7 Misunderstood Truths About Healing

The internet is full of self help and spiritual teachings.

Experts on healing your inner child. And teachers with the secret to eternal bliss.

As someone on the healing path this can feel overwhelming.

You may feel lost in a maze of non-stop techniques, teachings, and tips.

How do you know what to trust?

Our culture immerses us in shiny advertising, copious information, and promises of instant results. It’s easy to get caught up with false expectations. This set-up takes our power away.

Let’s get back into our power. Let’s clear the confusion. Here are seven smart tips to help you on your path.

1. No one healing method or teaching will cure you.

Our culture loves one-fix solutions.

Advertising tells us we need that one perfect thing. The right pill. The right self help book. The right therapist.

The truth is that healing is multifaceted. It is ever evolving.

Relying on the same method can keep us stuck. It can take us out of our power. When we rely on one solution, we close ourselves off to other opportunities for growth.

Is it a bad thing to stay with what works? Not at all.

But be proactive about your healing. Be aware of what your therapy or healing sessions are actually doing for you. And keep yourself informed.

Keep exploring.

2. Healing is an evolving process.

We heal to reduce emotional pain.

But there is also a deeper purpose.

Healing increases our awareness. It allows us to see an expanded view of life. It also brings neglected parts of ourselves to light.

Pretend for a moment that you are a house. (A common metaphor in dreams by the way.)

You see a dirty window and it’s completely distorting your view outside. It’s painful to look at, so you clean the smudges and dirt. Suddenly, new light comes into your perspective. The world becomes a little clearer.

But now with all that light shining in you realize what a mess your house is.

Limiting beliefs piled up in the kitchen sink. Old childhood wounds cluttering up the closet.

As our awareness expands we see what needs to be healed. And as we heal, our awareness expands. As each layer of wounding comes to the surface, we will see it with a new understanding. Thus, we will use different approaches to heal as we grow.

The healing process is ongoing. Eventually, healing merges into stages of awakening. And as long as you are a human being, it will never stop.

You will always be a part of this evolving process.

3. We need to heal who we are on all levels: spiritual, physical, emotional, and mental.

We are spiritual beings manifested in physical form. This complicates things a bit.

The spiritual self is connects us to our divinity.
The physical self allows us to survive in this world.
The emotional self allows us to interact with life.
The mental self allows us to process life.

Each of these layers interact with each other. If we heal our emotions, for example, our thoughts (or mental layer) will become more healed. This is why holistic healing addresses who we are as a whole being.

Not all types of healing address each layer.

Traditional medicine focuses on the physical body.
Traditional therapy focus on our emotional and mental selves.
Shamanic healing, energy healing, and spiritual practice focuses on our spiritual selves.

For wholeness to occur, we must focus on all aspects of ourselves.

4. Instant healings, awakenings, and “miracle cures” are rare.

These stories capture our attention and fascinate us. But this can lead us into an expectation trap.

Healing doesn’t happen all at once.

Okay. Yes, there are some exceptions. There are people who have healed instantly. Or with just a few healing sessions.

But this is rare.

Most of us are taking the slow path toward healing and awakening. (With quick spurts of growth here and there.)

What does this mean for us? It means we need to listen to and accept where we are now.

Don’t get trapped by expectations. Be realistic about Now. Follow what inspires and pulls at your heart.

But don’t get fooled into the expectation hype.

5. Assume you're not being told the entire story.

When I first became interested in ayahuasca and shamanic healing, I read several stories about people who healed their depression or back pain (or whatever) after only a few ceremonies. It seemed amazing.

But after a year of participating in healing ceremonies, I found that this type of quick fix is rare.

It is easy to become inspired by stories that give us hope.

But a story is just a snapshot of one person’s experience.

We don’t know her history or her current situation. Was she already far along the healing path? Has she had a relapse since then? What does she do to maintain the healing?

Our minds like to fill in the gaps of what hasn’t been told. It’s easy to imagine that Jane Doe is now enjoying an awesome life free of PTSD after doing four ayahuasca ceremonies in Peru.

A safer expectation is to assume that there’s more to the story than we know.

6. Learning to love ourselves is not enough heal us.

Don’t get me wrong. Self love is essential.

But when people get the idea that they only need to love and forgive themselves to heal, it creates unreasonable expectations.

Healing requires us to look at our wounds and destructive patterns. And sometimes we hate what we see. Sometimes we can’t accept who we are or who we’ve been in the past. We become incredibly frustrated at ourselves.

And this is okay.

To love ourselves, we need to accept both the light and the dark within us. The concept is simple, but not so simple to do.

Again, this is okay.

Being present to the messiness of healing, no matter how “unloving” it may feel, is more of an accomplishment than most people realize. Going through our life experiences—fully, without numbing ourselves—is what’s most important.

And eventually we can learn to love even that.

7. Mindfulness and questioning our thoughts is not a cure-all.

Mindfulness lessens our attachment to pain. Questioning our thoughts allows us to investigate the validity of limiting thoughts.

Both of these tools are invaluable at rooting out the cause of our suffering.

But sometimes pain is so intense that our ego can’t stand to be mindful for even one second.

And sometimes there is no thought related to the suffering we experience.

We just feel terrible for no conscious reason.

A few months ago I missed a step and twisted my ankle. I passed out from the pain.

No amount of mindfulness would have prevented my body’s reaction. No amount of self inquiry would have reduced the pain.

Certain levels of depression, anxiety, and mental illnesses are on par with physical injury. The pain is uncontrollable and intense no matter what we do.

We can learn to be with pain. But do we tell someone with a broken leg or schizophrenia that they just need to question how bad things are? That would be unkind.

The truth about healing

Don’t think a self help fairy will magically cure you.

You need to trust your own path. Because every time you look inside for answers, you decrease the amount of power the "experts" can take from you.

Think beyond the teachings.
Question what you read.

Remember times you’ve helped yourself in the past, and find ways to apply it to the present.

Above all, remind yourself that self help tools and spiritual teachings are there to help empower you.

When you see yourself as knowing your own answers, you become the healer.