a loving reminder: healing is not linear

My approach to healing, when I first started to dive deep into past trauma, was that this is serious work. I worked it like a job – and for me that meant throwing myself into the process 150%, letting it determine my sense of well-being and purpose. I tied up my identity with the trauma, the work. I got lost in it at times. I’m not sure if I consciously thought this, but my mode of operation was that if I followed the right path, the right books, the right methods, that this healing would be done, solved, resolved.

I forgot that healing is nonlinear. I forgot that healing not just anger, grief and anguish. I forgot that it is also joy.

So much joy.

adrienne maree brown wrote in Emergent Strategy, “Transformation doesn’t happen in a linear way, at least not ones we can always track. It happens in cycles, convergences, explosions. If we release the framework of failure, we can realize that we are in iterative cycles, and we can keep asking ourselves – how do I learn from this?”

Reading this books helps me understand healing is this beautiful, iterative work that never ends, that is always inviting us to take our growth and make it adaptable. Allow it shift, so we can learn what we need to, in that moment, in those “cycles, convergences and explosions.”

Healing is imagination work, too. We are imagining a different reality for ourselves, a liberated self. What would it feel like to learn from my pain, there to be another possibility than that pain and suffering?

“From its own fetal curves, green fiddleheads produce ancient spiral formations. The fiddleheads teach me to unfurl my own lineage & experience patterns – examine them, be with them, and listen to their messages. The fiddleheads are gifted time-travelers. If I don’t learn the lesson now, the pattern will show up in my life like an unwelcome visitor. By meditating with the spiral in mind, I can focus my attention on re-encountering the old wounds differently and imagine a new possibility. The fiddleheads teach me the vitality of a perspective shift. The fiddleheads teach me to respect the slowest micro-movements & my own way forward.” -Marie Varghese

And from The Emergent Strategy podcast episode “The Nonlinearity of Healing with Spenta Kandawalla,” some medicine wisdom, reminding me and you of these same truths, on the “keys to healing.”

“We can’t do it alone…it’s best not to do alone. Part of humans as beings, we need each other. We need connection to survive…Understanding our trauma is really important, but so is understanding not just our resilience, but actually understanding the places that we were loved, wanted, cherished, lifted up…you know, trauma tells us lies about ourselves. It tells us that we’re unlovable, unworthy. And I have just really started to see the importance that we find our way back to the stories that told us other things about ourselves. You know, that we were worthy, that we were good enough, that we tried hard, that we did our best, that being a human is hard, that being anybody alive organism alive on this planet is probably hard…transformation is about wholeness, it’s not just about wounds getting healed…I don’t even know if it’s about who we’re becoming but re-finding who we were always meant to be. I think that’s a key [to healing].

And I think a key is making sure we don’t take ourselves too seriously all the time. Finding life on life’s terms all the time and sometimes it’s mundane, sometimes it’s silly, sometimes it’s very serious, that it’s all real. Sometimes when we get into the work of transformation, we can get very serious…the thing that helped me as a practitioner was that there’s nothing to fix, there’s nothing to solve, there’s nothing to figure out…this is not something to fix in front of me, this is someone to be with. They’ve got their own destiny in front of them.”

And one more time.

There’s nothing to fix.

There’s nothing to solve.

There’s nothing to figure out.

We are someone to be with.

“If we’re gonna heal, let it be glorious.” -Beyoncé