The way I’ve begun to recognize healing in myself has been when someone who has wounded me deeply is no longer the reason I am doing something or not doing something. I am no longer reacting to that trauma but have found a way to begin integration of whatever that experience was bringing to the forefront of my life.
It’s been some of the hardest work I’ve done. There were times when I gave up on myself. What I found there in that place was that I had to keep giving up and it gets bad. It’s not somewhere I want to live. I can start moving towards wholeness whenever. Sometimes I just couldn’t keep going. I had to take a break to cope for awhile. I think I needed that too. I’m grateful I didn’t keep going down the road of giving up on myself to the ultimate end that we can see from here. That is to say, making the final decision to not be here anymore.
To begin to seek the healing I have so desperately longed for has been a journey into deeper truth about myself and the types of conversations I want to have with the world around me. The interplay between trust and vulnerability is so fascinating to me. This process, tension, and dance that exists as we converse with each other, ultimate reality, (which for me these days is an incarnated, sacramental, Jesus narrative), and the material world around us. The story arch that develops as we grow in and out of each others lives and sometimes drop back in. It’s so complex and messy and I think it can be really beautiful, (not just tragic.) Trust is sexy. I think the more I learn and the farther along in life I get the more intrigued I am by the idea of sex inside a deeply meaningful trusting context.
On that thread, I think a lot of the aspects of life fall into this sort of range that I am interacting with in different spaces. As I have conversations in these different spaces, whether that be with a set of limiting mental beliefs or a decision to get the heart rate up enough to allow the brain to release needed chemicals, or medication to help move the conversation in a direction toward wellness, (so on and so forth). There’s a sense of shaping that is always happening. I am being formed by these interactions and conversations that I am having every day. I have lots of conversations with coffee. I mean my body has a conversation with this substance and it creates a series of responses based on that input. I’m fascinated by all this. When I was learning more about Shamanism I came across this idea of having an interaction with natural substances in a way that engages the human experience in a different way. Shit hits different if you get my meaning. I think this sacramental idea woven into that tradition is something I am doing with many different things in life, I’m just not always aware of it. Does awareness make something sacramental? How much does intention impact the conversation?
I’m learning how to engage with myself in a way that isn’t based solely around the losses I’ve sustained or a fear of what I might have to live without in the future that is coming. These are also conversations I’m having with the world around me as I interact with fear and hope. How do I choose to engage and what am I making real in my own life in these spaces?
structures of home 