Healing is a journey yes, but it is so much more than that. It is not an automatic passage, where we board at a given point and get down when we reached our dream goal. If anything, it's a little bit more like hiking where each step is consciously taken, each fork in the road intentionally navigated. There is commitment and effort put in as well as the magic inherent to the healing modalities at work. We all know the inner (outer?) groan when we realize we took the wrong turn and must undo a long trek, and yet, there is a habit I come across often that does just this. It derails the progress made and it is such a shame. Before I dive deeper let me create some context. At core, healing is transformation. We take a limiting belief and transform it into an empowering one, we take a block and shift it into an opening, we take a broken heart and mend it into a bigger heart. We transform our understanding of our path, of ourselves and of our purpose. So let me take a page from the biggest icon of transformation: the Butterfly When a caterpillar enters its chrysalis, it's whole body liquified and it starts to recreate itself at a cellular level. Meaning that in all that mush of caterpillar goo are millions of caterpillar cells, and then one butterfly cell appears miraculously... only to be devoured by the immune cells of the caterpillar. What a bummer. but this process repeats itself over and over again, each time the butterfly cells are more numerous and no new caterpillar cells are being created so eventually the scales tip and the Butterfly is now uncontested and can go about the business of creating a new body for the new life that awaits her. pretty cool huh? Consider this, the butterfly is committed to telling a butterfly story. It doesn't come easy at first but she perseveres until the story is strong enough to reshape her. How does this relate to healing? Often, healing happens around stories. We heal the pain around the memory of a breakup, the shame we hold over a financial loss, the persistent loneliness of being the outcast child. We go in, we do the work.... and then? and then we go back into our everyday lives and we 'choose' what stories we tell. The sabotaging habit I come across the most often is not updating our stories. We heal the breakup, we understand the forces that influenced it, what we both tried to do and where we perhaps erred, then the next time we are asked about it, we tell the original story... For sure it is a fine line, take this too far and we end up telling stories that don't feel true and are not true. But that's quite easy to avoid. It is far more challenging to dare to change our stories. Because to do this is to let go of our identities. To give up our claim on abandonment, anger, betrayal and grief is hard to be sure, but every time we weave a new piece into that story, we are creating more butterfly cells. You don't have to change your whole story at once, just think of adding a new strand of truth, whatever really jumped out at you in your healing session, whatever was a lightbulb moment. Make sure it is honoured in your words, in the way you think about it and how you think about yourself. Let your butterfly cells keep multiplying. Give yourself the best odds to break free. Hope this resonates, much love to all of you! Andrea
