With it being the New Year I wanted to say a word about the phases of healing. The healing journey is made up of different phases, each important in their own right and each with their own traps that can get us stuck in stagnant loops. It’s important to have a map of what the path looks like so we can navigate more easily and reap the benefits of the path instead of getting waylaid along the way.
The first part of our journey starts by having transformative experiences like sitting with Medicine, starting a new therapy, or attending a spiritual retreat. These breakthrough experiences can be a rollercoaster of emotions that dive into our wounds, unconscious, emotional and spiritual selves leaving us with new perspectives. The trap is confusing these experiences with actual change. People who fall for this become caught in an addiction of sorts, seeking experiences one after the other without taking the next steps of processing and integrating what they have experienced. We can have a potentially life changing experience and without doing the work that comes next those experiences become just cool stories with no real-life benefits.
The next step is processing the information that we received during our experience. This is where we decode the wounds, the patterns and decide what they mean to us. This is the phase of understanding, of making sense. The quicksand of this phase is staying in our minds – getting stuck in the making sense of things but never taking the next step of creating real change through actions in our life.
Integration is where the tire hits the road. When we bring what we have learned and weave it into our reality, creating new behaviors, thoughts, and patterns and in so doing manifest change in our physical, mental and spiritual worlds. The best integration tools help us to bring together our understanding with new ways of being in our 3-D world. This can look like embodying our physical selves differently, using different language or communication skills, boundaries or practicing new habits. We can get stuck if we get too comfy in what we can control and don’t seek out new experiences that push us off our center once we have found our footing. We have to know when we have integrated enough and need new insights to digest.
Bodywork, energy work, behavioral or somatic therapies, meditation, being in nature, exercise, floating, dance, singing, biofeedback, journaling – all of these and more can be wonderful tools to help us integrate.
It would be great if these phases of the journey were all cleanly kept separate so we could move through them in a linear way but that’s not how life works. Instead, they all overlap, inspire, melt into and play off each other like ripples from multiple rain drops on the water’s surface. We are in different parts of our journey depending on the experiences, understandings and integration we are moving through at any given moment.
Our path is a great chaotic dance of finding and losing our center as we continue to spiral towards our wholeness.
If you are needing some help along your way, please seek support. Isolation is never the answer. Reach out to a guide/counselor/therapist you trust. You can also reach out to us here at SOLA as we have great recommendations.
This year may you lean into your adventures with a brave heart and a curious soul. Hoping that understanding more about the different phases will help you to navigate with more awareness and confidence!
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