept me moving, not trusting too much in my own senses, rather ridiculing them as asking for “laziness”, “lethargy”, “staying stuck”.

Becoming more trauma-informed I of course realize that survival mechanisms are at play that want to keep me protected from what I might feel or re-live if I take the much needed time and space. It has taken some consistent healing work and patience to strengthening my core, my inner sense of safety, to the degree that I can now say: “Sure, let’s hang out, stare to the ceiling, let the inner process flow and see how the puzzle pieces fall into place.”

At the same time, I feel melancholic and also scared by a new sensation of and awareness for life. Suddenly, I don’t automatically run to my thoughts for shelter anymore, but instead I’m calmed by knowing that the present moment is giving me the needed protection.

Here is what I learned when I looked at my longing for being in the “Here Now” through the lens of healing: Here Now is sheer feeling. No words, no analysis, not even of what is being felt. Here Now is the sinking into the body as the vessel for any type of movement, especially on an emotional scale. Here Now is isolated when it’s not in touch with me. I can force myself to presence but that’s never going to work unless I feel safe enough in myself to feel that presence.

And that brings me to another revelation with regards to many healing and spiritual practices: the emphasis on finding peace and life within the present moment is essentially and fundamentally true. It however disregards how unsafe the present moment has been for many of us from childhood onwards. On top of that, many of us might have never been learned being present, as we were raised by emotionally and/or physically absent parents.

My process of healing finally opens up the capacity of staying with what is. And of realizing how lop-sided our emphasis is on what is outside of us.

Therefore seeking shelter in solitude, in those moments of pure connection with oneself is a vital part of healing, of becoming whole again, of sensing into one’s true self. To then be able to meet the world and find one’s tribe from this place of authenticity.