I Think I’m Done With Healing

I’ve been thinking about this a lot lately, and I think I’m done with healing. And I know that probably sounds strange coming from someone whose work has been so deeply rooted in self-love, self-devotion, healing our patterns and learning how to come home to ourselves, but I don’t mean that healing doesn’t matter anymore. Of course it matters. I wouldn’t be the woman I am today without all of the looking inward I’ve done over the years. I needed to understand where I was abandoning myself. I needed to understand why I was making certain choices, why certain things triggered me, why I was looking outside of myself for validation or safety or permission. I needed all of it. But lately I’ve been feeling this really strong pull toward something else, and I think the simplest way I can say it is that I don’t want to spend the rest of my life healing. At some point I actually want to enjoy the woman all that healing helped me become.

I think we can get so used to looking inward for the next thing that needs our attention that we forget to look up and see our actual life. There is always going to be something else we could work on. There will always be another trigger, another old pattern that pops up, another relationship that shows us something about ourselves, another uncomfortable emotion to sit with. We’re human. I don’t think we ever arrive at some magical place where nothing bothers us and we have every single part of ourselves figured out. And I’m starting to wonder why we ever decided that was the goal in the first place. Maybe the goal was never to become perfectly healed. Maybe we just needed enough healing to stop abandoning ourselves so that we could actually get on with the business of living.

That’s where I find myself right now. I want more aliveness. I want expansion. I want expression. I want to laugh harder and play more and create things because they’re fun and have conversations that make me forget what time it is. I want to dance when a song comes on that makes my body want to move. I want to eat delicious food and sit outside and notice how beautiful the sky is and be completely present when someone I love is sitting across from me. I want to stop treating joy like something that happens when everything else has been dealt with. Because at 57, I am very aware that life isn’t some endless resource sitting in front of me. This is it. These are the days. And I don’t say that in a morbid way at all. I actually find it incredibly freeing. I’m here now, and I want to be here for it.

And joy has become really interesting to me because I think a lot of us are actually much better at allowing pain than we are at allowing joy. We know how to analyze the hard thing. We know how to sit with the discomfort. We know how to talk about the wound and understand where it came from. But give us a completely beautiful moment and watch how quickly we leave it. We start thinking about what we have to do tomorrow or wondering how long the good feeling is going to last or reaching for our phone or remembering something we’re worried about. We don’t always let the good stuff all the way in. And I want to get better at that. When joy comes, I want to let it stay. I want to feel it in my chest and my belly and my bones. I want to let it permeate every cell and fiber of my being instead of brushing past it because I’ve already moved on to the next thing.

Gratitude has become part of this for me too, but not in the “write down five things you’re grateful for every morning” kind of way. I mean actually noticing my life while I’m living it. There are so many moments that are ridiculously ordinary until you really think about them. Sitting outside with a coffee. Hearing birds in the morning. Having a conversation with someone you love. Making yourself something good to eat. Laughing so hard you can’t finish the sentence. Walking outside and feeling warm air on your skin. These aren’t the things we usually think of as the big moments of our lives, but I’m beginning to think they are our lives. And I don’t want to be so busy thinking about what’s next, or what needs fixing, or what’s happening in the world that I miss them.

I’m also finding myself leaning more deeply into faith and into this belief that I am divinely guided and protected. That doesn’t mean I think nothing difficult will ever happen to me. I’ve lived long enough to know better than that. Life is going to life. People we love will struggle. Things will change. We’ll get news we didn’t want. Plans will fall apart. There will be things we simply cannot control. But I can believe that I am held through all of it. I can believe that there is guidance available to me even when I can’t see ten steps ahead. I can believe that something not working out might sometimes be protection, that a delay might have a purpose, that an ending might be making room for something I can’t see yet. And mostly, I can stop believing that I have to figure everything out before I’m allowed to feel peaceful.

I think this is especially important right now because we are living in a world that gives us unlimited access to everything that is wrong with it. We can wake up, pick up our phones and within five minutes be carrying the fear, anger, tragedy and outrage of thousands of people we have never met in places we have never been. I’m not suggesting we stick our heads in the sand or stop caring about what’s happening. I care deeply. But I also don’t believe our nervous systems were designed to absorb the entire planet’s pain before breakfast. There is a difference between being aware of what is happening and allowing the media to decide the emotional temperature of your life.

Sometimes the most medicinal thing I can do is put the damn phone down and go outside. Nature brings me back so quickly. The trees are still there. The birds are doing their thing. The wind moves through the leaves. The sun comes through the branches. The seasons keep changing. Nature doesn’t ask me to have an opinion about everything. It doesn’t need me to solve anything. It just reminds me that I belong to something much older and bigger than the noise coming through a screen. And every time I reconnect with that, something in me settles. I remember where I actually am. I remember that right here, in this particular moment, I am okay.

So I’ve been thinking about what it actually looks like to move from a life that is constantly oriented around healing into one that is oriented around aliveness. I don’t think it requires some huge reinvention. I think it starts with three really simple shifts.

1. Ask a Different Question

Instead of constantly asking, “What do I need to work on?” start asking, “How do I want to feel today?” I love this question because it brings us into the life that is actually happening instead of the imaginary future version of ourselves we’re always trying to reach. Maybe today you want to feel peaceful. Maybe you want to feel sexy. Maybe you want to feel playful or creative or free or connected. Then make one choice that supports that feeling. Put music on while you make dinner. Wear the dress. Take yourself outside. Call the friend who makes you laugh. Sit in the sun for ten minutes without your phone. It doesn’t have to be profound. In fact, I think we’ve made personal growth far more complicated than it needs to be.

2. Become Much More Discerning About What Gets Access to You

Not everything deserves a front-row seat in your nervous system. You don’t have to watch every news cycle. You don’t have to participate in every argument. You don’t have to consume every frightening prediction or every stranger’s outrage. You can care about the world and still protect the atmosphere inside your own body. I actually think we need to learn this now more than ever because if we make our inner peace dependent on the external world being peaceful, we’re screwed. The world has never been completely okay and it probably never will be. We have to learn how to create an internal steadiness that can exist alongside the uncertainty.

3. When Something Feels Good, Let It Feel Good

This is probably the one I’m most interested in right now. Don’t immediately move past it. Stay for another few seconds. If someone you love hugs you, actually receive the hug. If you’re laughing, notice how good laughing feels in your body. If you’re eating something incredible, taste it. If you’re standing outside and the sun hits your face and for one second you have that feeling of “God, I love my life,” don’t rush away from it. Let yourself have it. Let your body learn joy. Let gratitude become something you physically experience rather than something you intellectually know you should have. I think there is something incredibly powerful about teaching ourselves to stay with goodness.

Maybe that’s what heaven on earth means to me now. Not pretending that everything is wonderful. Not bypassing the painful parts of being human. Not walking around in some state of permanent positivity. Just realizing that heaven isn’t necessarily something waiting for us somewhere else. Maybe we get little pieces of it here all the time and we’re simply too distracted, frightened, busy or busy healing to notice.

I have so much respect for the version of me who did the work. She got me here. But I don’t think she did all of that so I could spend the rest of my life staring at myself under a microscope. I think she did it so I could live. So I could express myself. So I could contribute. So I could experience pleasure and beauty and faith and freedom. So I could love people without abandoning myself. So I could be fully engaged with this messy, uncertain, spectacular experience of being alive.

So yes, I think I’m done with healing being the main event. I’m sure healing will still happen along the way. Of course it will. But I’m not going looking for it anymore.

And maybe there’s something almost poetic about the fact that I find myself here now, at this point in my life, wanting to be called by my Greek name, Zoi. The name my grandmother gave me. The name that means life. For so many years I thought my work was about healing, about becoming my own home, about finding my way back to myself. And maybe it was. Maybe all of that was the road that brought me here. Because now I don’t just want to understand my life. I want to inhabit the hell out of it. I want to taste it and feel it and express it and be changed by it. I want the joy, the beauty, the expansion, the contribution, the faith, the pleasure, the whole messy miraculous thing. And somehow, at 57, I find myself returning to the name that was waiting for me all along.

Zoi. Life. How absolutely perfect is that?

If you’re somewhere on this road too…

If you’re reading this and thinking, I’m not quite at the “done with healing” part yet, that’s okay. There is foundational work that changes everything, especially learning how to stop abandoning yourself and begin building a relationship with yourself that actually feels safe, loving and solid. Learning to Embrace Me is my self-guided foundational program for exactly that. It’s the work that helps you come home to yourself so that eventually, you can stop spending so much energy trying to fix yourself and start actually living.

LEARNING TO EMBRACE ME SELF-PACED PROGRAM

And if you’re already feeling the pull toward more aliveness, expression, pleasure and unapologetic Queen energy, well… I made a sweatshirt for that and the summer sale just started! 😉

SOUL SOVEREIGN SHOP/QUEEN ENERGY CREWNECK

With love always,

Susie ♡