When You're Ready, This Is How You Heal

by Brianna Wiest

However, the true work of healing is allowing that disruption to wake us from a deep state of unconsciousness, to release the personas we adapted into and begin consciously piecing together the full truth of who we were meant to be.

“a greater life is pressing to be born.”

In many ways, the journey of healing is not so much a chapter in your story, but changing the way you write the entire book. It’s a shift in the way you move through the world, one in which you move from being disappointed that life has not met your every expectation to expanding your vision to perceive all of the magic, the wonder, the awe, the heartache, the loss, the gain, the contrast that makes us all perfectly and unpredictably human.

Our healed selves are not our most flawless selves. They are not immune to sadness or grief or fear. They are just not controlled by those experiences any longer.

Life can be deeply challenging and profoundly unfair, and without the ability to move through the feelings that may accompany our experiences in real time, we often become trapped in the old stories we once wove around them.

We realize that we were never really lost, we were just giving ourselves some space to process before we could move forward completely.

It goes on, until one day, you realize you’re being levied, haunted, by a pain you can’t quite decipher.

You’re convinced your world is imminently coming to an end and these “gut feelings,” the ones you’ve been implicitly told to trust for so long, are simply warning you to take cover.

Slowly, over time, you will awaken to what is really wrong—which is the piece of you that had to break off and build a wall around your heart because behind it was a wound you did not yet know how to heal.

You were never lost. You were only hidden.

What if instead of thinking that your life was meant to unfold seamlessly, you realized that the courage it takes to keep opening doors, even if they all close, is all part of the process?

The most precious, important thing that you have in your life is your energy. It is not your time that is limited, it is your energy. What you give it to each day is what you will create more and more of in your life. What you give your time to is what will define your existence.

Make your life a safe haven in which only people that have the capacity to care and listen and connect are allowed.

It is your job to realize that you are the master of your fate, and that you are accepting the love you think you’re worthy of.

Think back on everything you worried about that turned out to be nothing, and how sometimes, our fears lead us to believe our worst thoughts are most real.

Remember that you’re mortal. All of this will pass. No time is guaranteed. You are not stuck forever. Life moves quickly and it does not stop. You are only here for a moment. Try to savor it as much as you can.