Dear 2024,

Wow.. just wow…  I bow in reverence to your relentless lessons.  You have truly been the grandest teacher of them all!  My 38 prior years of life on this planet doesn’t hold a candle to the pyre that is the Year of the Dragon. Today my dear friends, I come to you humbled, but wide eyed in wonder. On every level of my existence: personal, familial, communal, vocational and let’s surely not leave out environmental (I’m looking at you Helene…), I have had my resilience tested down to the marrow of my bones this year.  Yet here I am.  Battered. Bruised. Bewildered.  But in the end, feeling more whole than I have in my life.

Today I would like to talk about genuine healing.  The process of diving deep into the heart of  trauma, pain and neurosis to engage in the dirty work of real change.  So often we glamorize healing.  As if it’s one steady heroic climb up the mount of wellness where we reach a vast & beautiful life affirming peak to claim victory with a fresh new soul glow. We then blaze our beacons of love and light, neatly tuck away our half used box of tissues, shelf our chicken noodle book and stride out victorious to our regular scheduled life programming.  But real healing is so damn far from this Hallmarkian ascent. Genuine healing is a profoundly disruptive, messy and painful process often leading to protracted states of dysregulation, stress, anxiety, grief, depression and serious life imbalance. 

This is because as crazy as it sounds, our wounds and shadows actually provide us with a sense of security. They give us familiar ground to stand on.  Wounds help us complete our story about why we are not enough. They justify our fears and neurosis. They allow us to entrench ourselves into bitter aspects of our character convincing us that’s “just the way things are” and we have a damn justified reason for it!  We are taught to proclaim, “I am damaged because of xyz…” and although it’s horribly uncomfortable, we have a stable familiar place to navigate the world, a clear list of names to blame and a solid host of reasons to remain stuck that we can really stand behind.

Don’t get me wrong! I dare not diminish the power of these stories.  They are as brutally real and felt as any wicked blow to the flesh.  Our stories shape our reality!  And it’s not our fault this is the way things are.  Our familial, cultural and social systems, sponsored by hurt people hurting people, have most of us captured in an immature state of emotional entrenchment, supporting an endless cycle of emotional pain and spiritual amnesia.

But what happens when we disrupt our core wounded patterns?  When we dig deep within ourselves to uncover the shadows, face the neurosis, drop the armor and settle into genuine accountability?  When we decide to not push away the discomfort nor stuff it all in some dark dank corner of our psyche and surrender fully into the visceral emotional rawness?  When perhaps we even courageously take it one step further and choose to forgive ourselves and others for being human? Or maybe even wildly choose to love ourselves in the mucky stew of it all anyway?  What happens then?!

Trauma is like an ice block in our system.  Only through a deeply devoted process of consistent care and sincere resolve are we able to thaw that frozen pain; to fully gestate it and allow it to pass through our system. When a trauma occurs, our body seizes up, and although the drama has passed, we often never quite fully relax back into our origin state.  That survival signal rages through our body constricting our nervous system leaving us in a state of relentless reactivity. Yet when we find a way to dislodge those wounds, from psychotherapy to psychedelics, meditation to spiritual ritual (and many other time honored methods of catharsis), there is often a void space left behind where that sore held residency for far too long. And the result can be a feeling of profound and utter groundlessness when vacated.  Thus, we quickly learn that healing the wound is only the beginning! There is so much more to the process after that courageous choice is made.

Groundlessness is that sense of being in flux with no stable or secure ground to hold onto. When we experience true transformation, we are no longer able to cling to what was, nor can we depend on what may be. This experience creates a liminal state of prolonged uncertainty.  It can feel like a free fall without end, an anxious zone of unrest unbound by any form of familiarity and without any hope of a known landing.  It requires a full surrendering to an ongoing state of change without a road map to follow.  And boy can it be terrifying for an egoic mind that loves consistency, dependability and expectation fulfillment.  But sorry ego!  Life is anything but dependable, especially for one courageous enough to walk a path of sincere self-actualization.  The minds ideas of security are illusions.  Once that door of truth is opened and fully realized, there is no going back!  We can’t unknow what we know. We can try and settle into an old pair of shoes we’ve walked the souls out of, but one can only walk toes out blisters boiling so long before we are forced to set those puppies free!

So what can we do to become whole? How do we anchor into a space of true alignment and acceptance after experiencing the profound disruption of genuine healing without falling back into old neurotic patterns?  The answer. Take a deep breath. Clear the mind. Relax. And just BE. That’s right.. its simple.. No, I’m not bullshitting! Trust me, I have flailed my ass off to find ground in every direction imaginable.  I consider myself quite brilliantly exhaustive in my futile attempts to control the uncontrollable! But there simply is no place one can dependably cling in this dynamically unfolding life experience.

When we get a bad cut and the doctor stitches us up, what do we do next?  Do we yell at our cut demanding it heals faster? Do we prod it with our fingers sending in some healing juju?  Do we reflect on all the ways it was healed in the past to uncover new ways to cleverly accelerate the healing now? Do we get our partner to help it heal with their nurturing vibes?  No.  We trust our body knows what to do and relax.  When we heal a deep psychological wound, a catalyst like psychedelic guidance or therapy may help us contact and begin the gestation process, but only our own inner healing intelligence understands how to complete the process.  The difficulty is finding the patience and restraint to not allow the Ego and its million and one machinations to co-opt the scene with an endless list of “doing” exercises.  We need to learn to genuinely listen and trust in our bodies again, like when we ran barefoot through the grass like a swift gazelle as a youth. We need to learn to trust and listen to our own inner healing intelligence to advise us when to rest, seek support, meditate, act or stretch into new frontiers of reemergence. 

Mindfulness can support our ability to clearly receive the body’s instruction without the interference of the endless chatter of our mind.  To move into our innate witness state of awareness.  To be quiet and spacious enough, present and vigilant enough to not be lost in our own incessant neurotic thoughts and judgements.  It helps us to remember we are the dungeon master to our game of life, not the character on the board in some strange dramatic quest of reactive suffering. When it comes to healing, the mind is way out of its league.  True healing is soul work. 

As hard as it sounds, we are never made “safe and secure” in any circumstance by any outside measure. In fact, we are never truly in control of anything save how we choose to engage with the world around us.  Perhaps that’s why we aren’t called controllers, or fixers, or reactors, or responders, or doers for the matter.  We are Creators. We are Human BEings.  Born with an endless capacity to adapt to the everchanging tides of life in any given moment.  The question we have to ask ourselves is.. Will we choose to trust in life?  Are we brave enough to allow the transformative power of every single NOW to carry us through the current of existence?  No scaffolds, no footholds, no mindholds, no handholds… just a wide open embrace to the expansive ocean of being in every moment.

Its daunting as hell.. I know.  I’ve tried everything I can fathom to fashion a raft to ease the ride. And boy do I mean everything! But the universe just simply isn’t having it. It’s time to let go. But when I say Yes to life, no longer grasping for the glamourized nostalgia of what was, the justifiable excuses for why I (and everyone else around us for that matter) “should” remain the same, or cower in the fear and resistance of what may be.. I am free to become my true Self again; equipped with the awareness, presence, compassion and care to welcome all life has to offer. 

This is true Wholeness.  It is in this awakened state where we can finally find the rest we truly seek. To relax in the eye of an omnipresent storm of happenings, and realize in the end, we can’t fight the river of life. By all means we can certainly try. But we will quickly find ourselves ass over tea kettle smacking every boulder and branch on the way down! And we are ALL going down that river one way or another.  What is truly being asked of us is to surrender to the flow. To trust in the flow of the universe. Because there is no solid ground. There has never been solid ground.  It’s time we recognize and bravely accept this profound truth.. and choose to relax and embrace the mighty adventure of a boundless untethered life.