"This post is part of the Empowering the Goddess Within Blog Tour hosted by www.BraveHealer.com! To read more entries and potentially win a fun prize, visit the tour page HERE, between September 9th and September 19th!" Ah the healing journey – we are all on it and I think, if you are like me, you will likely think, yada-yada-yada! - we go on and on about it to the extent that it can sometimes feel like it’s all just a bunch of words, when what we really want is to feel better…… How long have YOU been on this healing journey? Are you feeling frustrated at how slow it sometimes feels? Do you sometimes just wish you could find the magic ladder and skip forward a few steps instead of keeping on landing on the snakes and sliding backwards all the time? Stop. Take a deep breath. Today I want to talk about the three aspects of our healing journey that will be our very best friends – the three things that, if we can just get our heads around them and make them welcome, will allow us to relax and embrace our healing journey in a profound way. Acceptance, surrendering and time, will, as we embrace them become our very best friends as we continue to walk forward into our healing. Acceptance The biggest thing we have to deal with in our recovery journey is coming to terms with the simple fact that we have known loss. We have known trauma and grief and pain and things have happened that we're far from ideal in our early lives. Many of us have suffered terribly and for most of us there has been no apology, no attempt to put things right, no move to identify wrong doing – we have had to deal with the past entirely on our own, making our own way into a future that has then had to be of our own creation. That's a tough call and it leads us on a tough journey. Coming to terms with our past, finding a way to accept what happened and that the only thing we can really do is move forwards, has been a huge challenge. But to find acceptance, to reach that place of making peace with our past, is critical to finding true healing in our lives. And there can be no short cuts in that journey. No one can do it for us. There is no magic formula – we simple have to give ourselves the opportunity to process and deal with what has come our way and part of that processing involves finding a way to accept the past, painful as it might have been. Surrendering We find the most incredible freedom in surrender – in letting go of the pain, hurt and trauma of the past and surrendering to what is. A freedom that we never knew existed before – a deep soul sighing as we realise that we have been let off the hook – that the burden has been lifted from our shoulders. Sure, there is work for us to do, but it is only in surrendering those things that we can’t change, that we allow for the real work of healing to happen in us. And what we can’t change is the past. What happened, happened. That’s all. There can be no real healing until we are ready to say that that is all there is to it. It happened. So many times we get lost in the healing journey because we let ourselves focus on the wrong. We let ourselves get caught up in the injustice and the angst that came our way and of course we do, it’s only human. It is essential that we allow ourselves to stop and remember, that we allow ourselves to feel the pain we protected ourselves from for so long, that we grieve, process and let that pain come to the surface, even that we tell our stories. This is vitally important if we are to ever move on from there. But if healing is our goal that’s where the letting go, the surrender, comes in. To really heal we must then let go. Let go of the pain, let go of the sadness, let go of the hold the past has over us and allow our authentic self, that person we always had the potential to be, emerge. Time They say that time heals all wounds. And in some ways it is true and in others ways not true at all – because it’s not just the passage of time that matters, but what we are doing during that time. We don’t recover and find peace in our souls overnight. There is no magic formula for healing. There is no one thing that we can to do and then – hey-presto we are healed. The truth is that it takes time for us to heal and there are no short cuts. Time is such a significant factor in our healing and we must never overlook the simple truth that heavy and painful feelings take time to ease off. We do a lot of work in recovery, we have so many issues to address, but it is so important to grasp this pint, that time is itself a factor. Time is itself a healer. So often we get in the way of our own hopes for healing by holding on, by not surrendering and by refusing to come to terms with our loss but if we allow ourselves to move closer towards acceptance and surrender, then we allow time to do its wonder-work. As we focus on the parts we can do, as we focus on surrendering and accepting, then time can be our ally, bringing healing into our lives. Have you met these friends? Have you welcomed them and are you getting to know them well? When we have really struggled in our lives, when we have faced something huge, of course we want it to be over. It is part of the human condition that we would want it to be fixed. But despite the fact that we live in an impatient, instant society where we need fast food, instant coffee and express lanes in the supermarket, it just isn’t the same when it comes to healing. We find what we are looking for when we let it go. We resolve what we must when we surrender and we realise we have found healing when we look back and see what time has changed. We find our authentic selves when we focus on allow time and our work to walk side by side as we journey towards recovery. We find hope in our recovery journey when we welcome these friends in to it with us.
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AuthorSue Parry-Jones is a trained counsellor, a social worker and survivor of abuse. The content of the blog is both personal and sound. The words are relate-able and widely appealing to those struggling with survival from abuse in their own lives. More and more we are appreciating in our society that abuse affects a number of people’s lives and as more people are beginning to openly discuss what they have endured, so there is a huge need for encouragement and hope in the form of texts that deliver clear and concise yet real input. THe words shared here are honest, real and heart-felt. Archives
February 2018
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