How Healing Began
I wanted to heal. I wanted to get better. I wanted to live the potential I knew was inside of me. Beyond wanting and talking and promising, I took action. I became willing. I shifted from wanting to doing and from doing to being. I opened myself to other people’s suggestions. I dropped the resistance and started to do the work and exercises that people recommended to me. I let go of needing to be right and needing to hold onto a position that wasn’t working for me. I stopped making other people wrong, and I started to look at me. I worked self-forgiveness around my shame. I took total ownership of where my addiction had lead me. This wasn’t about what happened to me as a child anymore, this was about my inability to cope with my feelings and life. I was using my story against myself. I stopped holding onto a story that wasn’t serving me anymore and worked on creating the new story of my life. The switch from looking at everything as a victim took some time. It was so ingrained in me. It felt like life was just happening to me; I was totally out of control. I acknowledged that I was the common component, and I needed to own that piece in service to getting peace of mind. I jumped into my healing wholeheartedly and made it my life’s work, because it was. Your life is your own masterpiece. What kind of expression are you creating? I started to work on the judgments I had been holding in my consciousness, mostly about my own limitations. I began to see myself as divine and capable. I said no to choices and people I knew in my heart were not good for me. It took good choice after good choice to lead me back to myself. The journey has not been easy but necessary. I’ve got enough altitude on it now to see beauty and transformation in the process. This process is available to all of us. How might your healing begin? Or if you’ve began your journey, how did your healing start?
I was in a sort of limbo for a long time. Reading spiritual or self help themed books cover to cover was about all I could do but not much beyond that and I never did the exercises. I was always wanting to meditate but could never make the time. And when I had kids, the reading stopped altogether. For decades before my healing started, I was aware of a belief in something larger than myself but the evidence was always just out of reach. I was existing for the sake of no more than a belief in God and a vague feeling that there had to be some greater purpose that was taking its sweet time making itself known. I was desperately searching for something outside of myself that would fix me but I wanted tangible proof that it was there to be found. Blind faith wasn’t enough for me to take the next step and even if it had been, I didn’t have a clue what that next step would be. Outside of joining an ashram in India or a monastery in Tibet amongst the buddhists, I thought I was doing all I could possibly do to discover a deeper meaning to my existence while living in a secular, western society. Then in January of 2014, I stumbled across an internet article about avoidant personality disorder, something I had never heard of prior. The article left me speechless and somewhat euphoric because I connected with every symptom and every word. I felt I had finally found a medical reason to explain why I was the way I was, so seemingly different from everybody else. This lead to an appointment with a doctor who referred me to a psychiatrist which started me in therapy. Up to that point, I had long since been diagnosed with depression and anxiety, on ineffective meds and bouncing from psycholigist to psychologist. Around the time I started in therapy, I also stumbled across an app called onehealth which connected me with a like minded community as well as supportive staff. This provided an opportunity for me to use some of what I had come to learn in therapy and challenge some fears and beliefs about my worthiness to connect with people and to be seen and heard. I also had resumed reading books that resonated with changes I wanted to make in my life and in conjustion with therapy and coaching, I started to connect with a long held intellectual understanding that had only just resonated but never been truly applied or realized, that of being a spiritual being having a human experience. Connecting with a coach that not only shared that belief but that demonstrated how I could live it created a huge shift in my perspective and maybe even my consciousness that resonated with something deeper in me that I was only just coming to recognize as my higher self. She had me working on forgiving the judgments I hadn’t realized I’d held against myself, bringing awareness to how I was living in victim consciousness. I was learning to express myself vulnerably and with a commitment to overcoming the limiting beliefs that kept me small. I was able to see how I was not the ego that had been created and shaped by every life experience that I had ever had and that it was my ego’s need to exist that was creating the resistance to growing beyond it. I applied myself to identifying the self limiting beliefs and judgments that kept me ego identified so that I could actively challenge them when I could see an opportunity to do so. Tools such as meditation and journals became a way that I could stay in communication with my higher self as I went about living a still largely ego identified day but with a shift in consciousness that was curious about exploring the possibilities it wouldn’t otherwise have been able to see. It became for me a purposeful way of living, one I wanted to continually explore. While creating this new life, I wanted my old story to simply be in service to my awakening in the present, not something that had to continue to define me. I continue to gain altitude with each passing day that I bring consciousness and light to my process and direction and choices and thoughts. Everything becomes, even in some small way, a part of my process which is why I enjoy engaging your blogs in this way.
This is fantastic Wes! I’m honoring you for sharing your process here so courageously. This shift has happened inside of you. I’m eager to see what more you can create in this existence as you continuing shifting your beliefs. I’m so grateful that you have connected so deeply with the teachings and that you continue to engage. This is how we continue to evolve.
I love being inspired by you, Bev. You’ve blazed a fabulous, exciting trail for me to walk down. I can’t wait to see where it leads for me! Thank you for sharing yourself and your journey so generously with us.
Debbie it’s been a joy to witness your incredible determination and growth. I see a lot of me in you! I will continue to share my past and current process for those seeking inner peace and transformation. Thank you for your continued engagement!