Do you remember the moment after you've healed something? Do you remember that feeling? Perhaps is that 'Aha!' moment when you have 20/20 clarity about your relationship or the lightness that swept over you as the energy healing was over, or even the feeling of strength and support you tasted after a strong session... and then what happened? It can be very frustrating to feel that insight slip through our fingers, the aha! become muddy as we effort to explain it to a friend. As though it's a balloon gliding skywards beyond our reach. Even more frustrating, sometimes we don't even see it happening. The energy dissipates quietly, almost anti-climatic, and at some point, we just realized we are back where we began *heavy sigh*. As a healer, I understand that it is a journey - that life is spiralic and we will revisit themes of healing, and yet, my paradox is that as a healer I want to enhance the power of that shift. I want to do everything I can to tilt the scales towards your happiness and fulfilment. Of course, I also am in my own healing journey and deeply value knowing how I can make my life the epicentre of healing hospitality. I want it to be a place healing gravitates towards and is in no rush to leave. So you see, the question of what makes healing dissipate is close to my heart many times over. And there is one very important thing I have found:
Language is the software of healing
If you imagine the 'fixed' parts of our Life (where you were born, the childhood and past experiences you've had) they are very hard, sometimes impossible, to change. Metaphorically they are like the hardware of our technological devices, they are constraints around which we adapt. But within those constraints, we have ample ability to heal things. To optimize our abundance, the love we receive and how we look back on the experiences that made us. This is often the cornerstone of healing. And Language is its guardian. Let me take the example of a Constellation: Perhaps the constellation shows you that behind your father's abrasiveness lies a child who was angry at his own parents. Who spent every evening waiting for them to arrive only to end up eating dinner alone by the TV. Who in a few years stopped bothering to let them know where he was. Whose anger became bitterness and who was often triggered by seeing you grow up, and confused as to what being a father meant anyway. Does this erase the many memories of anger? No. Does this erase the loneliness you might have felt? Also no. In this story, these aspects would be a type of hardware.
However, witnessing this *could* water down the longing for a different father. It could amp up your feelings of compassion, knowing you were loved, even if it wasn't in a very mature way. It could help you appreciate the clumsy efforts your father might have made and any and all that was better in your relationship with him than it was in his time. It could do all this if you let it. If you Language it. 'My father had a lot of pain in his heart when I was growing up', 'I am not sure he knew what a father was so we didn't get very close', 'There were many things that were difficult, but he did always make us laugh' - These would all be 'new software' examples. Language that acknowledges what was while embracing the healing that happened. It is POWERFUL language, the type of language that births a new identity into existence.
As I healed my own relationship with my father, healed the remnants of the abandonment my parents grew up with, I have given up much language around it. Sometimes it has truly cost me something.
There can be a strange satisfaction in telling my 'I grew up on my own' hero tale, or an invitation to empathize when I say for the 100th time 'I have always felt alone', and other 'hit songs' I once used to love sharing. The price for my healing is I have given them up.
I now catch my words and force myself to say: 'My mom didn't know how to do X but she did Y', or 'Given what my dad lived through, I am amazed he was as good a dad as he was' or even 'What a surprise it must have been for my mom to be given a girl so different from herself. It must have been hard to understand me'.
Like a person on a diet passing on dessert. I secretly crave the emotional zest of my old stories, but every time I choose the new one I feel a renewed sense of vitality, of belonging and I feel the healing I have efforted to create becoming the foundation for something new and exciting.
What have you been creating with your language? Is your speaking enhancing your healing or cancelling it? What emerges for you as you sit with this question? I look forward to hearing from you.