How Are You Healing?

How are you healing?

That is a loaded question depending on whether you are reading it with the active or passive usage of the word “healing.”

How are you healing?

Are you broken? Did life bring you traumas that feel impossible to overcome? Do you wake up in the morning wondering what fresh hell will spring up today?

Has a year of social distancing and interacting with people whose faces are half hidden by masks and limited extrovert activities done you in?

Are you so fucking weary from the push and pull of a country divided that you can barely stand to interact with anyone?

Have relationship conflicts kicked your ass hard so that you wonder if there are any good people left in the world?

Is your world frozen and doesn’t feel like it will ever be warm again?

Are you financially broken to the point that you cannot imagine recovery?

Do you suffer from chronic pain or illness that causes you to not want to go on for another hour, day, or week?

Do it for you

If no one else is doing it for you, please take care of yourself. Show up… for yourself. Be present and hold space… for yourself. Even if you don’t believe you’re worth it, even if it feels like the energy required to be good to yourself is more than you can manage, please do it.

Tap dance healing

Take a break, just 5 minutes today, to sit and not think about the horribleness. Be in yourself. Fill yourself with white light and push it out as far as you can into the world. Shove away what is terrible and terrifying and wrong. Breathe. Not short, panicked breaths, but long, deep breaths. Put your hands over the top of your head, guarding your precious amygdala.

Thank it for working hard to keep you safe. Tap your temple with your first two fingers and say to yourself as you tap, “I am safe, I am healed, I am sacred. I am safe, I am healed, I am sacred.” Now tap the inner corner of your eyebrow times while saying, “I am safe, I am healed, I am sacred.”. Keep breathing. Now tap the outer corner of your eyebrow saying, “I am safe, I am healed, I am sacred. I am safe, I am healed, I am sacred.”

Now tap your upper lip saying, “I am safe, I am healed, I am sacred. I am safe, I am healed, I am sacred.” Breathe. Now tap the divot between your lower lip and chin saying, “I am safe, I am healed, I am sacred. I am safe, I am healed, I am sacred.” Next, go to the divot under your collarbone. You know, the one that is probably tender if you are in crisis. “I am safe, I am healed, I am sacred. I am safe, I am healed, I am sacred.”

Now, go to the area under your arms where a braline would go if you wore a bra. Tap and say, “I am safe, I am healed, I am sacred.” Return to the top of your head and tap saying, “I am safe, I am healed, I am sacred. I am safe, I am healed, I am sacred.”

It does not matter if you feel safe, healed, or sacred or even if you know damned well you aren’t any of those things. Say it and during those few minutes, pretend that it is real.

How are you healing?

What are you doing to heal the world and the people in it? No, that’s not your job and you have every right to keep walking, head down, eye on the prize, moving toward your goal. You absolutely have that entitlement. No one is born into this world with a to do list that is not of their own creation on some level. You aren’t necessarily a bad person if you don’t heal others and not necessarily a good person if you do.

But what if you did?

You might be the one person whose energetic contribution tipped an unworkable situation over into a manageable one. If we all give even just a little into the aggregate healing energy going into the world, could we make it a better place? If not, how much does it hurt to try?

How are you healing?

How you are healing the people around you who are not as fortunate as you? There is always someone. You don’t have to save them. You don’t have to fix them. I used to date a clinical psychologist a million years ago and he would shake his head at me and say, “You have great tits, but you can’t breastfeed the world.”

You can’t make it all better.

But you can be kind. You can be present. Externalize from your own situation for a few minutes to hold space for someone else who is grappling with theirs. Pray for someone or light a candle. You can listen without running through your experience rolodex to find something similar to what they are going through to be relatable. You can say, “I can see that really hurts you” or “That must be frightening” or “I am sorry you are going through this.”

What else?

You can take a moment to pull up joy and radiate it out as you interact online or go into a grocery store. Even if no one is around, you will leave your energy signature and it will be a positive impact.

Gossip, complain, and impugn others less than you do. Be a person who realizes that humans are intricately and desperately flawed, some more than others, and that their challenges are not always about us even if they affect us.

Distance from toxic situations and create safe space for yourself so that you are stronger for those who are not yet able to be so.  Reject bitterness, resentment, and jadedness in yourself so that you feel cleaner and less toxic, which changes your energetic impact into the world. It’s like a carbon footprint, but instead, is your energetic footprint.

Forgive yourself for not being perfect, for not having the answers, for not knowing the next step to take for you or anyone else. You can love, feel, and can be shamelessly and fearlessly present in your own life. Welcome joy into your life and into the world instead of believing it doesn’t exist. Like the fairies in Peter Pan, if we stop believing, it might truly be gone, so insist on believing despite any lack of evidence to the contrary

Or really step it up

Can you go further? Learn Reiki. Take a mindfulness class. Learn how to spiritually cleanse and energetically heal others. Practice positive spell work and light those candles. Anoint blessing stones and leave them out there in the world for people to find. Put a $5 bill in the receiving area of a soft drink machine or tucked under the plastic flap in the baby seat of a grocery cart (“buggy” for those Southward people). Donate to Go Fund Me causes.

Clean the foods you will never use out of your pantry and donate them to your local food bank. Get the old blankets and jackets you aren’t using out of your storage shed and take them to a homeless shelter. Reach out via text or social media to people who care about you who you have not checked in on for a while. Clear out your old vehicles and sell them for affordable prices to college kids who are struggling right now. Locate your neighborhood exchanges on marketplace and offer for free your old pots and pans, household goods, clothing, baby goods, computer hardware, and other items you are not using. You will be someone’s blessing that day.

Baby steps

The world will go on, with or without us; us as individuals or us as a species. We must be present and plugged into our lives rather than living on autopilot. Step by step, we work to make our lives incrementally more livable every day.

The more we reject the toxicity around us and find the love and joy, the more we can make a positive change in the world from a solid foundation. Notice I did not say “ignore” the toxicity. We do not pretend it isn’t there. We instead reject it as unwelcome in our human experience and actively work to negate it.

So… How are you healing?