Lucius Annaeus Seneca (the Greek Stoic Philosopher) said that "The wish for healing has always been half of health." We all need to heal ourselves and our lives. As the American proverb goes "Love many; trust few. Learn to paddle your own canoe.“ Only we are responsible for our own healing. Once we are healed, our lives fall into place. Healing is a sacred journey back to the Self.
The path of healing is not an easy one, so it takes courage, but it is the most important thing that you will do in your life. Ruth Westheimer said that “Our way is not soft grass; it’s a mountain path with lots of rocks. But it goes upwards, forward, toward the sun.”
Dean Ornish wrote that "Awareness is the first step in healing." Marianne Williamson wrote that "Trying to suppress or eradicate symptoms on the physical level can be extremely important, but there's more to healing than that; dealing with psychological, emotional and spiritual issues involved in treating sickness is equally important."
How can doctors or psychotherapists who don’t recognise the soul be expected to heal it? Man can't heal a spiritual dis-ease.
John Bowlby, the founder of Attachment Theory, said that "The human psyche, like human bones, is strongly inclined towards self-healing."
The mainstay of healing is:
Feel your feelings. Marcel Proust said that "We are healed of suffering only by experiencing it to the full." Rumi wrote that “The wound is the place where the Light enters you.” You can't prevent the birds of sadness from passing over your head, but you can prevent their making their nest in your head. Life is full of feelings. We can be happy, sad, mad, scared. These feelings can come and go quickly. Or we may hang on to them. As we grow in understanding, we see that at times, we hang on to feelings that make us feel bad. We let them 'nest' in our minds. We use the resulting feelings as an excuse for our behaviour. With understanding we’re learning to hang on to our good feelings. We can let go of anger, hurt, and fear. We can shoo away the birds of sadness and welcome the birds of happiness. Feeling your emotions is how you heal. Childhood trauma teaches you to close your heart and armour up. Healing teaches you to open your heart and boundary up.
Surrender all thoughts that are not of your Higher Power
Face your fears. We abandoned our inner child. We are trying to reparent ourselves in a world where we feel scared
Take intuitively inspired action and let go of the outcome
Always choose to act from your Higher Power in every moment
Always choose love. Lao Tzu wrote “Being deeply loved by someone gives you strength, while loving someone deeply gives you courage.” Hubert H. Humphrey wrote "The greatest healing therapy is friendship and love."
Serve others. Yoko Ono said that "Healing yourself is connected with healing others." David Hume wrote that "It's when we start working together that the real healing takes place... it's when we start spilling our sweat, and not our blood."
Seek spiritual bliss, not oblivion. Enlightenment is simply when all the moments of bliss connect
At times you simply need to stop everything. The key is simply to have the courage to stop, meditate, receive the clarity that this brings, and face your feelings. In that pause you become the observer of your thoughts - the silent witness. This involves not giving weight to anything: There is no need to label. Nothing is good or bad - it just is. Don’t give value to thoughts. Know thyself.
Healing
As someone who has been on a healing journey for four years, I would like to say the following about my experience…
Everyone’s healing journey is different. You need a tailor-made box of tools to heal. There are many tools and modalities. It can be a maelstrom of recommendations and diagnoses when you first start to heal:
In short psychiatry numbs your emotional pain with medication. Bernie Siegel wrote that "Physicians need to be good technicians and know how to prescribe, but for healing to occur they also need to incorporate philosophy and spirituality into their treatment. We need to feel as well as think."
Psychotherapy unravels you so that you can see what a mess you are and understand your subconscious behaviour. Every psychotherapy tool has its uses and also its complications or side-effects. Marianne Williamson writes in 'Tears to Triumph' that “The soul theoretically is the purview of religion. But in today’s society, relatively few people look to religion to truly heal their despair – and for understandable reason. In most ways organised religion has abdicated its role of spiritual comforter, if not through its own malfeasance, the at least through dissociation from the soulfulness at the core of its mission. Modern psychotherapy has taken up some the slack, and yet it too fails deliver when it doesn't recognise the soul; necessary to heal our emotional pain... Spirituality reflects the most sophisticated mindset and the most power force available for the transformation of human suffering – whether some is taking medication or not. That is why learning the basics of a spiritual worldview – and the mental, emotional, and behavioural principals that this entails – is key to reclaiming our inner peace.” People in therapy are often in therapy to deal with people in their lives who won't go to therapy. The Self in us is fractured and the very knowledge of all parts is Self-awareness.
Addiction is running away from your true Self. Addiction recovery works on your physical and emotional sobriety and connects you to your true Self. Recovery is a bridge to normal living. People have personal power if they don't give it away to their illness. Throughout your recovery, you use your challenges to propel you to a higher level of peace, understanding, and Self-love that would not have been possible otherwise. You trust that you are being led toward your greatest potential. When you accept yourself for who you are, and feel the love around you, you know that you are inherently worthy. You learn patience with yourself as you continue to grow, knowing that you are being guided with love by a strong program, and by a Higher Power of your own understanding, who is always with you. Step Three reminds you that there is unconditional love available to you. By giving your will and your life over to the care of a Higher Power of your own understanding, you trust that this love and presence will remain in your life. In times of fear, you can imagine your Inner Child resting in warm, loving arms - feeling the comfort that you did not receive as a child. Recovery is a well of Grace that you can return to again and again and dip in self-acceptance, self-assurance, and love. Each time you do recovery work, you drink down God's love. Recovery work takes consistent, lifelong effort, and time: The only thing that is instant in recovery is the coffee. The problem is "Not the drink (or whatever addiction you have) it's the think: The disease is between the two ears." Recovery is knowing that right now you have abundance - you can stop looking for a destination: Surrender to Heaven in this very moment and realise that it is a reality and that it is not related to other people, places, events, things, or achievements. There is pain in the here and now: Yet you come to cherish the pain in the present moment. Pain is what your spiritual Self has not yet learned to digest. Our spiritual experience sends challenges to us as a good evolutionary pain to teach our spiritual Self to digest it. The degree of peace that you will feel is directly proportional to your surrender. "It's not the drink, it's the think": It's not our addiction that rules us, it's the thinking that leads to a need to numb the emotional pain. The addiction is simply a symptom. Minimise your exposure to triggering situations, people, and circumstances. Respect your powerlessness and avoid those triggers.
As it says in the Bible, James 2:17 "In the same way, Faith by itself, if it is not accompanied by action, is dead."
Appendix II of the 12 steps - The Spiritual Experience
EMDR works on your trauma. Tarana Burke wrote that "I want survivors to know that healing is possible." Recovery can feel like re-traumatisation, which is why the metaphor of broken bones works - the bones have to be re-set (which is painful) before healing can start. But it’s an opportunity to reorganise the way that your brain functions. Recovery can be very panful, so we must remember the long-term benefit.
Yoga, meditation, mindfulness, practising presence, and spending time in nature all help to heal the heart, could be called 'spiritual strategies', and have been shown to help recovery from PTSD by calming your dysregulated nervous system. As with childhood trauma, the "Issues live in our tissues", this creates the freeze response, which is why yoga is so beneficial. Addicts, most of whom are trauma survivors, are frozen in time and in the body. Paracelsus wrote "The art of healing comes from nature, not from the physician. Therefore the physician must start from nature, with an open mind." So get off your phone and head for the woods. As Monty Don wrote "That first snowdrop, the flowering of the rose you pruned, a lettuce you grew from seed, the robin singing just for you. These are small things but all positive, all healing in a way that medicine tries to mimic." W. H. Auden wrote "'Healing is not a science, but the intuitive art of wooing nature.'" Thich Nhat Hanh wrote that "Meditation can help us embrace our worries, our fear, our anger; and that is very healing. We let our own natural capacity of healing do the work." Paramahansa Yogananda wrote "Yoga is a method for restraining the natural turbulence of thoughts, which otherwise impartially prevent all men, of all lands, from glimpsing their true nature of Spirit. Yoga cannot know a barrier of East and West any more than does the healing and equitable light of the sun." Spiritual strategies help you to connect with your Self and with the rhythm of the Universe. These must be deepened and strengthened with practice. This produces a calm centre that can survive any turmoil at the periphery.
Breathwork may be combined with meditation, mindfulness, yoga, and walks in nature to bring peace and serenity to a dysregulated nervous system and give you emotional balance.
Spending time with an Enlightened Witness helps your emotional recovery. The psychologist, and co-founder of humanistic psychology, Carl Rogers, wrote that “In my early professional years I was asking the question: How can I treat, or cure, or change this person? Now I would phrase the question in this way: How can I provide a relationship which this person may use for his own personal growth?”
Avoid claiming 'victim' status - there is no growth or healing here. You are in charge of your recovery and lifestyle choices. Without this, addictions can become rife. As Morihei Ueshiba wrote "Life is growth. If we stop growing, technically and spiritually, we are as good as dead." Tenzin Gyatso wrote "You cannot liberate me, I can only liberate my Self."
Vulnerability is the birthplace of recovery. Isabelle Allende wrote that "Everybody has losses - it's unavoidable in life. Sharing our pain is very healing."
Having Faith is the ultimate antidote to fear. In Isaiah 43:2 it states “When you go through deep waters I will be with you.”Have Faith: Wayne Dyer wrote that "If you believe it will work out, you'll see opportunities. If you believe it won't, you will see obstacles."
Forgiving your Self is the keystone of healing. Marianne Williamson wrote that "The practice of forgiveness is our most important contribution to the healing of the world... Each of us has a unique part to play in the healing of the world." India Arie wrote that "For me, the healing process starts with graciousness and forgiveness." Be gentle with your Self.
Learning to give and receive real, unconditional love, is a potent source of healing. Rabindranath Tagore said “Let my love like sunlight surround you and yet give you illumined freedom.” Learn to love your Self.
A life built on a solid principle is indestructible, so have rock solid core values, let go of negative thoughts and outcomes of all your actions.
Find your voice: As Karen Salmansohn wrote "It's so essential to happiness to speak your Truth out loud - because this sharing of your core pain is what creates a necessary healing shift - from negative beliefs about the world - to positive beliefs - and frees you up to be able to fully view life with meaning, purpose and connection with others."
Avoiding the 'blame culture', rejecting hate, dropping toxic people from your life, and giving up your resentments are all an essential part of healing. Louis Zamperini wrote that "Hate is self-destructive. If you hate somebody, you're not hurting the person you hate. You're hurting yourself. Actually, it's a real healing, forgiveness." Martin Luther King Jr. wrote “As my sufferings mounted I soon realised that there were two ways in which I could respond to my situation - either to react with bitterness or seek to transform the suffering into a creative force. I decided to follow the latter course.” Tara Brach, the meditation teacher and spiritual guide wrote "There is so much division in this world. So what is really the path of healing? It can begin in this moment, by embracing the life that's here."Shame is blame turned against the self. Our parents were too powerful and scary to blame. We can now redirect our anger onto the inner critic, our parents, and toxic people. We can practice inner critic-shrinking.
A spiritual dis-ease requires a spiritual solution. Man can't fix spiritual sickness. We really need to it to a Higher Power, as in the 12 steps recovery model for addiction. This total surrender needs daily ego deflation. You can always be too smart to recover, but you can never be simple enough. You recover in your soul, not between your ears. The ego is like a mud-guard on a classic car - shiny on top and messy underneath: The ego can't carry you through recovery. Indeed the purpose of recovery is to recover your true Self and drop your ego. Get right-sized and do things for people without expectation. Don’t overanalyse or intellectualise.
Work on nurturing your Self. Exercise, walk, eat well, and rest. Remember that, and Melba Colgrove wrote, that "Rest is the guardian of health." Spend time in nature. My favourite place to find presence is in the forest. It's no coincidence that it's for-rest. Make of your home a cocoon for transformation. Find time to take care of your Self. Seek out music, art, and humour. Build your connections with your close friends. Develop interests that are rewarding such as hobbies and sports. These new passions become further areas for growth and help keep your life in balance. Leonardo da Vinci wrote that "One can have no smaller or greater mastery than mastery of one's Self." Coming to your own assistance is the only way healing occurs.
Be patient. Social psychologists use the term 'paradigm shift' to describe a person who has moved to a whole new level of understanding. A set of insights so powerful has occurred that every belief a person has is shattered or altered. A paradigm is the lens of your belief system. When you look at the world, your beliefs help you make meaning of everything. When your beliefs change, your vision also changes. Neurobiologically this process takes from 18 months to three years. The brain needs time to sort through what you believe now to be true. This can result in a period of confusion. Researchers belive that the more confusion, the better the prospects of profound change and growth. The confusion stimulates the brain's growth. Thus, people who evolve to a more complex understanding only make that progress by being able to endure confusion. They are secure enough that they do not have to have everything in order: They tolerate the anxiety of not having it all figured out. If they can do this, maximal growth occurs. This shift is akin to turning a large ship or oil tanker round, which usually takes miles to change direction. This is why we say to "Trust the process" or "Let go and let God".You can do it! As Harvey Mackay said "Encouragement is oxygen to the soul."
You may need some or all of these disciplines and tools to heal. The various disciplines often have cult status and may advise you not to use any other modalities. But that is like saying that you only need a screwdriver to build a house. `You may need the whole toolbox, especially when building your new foundations. The triggering elements of healing need to be balanced by including soothing ones.
Transformative Life Coaching (TLC) gives you a cosmic view on your own healing, 'ravels you back up', guiding you, and holds you with compassion as you navigate your journey. This is the benefit of an Enlightened Witness and TLC. As Marianne Williamson writes “The greatest opportunity for humanity’s survival in the twenty-first century lies not in widening our external horizons, but in deepening our internal ones.”
We hold onto pain, and therefore suffer, to avoid unfelt fear and the hurt of lost love. When we cease to perceive value in suffering, healing is instantaneous. Remember to feel your emotions and face your fears.
When we are well the Universe notices and rewards you through Grace.
Helen Keller said that "Although the world is full of suffering, it is also full of overcoming it."
Eckhart Tolle wrote that “To recognise one's own insanity is, of course, the arising of sanity, the beginning of healing and transcendence.” Stephen Hawking, the English theoretical physicist and author who suffered from motor neurone disease, said that “If there’s life, there is hope.” Haruki Murakami mused “What happens when people open their hearts? They get better.” Louise L. Hay has the final words in that “You have the power to heal your life, and you need to know that. We think so often that we are helpless, but we're not. We always have the power of our minds…Claim and consciously use your power.”
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Olly Alexander Branford MBBS, MA(Cantab), PhD
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I have a Bachelor's degree in Natural Sciences from Trinity College, Cambridge; a Master's Degree in Philosophy from Trinity College, Cambridge; a PhD Doctorate in Scientific Research from University College London (UCL); a Medical Degree (MD/MBBS) from The Royal Free Hospital School of Medicine, London and have been a doctor and reconstructive trauma and cancer surgeon in London for 20 years. I have published over 50 peer reviewed scientific journal articles, have been an associate editor and frequent scientific faculty member, and am the author of several scientific books. I have been awarded my Diploma in Transformative Life Coaching in London, which has International Coaching Federation (ICF) Accreditation, as well as the UK Association for Coaching (AC), and the European Mentoring and Coaching Council (EMCC). I have been on my own transformative journey full time for four years and I am ready to be your guide to you finding out who you really are and how the world works.