When You're Ready, This Is How You Heal

by Brianna Wiest

The path forward is understanding that we are sometimes collateral damage to people’s own inner wars, and that we do not need to adopt their weapons as our own in order to fight back.

The path forward is realizing that our sanctuary is within ourselves, and our power is impenetrable. It is there, resting, and waiting, until we are ready to act on it again.

It’s not that you’re not trying hard enough, but that you’re too attached to things that aren’t right for you.

If you want to be in a completely different place by this time next year, you’re going to have to get honest with yourself. You’re going to have to stop using busy-ness as a distraction, you’re going to have to replace quantity with quality, you’re going to have to do some soul-searching, and you’re going to have to learn to prioritize what your future self will thank you for.

You have to start now. You have to adapt here. You have to do what you can with what you have.

Your maximum potential is creating a life that is peaceful and meaningful to you. It is doing less, but better.

While there’s always a time to treat yourself and enjoy life, it has to be balanced by principles, values, and forward thinking.

Stop underestimating the power of inner work. The truth about forward movement is that it’s more about present stillness than anything else. Can you sit with yourself? Can you be present? Can you allow yourself to metabolize the feelings that keep coming up? Can you ask yourself the tough questions to get the important answers? Are you willing to change your mind? Are you willing to change your life?

So commit to growth. Commit to becoming better. Decide that you’re ready to expand your heart past its current perimeters. There is so much more waiting for you, but you have to be open to it first.

What if you allowed yourself a safe space to emotionally process, and then allowed yourself to rise the next morning in the calm, and trusted that you would know what to do?

A life of more is not one that always expands outward, it’s very often one that opens up inward.

We don’t lose relationships because we’re not worthy of them, we lose them because we’re mismatched to them. That’s usually a good indicator that we’ve grown, we’ve changed, and we need to realign with people who understand who we’re becoming, not just who we’ve been.

If you’re not doubting your next step, it’s not the right step.

You’re scared because you care. You’re doubting because this actually means something to you. You’re nervous because it’s unfamiliar.

You’re no longer just passively floating through your existence.

Too many people won’t leap because they’re afraid of that initial jolt, but they also never learn to spread their wings, and they never arrive anywhere else.

Please know that nobody is, or ever was, judging you as much as you are judging yourself right now.

When we slow down, it’s because we’re no longer just running away from what’s wrong, but learning to step toward what’s right.

You’re aware of what’s wrong, even if you don’t know what would be right.

What’s meant for you will come to you, and it will stay with you for as long as it needs to.

What would it take for you to truly feel alive each day? That’s the question you start asking yourself when you are genuinely making unprecedented progress.

You know it is only ever in solitude that we extract the most important truths about our lives. Without the expectations of others around us, we get to see who we most essentially are.

You are part of every person you’ve ever loved. You are a part of every place you’ve ever been. You are cared for even if those who care are no longer present in your day-to-day life.

It’s about that real connection, which is the willingness to show up exactly as we are and realizing we’re being met exactly where we are. No adjustments. No shifting. No hiding.

When life hands us a season of being by ourselves, we have to find the courage to sleep alone and eat alone and dance in the kitchen in our underwear and lay in bed at night and wonder if we are going to be okay.

Try to find love in the fact that maybe you’re being given an opportunity to be introduced to yourself so that you might be able to introduce that person to someone else.

And maybe that was the piece that was missing all along.

Though you cannot always control what you feel, you can control how you respond, and in that response, you can find your freedom.

Your heart knows something much greater. It knows that you were meant to seek what makes you come alive, it knows that the gifts embedded in you could heal many others, and it knows exactly the person that you are meant to be, even if you can’t imagine anything else right now.

It may have taken you a while to see clearly, but your heart has known the entire time. The question is not will you follow it or not, but how long will you wait until you begin the life that you know is meant to be yours.

Here’s a litmus test for you: what was going on in your life when you first got together with this person? Before you were in this relationship, did you know where your life was going? Were you confident in who you were, what you wanted, and how you were planning to proceed with the next few years of your life? Were you at all worried, stressed or anxious that you hadn’t found a relationship by the “right time,” or that you’d hit some milestone and be alone? Were you feeling lost in your career, stressed about money, or tense about your family? The circumstances that existed when the relationship began can tell you so much about the relationship itself. This is why people preach from the gospel of “Love Yourself First” so often: when two people who are happy, well adjusted, and pursuing their own individual goals get together, the relationship lasts. When two people who need self-work get together, they use one another

Band-Aid, and then it falls apart because ultimately, they realize: another person is not a solution.

If you are anxious about the future, you need to be the one to make a plan. If you feel unsure about what you want, you need to sit down and brainstorm until you come up with some ideas. If you don’t know who you are, you need to do some soul-searching. If you feel unfulfilled, you need to work somewhere new. If you feel stressed, you need to manage your time, money or relationships better. This is what you needed to do then, and it is what you ...

You need to get up, you need to start over, and you need to begin anew. You need new places, people, and routines. You need new adventures and goals and plans.

Most people hang onto what they’ve known and what they think they want because they are too afraid of feeling the discomfort of not knowing. People who are willing to brave that tension are the ones who truly free themselves.

A relationship is not a Band-Aid. Treating it like one is what landed you with the wrong person in the first place.

Future self work is a process of visualizing yourself many years down the line. When you sit down to do it, make sure you’re in a quiet and calm place, and have a pen and paper handy. Close your eyes and visualize the highest and best version of your future self. It doesn’t matter what age you are. Know that it is common to first see scary things (like being dead or hurt or in pain when you’re older) and know that it is just your fear of what could happen that you’re seeing.

The reality is that you already are that best version of yourself. Everything that’s happening around you right now is helping you to realize that once and for all.

You were never meant to find a permanent home in a temporary world. Other people were never meant to love you into a feeling of safety and security. You are here to make a home within your own heart. You are here to learn not that you don’t need connection, but that without being connected to yourself, nothing else is viable.

What you have to realize instead is that home is not an idea, it’s not a place, it’s a way of being. It’s a way you show up to your life and make it your own. It’s a way you find comfort in the contours of who you are, not who you might one day become.

We are here to bring ourselves home, and then to show others the way back to themselves.

The idea that you might have to earn your way into the life that is already yours is an illusion.

Facing the hardships is part of the experience. There is no experience through which you cannot seep out a part of your soul that was once a mystery to you. That, in itself, is part of the magic.

You have to start being kind to yourself. Kind in the way that you’re kind to a child, to someone or something so innocent and endlessly deserving of your affection and praise. We have to be kindest to ourselves when it seems least deserved, because that’s usually when it is most needed. Find the simplest and most obvious ways to do that. Over time, you will find that so much of the relentless internal pressure are voices you once heard and then took as your own.

We aren’t supposed to know every detail and milestone of every person we’ve ever been acquaintances with since childhood. This is an experience that’s distinctly unique to the digital age, and it’s one we’re still adapting to.

The journey isn’t about convincing yourself that you’re enough, but loving yourself even if you aren’t.

Of course, if you are sought after to date, you are appealing, and so you are worthy.

Unfortunately, life doesn’t actually work this way, because even when we gather all of those reasons we should believe in our worth, we really don’t feel it until we decide to love ourselves even if we don’t believe we’re worth it. Instead of trying to convince yourself that you’re the best person ever, try instead just caring for yourself and your surroundings unconditionally. Worth is not something we earn, but something we remember as we cultivate our own care and approval.

When you have to try so hard to convince yourself that something is right, it’s almost always because deep down, you know that something is wrong.

Giving into life is trusting life.