Healing

Concepts for Thriving
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Healing

Healing is a natural, ongoing process that restores balance and well-being to our body, our mind, and within our physical and emotional world.

  • Understanding that healing is a process rather than a goal (healed) helps us to discern when we’re out of balance and make a shift.
  • We learn to notice when we’re far away from well-being and craft a healing journey back to wellness following our body guidance.
  • Co-Regulation and Holding Space promote healing for ourselves and others.

The Healing Journey

We’re called to take a healing journey when we find ourselves far from well-being.

We can end up quite sick and messy if we have trauma. Sometimes, in order just to survive, we make choices to eat, drug, ignore, or endure at the expense of our long-term well-being. It happens. We’re human.

While this may stoke our fears and make us believe we’re in a healing crisis… our concept for thriving is that a healing journey is called for. Journeys often call for some preparation, gathering resources, setting intentions, and getting help.

Getting Help?!? Often, in survival culture, people are expected to go it alone. In thriving culture, we recognize that healing — like any journey — benefits from cooperative support. Help can arise from teachers who can help us develop new skills and practices. Skilled practitioners who excel in holding a healing space can help us co-regulate and attune our body, nervous system, and thoughts toward restoration and replenishment.

The healing journey is yours to craft and to take each baby step along the way. Your choices, your freedom, and your body guidance are what always matter most! But that does not mean you need to do it alone (or that going it alone is a “higher” achievement).

Healing Every Hour

We’re naturally healing all the time. Cells are being repaired and replaced. Emotional upsets are processed (or shoved away for later). Sleep gives a chance for the brain and body time to process and unwind stresses. Food and water comfort and replenish us.

So much healing occurs without even thinking about it!

That said, so much damage and stress also occur without even thinking about it.

Imagine at the top of the hour you checked in with your heart. How’s it feeling? Any distresses that are calling to be unwound?

How about your gut? How is it feeling about the relationships around you and the environment you’re in right now?

Is your body asking for some nourishment? Shift in position or location?

Don’t feel bad if you’ve yet to develop the skill of listening to your body guidance so that healing happens regularly throughout the day — rather than deferred for “later” (tomorrow? next week? next year?).

For thriving, it helps to be aware that healing is designed to be in the now. An emotional trauma that gets healing attention right after it happens might unwind in 30 minutes. Wait a decade and it may take… much longer.

Tending to our healing regularly throughout the day means we’re much less likely to require a challenging healing journey later.

Useful Questions

  • What am I noticing? How is my body asking for healing right now to restore balance and well-being?
  • In my emotional world, what feels toxic or tense and could use cleansing and unwinding?
  • As I move through my week, do I feel like there’s natural healing happening? It’s okay to get tense if it’s followed by release. Tension followed by even more tension leads to dis-ease.
  • What practices promote my own healing? Am I doing those practices or deferring them?
  • Who is in my support circle? Do I cultivate those relationships and keep them fresh and alive?
  • What do I face alone that would benefit from hearty help?

Resources

Related Concepts

Body Guidance, Choices, Circling, Comfort, Co-Regulation, Grounding, Holding Space, Lifestyle Design, Powerful Pause, Self-Care, Unwinding, Vitality, Resilience, Trauma Informed

Links

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Healing - Seems like I’ve been trying to heal chronic fatigue “forever” and I get tired of the same old stories and desperate attempts to “figure it all out” that circle around in my brain.

Today, even though my current budget is pretty frugal - I decided to use my “birthday gift cash” to get Carol Look’s new program “Tapping into Abundance” since she includes the topic of feeling abundance in your body / with your health.

I really want this experience of abundance of health and need encouragement & uplift in this area, because I’ve been pushing myself to do my retail job and keep ending up exhausted and then depressed and cranky & negative too. I try to tell myself it will only be this crazy busy for the next few months and then things will slow down alot in January, but this current situation with work and chronic fatigue is misery. Not only do I get over-tired in my body, but the depletion affects my mind & mood so much too.

Hoping & praying I can create some patterns of newness with my health and abundance in my relationship with my body & emotions. Is anyone else playing along with Carol’s new abundance program? If so, I’d love to have some company & support on this healing adventure.

Thanks: Jewel
abundance in all areas

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Delighted you’ll be joining us for Carol’s program!

One of the curiousities I’ve had about chronic fatigue, for example, is I’ve noticed that the people who tend to have it are expressive and generous energetically. They can take a mess and make it art. Chaos at work they bring competence and sufficient care to turn sticks and leaves into… heartistry.

What feels awfully consistent is that “taking in qi” (meaning, the active flowing INTO of energy) is their stronger challenge.

In the artwork you posted, is the person meditating actually absorbing the energy of sun and abundance and love all around?

We KNOW she can generate all that. But notice her / their body is not internally flowing with energy. It’s not rippling with vibrancy. Yes, connected to all that, peaceful with all that, but is that body being nourished, replenished, and full-filled by All That Is?

When we express and act and serve from out internal resources predominantly, well, we can exhausted.

When I am tired, healing looks like me asking Source to work THROUGH me. Sure, that requires a willingness (and some energy skill) to allow that. But it is an intention that shifts me. It says, “I know there is energy and intelligence all around me. I invite it to replenish me as I go, and yeah, I am willing to even let it full-fill me as I do this work.”

Then, when we’re done with work, our tank is more full – even if we concurrently “worked” certain energy pathways “hard” and they need a rest. Rest is different from fatigue. Ready for Replenishment is different from depleted.

Abundance, then, for me is predominantly about Allowing myself to tap into energy resources already existing. Sometimes, like looking at the tree outside your window, there is a potent reminder and Opening that happens. Even at work, any work, we can revitalize through connection to the Nature and Altars (including ones that don’t require us to do anything to organize them!) that connect us to sacred energies for our thriving.

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Thanks - appreciating your words, Rick. I noticed as soon as I took a second look at the picture that there is this sense of me beaming out energy, but not taking it in, and not really absorbing the love and abundance around me. But I wasn’t really aware of that until you pointed it out.

I will explore & play with this more. I know sometimes I’ve been so grumpy going into work tired and feeling like no matter how hard I try it’s never quite good enough (my employer tends to have very high expectations this time of year - since Christmas is the big profit time), so I would make a prayer to “let Jesus take the wheel” (this is kind of a joke between another co-worker & I - as we both tend to get grumpy and need help to avoid reacting in unprofessional ways with customers). Another way of saying it might be asking my “higher self” to “drive the bus”.

It has surprised me that sometimes when I have asked “Source to work through me” I’ve blurted out some unexpectedly assertive things that I wasn’t really planning on saying. But there’s alot of frustration at work right now - too much workload and not enough staff and not enough space to store all the merchandise either, so it’s just bloody aggravating.

Anyways, I will invite this “replenishment as I go” and willingness to let Source Full-fill me as I do this work. And I’m looking for new ways to revitalize. New ways of thinking and responding to life, and my relationship with myself.

I notice I have alot of stories because of what I’ve read about chronic fatigue over the years - the way the body tends to get depleted easily and then it takes quite abit of time to replenish after it gets drained - like the “energy storage tank” is not working properly. And this has certainly been my experience. But I have this course on various qi gong practices I’ve been meaning to get back into - maybe those practices could shift the way my body works with the subtle energies / repair my inner storage tank?

One of the questions you asked above - * What practices promote my own healing? Am I doing those practices or deferring them? - I can’t help but notice I am deferring - I think about doing qi gong but then I don’t actually do it.

Something I can tap on for sure.

I like the words “ready for replenishment”. I think I will post them on my mirror to remind me - instead of thinking in terms of how depleted I feel. And “sacred energies for our thriving”. That somehow lights me up too.

Gonna go walk around in that big pile of yellow leaves in the backyard now.

Thank you for your support & caring.

P.S. Sending you some “yellow leaf” energy.

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At the playground yesterday (for 5 hours) with the kids. Late in that period I shifted from playing with to isolating from. Yeah, as an introvert-ish kind of person, that’s a pretty normal reaction to overstim.

And… at one point what we’re talking about here kicked in. Replenishment. I was depleting through the isolation strategy. protective but not restorative.

Got up. Did some energy movements - physical and energy awareness. Felt into the magnificence of a we-space that could delight so so so many families all at once, while mostly not really connecting with the people. Felt the trees giving me shade from the sun. Felt the vibe of celebration of life. Put on my noise cancelling ear phones and played some song as I moved intuitively.

Qi gong is “energy skill”. Any movement we do with awareness of our energy and a chosen selection/filter of the energy around us is… qi gong in my book. Like walking in the yellow leaves.

The Chinese are typically not into freedom and improv as much as I am in their practices. So Qi gong for me is not going to be about some fixed “form.” It will be about energy skill. Which you’re doing. Letting other energies “drive” is savvy energy skill, in my book, too!

Onwards…
Rick

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Love everything you shared here and want to write back more, but I came down with the damn cold and feel like shite, so just going to bed early and praying for some deep replenishment in ways right for me.

Carol Look’s call today was really good. It opened up some emotions for me that I had been holding down.

If you guys could send some healing vibes my way I’d really appreciate it because I’ve got to go back to work tomorrow, but I’d rather just stay in bed for a few day. Yuk.

Thanks & Hugs: Jewel

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Healing vibes your way, for sure. Love to you!

Rick

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Thanks, Rick. :green_heart:

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Sorry I deleted these posts. Feeling embarrassed by the intensity of my angry emotions and my negative head space. Will write more after I’ve had 3 days off work and feel more rested. Hopefully my perspective will be better then. Thanks.

if I did love myself
if I did love myself1080×1080 62 KB

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Listening to a good talk by Tara Brach about Awakening through Anger.

(video at bottom of this page = “causing no harm”)

Awakening Through Anger

P.S. Abit later - I enjoyed the Carol Look “Emotional Abundance” class today alot. Got some new perspectives & idea’s that I think are going to help me. Decided that it’s really better for me to focus on “emotional abundance” right now, rather than this desperate grasping to heal chronic fatigue. I will keep playing with this and let you know how it unfolds.

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Another good bit of wisdom on holding anger with love…