The End Of Self-Healing

What if you could predict that the same fears, insecurities and issues that you’ve had up until this point were going to be with you for a lifetime? Or at the very least, what if you discovered that the transformation of these things were not up to you?

Would you relax? Come into a deeper acceptance of yourself? Have some fun?

What if the acceptance of yourself was, in and of itself, a potent catalyst for feeling better?

Since walking this new path of mine, something has spoken to me in a way I’ve never heard it before. I’ve been invited to take a very deep dive into identity. Namely, who I am and why I am here.

Of course I’ve asked this question a million times over the decades and began asking it at a fairly young age. But the answer has changed recently.

My new age days involved endless machinations of trying to elevate myself in some attempt to erase the ‘bad’ parts and highlight the better ones. This is what new age ‘healing’ does. It seems that it is a last ditch attempt at divining the self into some clean and perfected state.

It dangles a shiny image of yourself just in front of you, but you can never quite grab it. It’s all smoke and mirrors.

This entire song and dance masquerades as a quest to heal and perfect the imperfect self while underneath lies an insidious shadow of self-hate. It’s always there, whispering that you’re still broken, you’re still unhealed, still not enough.

It’s actually quite cruel.

And we call this love.

It’s not.

During times of stress, our old, neurotic fears and compulsions will come roaring back to life; just when we think we’ve nicked them.

There they are in all their glory.

And that’s when we feel deeply defeated. When will I ever be rid of this? I shouldn’t still be feeling like this!!!

But what if, enfolded into our human identities are both good and bad…healthy and unhealthy…beautiful and ugly. What if that is simply a human life is in all its complexity and intelligence?

What if there is a reason these compulsions persist despite our best efforts at wiping them out?

Just like our inner workings, life and nature mirrors back to us a similar show. Some days the sun shines and the birds sing and some days the wind destroys everything in its path. There is light and there is dark. There is birth and there is death. There is joy and there is sorrow.

How did we get it so embedded in our psyches that there is only room for one? That the other had to go.

As I deep dive into identity I find that I cannot have the lighter parts of myself without the darker. I find that I cannot even begin to explore my empathy, sensitivity and humour without the deep weight that sits in the pit of my belly.

I could not be who I am without all of the beauty and the chaos.

Once we accept that we may never be rid of our ‘tendencies’ a tremendous weight is lifted from our shoulders. We are almost instantly released from the impossible goal of being anything other than ourselves.

The self-hatred masked as a never-ending search to be something other than who we are, ends.

And perhaps that, right there, is the key we’ve been looking for. Not to heal this or that or tweak certain tendencies or heal an illness or get rid of shame and insecurity…perhaps we’ve been coming at the whole thing ass backwards.

And I already hear that little voice inside of your head (and mine) that says…Ok great…once I do this acceptance bit than everything will heal!!

Ha!! We’re such predictable little creatures.

Self-hatred is cunning and insidious. It knows every nook and cranny within you. It will slip in, unseen, through the tiniest cracks.

Okay, so we accept that part of us too. The one that hates ourselves. The one that feels we’re never enough…that we’ll never be enough.

That one probably needs more love and acceptance than all the other parts. It’s the one, after all, attempting to annihilate what is distasteful. It is trying to wipe out entire aspects of your identity.

It doesn’t realize that it can’t. It’s futile.

And that is the very good news.

We are then released of the impossible goal of trying to be someone other than who we are.

THAT is true love, my friends.

Anything short of this is a suicide mission; trying to decimate anything distasteful. Not realizing that the downing of one part, takes the whole being down.

I’ve had to slowly, painfully, accept my own body’s fallibility. This body of mine that, despite being strong and so capable in some ways, is also disordered and exhausted in others. I’ve come to watch its dance of openness and contraction.

The openness comes when I forget about myself. When I throw my hands up in the air and know that none of this is up to me. The relief that floods this burdened body of mine is almost instantaneous. It borders on the miraculous.

It’s the ultimate cosmic joke.

I am and always have been, a walking, talking barometer. In many ways, I count myself lucky. That this body of mine shows me, almost immediately, when I’m trying to control everything.

Always a little late to the party, I’m finally onto the game.

And the best part of this game that we’re all playing? We can’t win!!!

We’re not the central player.

Something else is moving the chess pieces. In our attempts at being the knight, the Queen, the rook, the Bishop, the pawn…while simultaneously moving them around the board, we mess up the game.

We are being moved…but we’re not the mover.

Only God moves your life. Only God is the transformer.

You have been given a unique identity. It is a beautiful disaster.

But it comes with purpose. There is a game plan.

When we surrender to the game, a certain cosmic flow is restored. Disorder galvanizes into order.

The ego would scream and shout that this is totally undemocratic. And it would be correct…if life were a democracy. But it is not.

It’s so much more. It is beyond human conception.

Saint Augustine, a Bishop from Roman North Africa in the 4th century famously wrote, “Our heart is restless until it rests in you.” It refers to our human longing for a deeper connection to God. That all other passions, distractions and longings are really a cry to rest in God. So rather than trying to undermine this identity…this God-given identity that you’ve come here with…rather than trying to deconstruct what makes you uncomfortable about yourself, we might want to simply rest in God.

Might that change the chaos running rampant inside? Maybe. And maybe it just won’t matter anymore.

There is one, central question that can quickly snap us to attention: Do you want peace above all else?

If the answer is yes, than you’re going to have to stop.

Stop trying to play God with your identity. You are who you are.

Every one of us will see, at some point, why it all had to be the way it is. Why all of the pain, the suffering, the loss, the anxiety, the insecurity, the confusion, had to be here. It will be clear.

In the meantime, you have a life to live. You can move through it all bent out of shape over yourself…all contracted and self-loathing…or you can take another road.

You can embrace this identity that you have been gifted and get on with it. You can relax.

You can begin to rely upon the grace of God.

You can access the uncontracted self. It is there. Patiently waiting while you tell yourself all the ways in which you are broken.

Therein lies the difference.

Therein lies the peace.