Welcome Back 🙂

In Part One of this post, we talked about how your brain knows that unconditional loving presence is the truest route to healing. If you have not read part one, please do before continuing on with this post! <3

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How Does Healing Happen?

When we are looking at healing an emotional/psychological/spiritual wound - the one and only ingredient that is needed for total healing is you fully showing up for yourself.

For you to show up and believe in your heart that it is ok to feel how you feel, think how you think and be what you are.

When you can stand in a space and fully approve of a situation that was previously very painful for you, and more importantly when you can show up and approve of YOURSELF fully in that space - when you can stand in the eye of your pain and say that YOU.ARE.WORTHY. You are of value. You are deserving of love. When you can proclaim that you approve of you - in that moment the past is healed and you are set free.

When you can stand in your current situations and approve unconditionally of yourself, you heal what was once broken within you.

I know this is true, because I have witnessed it in myself, and I have witnessed it in countless others.

This is what people are talking about when they talk about true forgiveness.

True forgiveness is a state where no forgiveness is needed. Where you FEEL a deep sense of knowing that what has happened was for your greatest good. A state where you can see how it all played together to serve you, where you fully approve of your role and the role that everyone else played, where you have fully approved of your pain, anger, resentment and sadness to the point that those emotions have naturally cycled through you. Leaving you in a place of peace and love.

It is the unconditionally loving presence in the anger, the pain, the sadness, the hatred - that allows these emotions to move THROUGH rather than get STUCK within you. It is only when you resist feeling how you feel that you get caught in a feeling state. When you allow, when you approve, things move.

So when you can be fully, unconditionally lovingly present with your pain, you heal your pain. You heal the parts of you that were wounded and that simply needed to be seen, heard, allowed, and loved. You take what was once your greatest struggle and turn it into a new nugget of wisdom to carry with you along your path.

When You Can't Show Up

When you are not ready to show up and approve, when you are in a place where you beat yourself up for feeling 'negative' emotions, when you won't let yourself be mad, be sad, be resentful - you block the healing work that only love can do.

When you refuse to be available for yourself, when you refuse to love you unless you are feeling good, acting appropriately, living how you think you should live - you are not a candidate for healing. In fact, you are a candidate for causing deeper, more aggressive wounds.

You see, if unconditional approving presence is the key to healing - then when you make yourself wrong, tell yourself you cannot, you should not, it is inappropriate to - you are in a very real sense abandoning yourself. You are doing the exact opposite of showing up for you. You are walking out on you.

This abandonment is what likely caused the initial wounds you still harbour today. You get hurt when you get abandoned. You are abandoned when you are told that it is not ok to be what you are. When you are told it is not ok to think how you think, behave how you behave, feel how you feel. You are abandoned when your needs are not met, and when others use you to meet their needs at the expense of your own.

Most of your wounds likely come from childhood abandonment - your mother not listening to you, your father yelling at you for acting inappropriately, your teachers scolding you for being too this or too that. Then, as you grow you learn to abandon yourself. You learn to make yourself wrong when you don't want to hang out with so and so, when you don't feel like going to work, when you judge/feel negative emotions/slip into negativity.

You do harm to yourself over and over by telling yourself that you are fundamentally wrong - you abandon yourself all day long. You are wounded, and you keep on wounding.

Your Brain Protects You At All Costs

Thus, your brain is very intelligent. It knows that unconditional loving presence is the only thing that will heal your deepest wounds. It also knows that further abandonment will cause those wounds to be made worse.

So it cuts off your access to your deepest wounds. It says if "you are going to come in here and abandon yourself again, if you are going to make yourself wrong for feeling this pain, for going through what you went through, for being who you were, then I am not going to let you in. I am not going to allow you to enter this sacred place and harm yourself farther."

So it sets up a barrier. It sets up a wall. It sets up a bate and switch.

You become addicted to some other form of self destructive behaviour as a way of keeping you clean and clear of your wound.

Your self destructive behaviours are the perfect distraction from the wound that you are not yet ready to be present with. That you are not yet ready to love. That you are not yet ready to heal with your own acceptance.

Your brain will not give you access to the wound that causes you to engage in self destructive behaviours until it knows that you are ready to show up with love. Until that moment, you will be lost in your addictions.

Your self destructive behaviour is a way of blocking you from wallowing in a pain you will only make worse by judging and condemning.

Because it is never really about your body.

It is never really about the food.

It is never really about the suff.

It is never really about the alcohol, the money, the sex, the escape.

It is about the belief that you only have two options - to stay the houseguest who is lost in the pain and despair of your wounds, or to become the cloaked figure who succumbs to the darkness to at least feel a sense of power and control over it.

But There Is A Third Option

Your self destructive behaviour - those cloaked figures in your own life - will always be there so long as you are unwilling to love the broken parts of you. So long as you are unwilling to show up for yourself with nothing but approval and grace. So long as you are only going to go trampling around inside your own heart looking for things to fix.

The third option, the way to heal, the way to fully alleviate your need for your self destructive behaviours is to show up for yourself and make yourself right. To allow yourself to fully feel what you feel, to fully think what you think, to fully be what you are in this moment, and to stop making any part of that wrong.

When you can do this, you will start to gain access to these deeply wounded areas of yourself. You will start to be able to see past your self destructive behaviours, your self imposed distractions, so that you can see what wounds need loving. It is only when you show up for yourself with love, that you will even begin to understand why you do what you do. In this you will SEE that it never had anything to do with what you thought it did.

You can choose to show up in your house of pain with an open heart. You can choose to show up and love the house guests you see panicking. You can love the cloaked figures. You can love the house. You can love yourself within the house.

You see what I am saying?

When you can love you in your pain, you will heal. You will no longer need the self destructive behaviour.

You are trapped in the house of pain with the freaked out guests and the hooded figures so that you can learn how to love.

This is no evil trick.

This is no test.

This is the stuff of life.

This is what you came here to do.

This is the whole.dang.point.

Learn to love unconditionally. Learn to show up for yourself unconditionally. Learn to be with yourself no matter what.

In this, you will heal.

<3