Miracles in Healing
Early in life, when we experienced our first heartbreaks and felt the sting of rejection, failure and let-down, our instinct was to find an immediate fix. If I just find a new boyfriend or girlfriend, the feelings of rejection from this relationship won’t be so strong. Heading down paths of avoidance, and rebound relationships we use anything to combat the nagging, broken feelings that pursue us.
Songs on the radio, smells in the night, and words I’ve read, bring my old feelings of brokenness back in waves. Am I still healing or is this in my mental memory? I’ve rode the wave of healing, sometimes with grace and sometimes with utter gutted-ness. Other times I thought that I was broken, but now I can see that it was not my spirit that was bruised: it was my Ego. How confusing! At the time, it felt as though life would never be the same.
My recent heartbreak had me shutting out all noise, my soul demanded quiet. Healing was found in simplification. In my inexperienced days, I would have thrust myself back out into the dating world, only to experience rejection in all sorts of magnitudes. During my days as a student of Psychology, we explored this rebound habit in class and I coined a phrase: “Rejection Junkies”, the inescapable places we look where we can experience this rejection time and time again.
Rejection junkies is a rampant phenomenon, yet never discussed explicitly. An Ego creation that keeps you going back for unnecessary punishment of the soul. Why do we always travel back to places that tell us where we are not wanted, where we are not good enough? In our digital addictions, rejection is a click away, lurking around each post. Choosing to be mostly disconnected from that hyper-connected world has saved my heart from unnecessary punishment.
Wisdom would ask, when burned by a fire, why would you turn and sit in the sun? When you’re broken, why do you keep going to places you will be beaten, hoping for a different result? Wisdom knows the heart must take time to heal, to just be, and allow it to pass. But most importantly, healing is a process between you and God. A solitary conversation where we start to see how God sees us, not as our fractured fellow human beings wish us to be, or our ego tells us we are. What our fellow humans think of us is really none of our business. The better question is why do we care so much?
Do you feel broken? Do you know you need to heal? Are you able to give yourself what you need in order to heal?
Healing the soul is quite different than the mind. When the soul needs healing, it feels so bruised that it causes a visceral response in your being, like turning your cheek, or an involuntary shuddering. When it happened to me, my soul’s removal from the pain was harsh, abrupt and swift.
Feeling hurt, pain, anger, or frustration, the source is never what or who we think. When we focus our healing on the further discovery of the external source it is similar to the emergency brake we place in the car: it slows and often stalls the healing process. When your soul needs to heal, it often has nothing to do with the conscious, current source, so why give it any attention?
I needed time, I needed to breathe. I need to heal.
Feeling guilty for honouring what my being was saying to me, I longed for distance, time away, and time to heal. Was it a call to God? Regardless of what you believe, what I realized in that moment is that the call to heal is our soul’s urging. Despite all conscious desire to stay, I missed him terribly for months and months afterward but my soul knew it was time to say good-bye. I had to heal, by myself.
“Love yourself. Accept Yourself. Be honest about what heals and helps you. Then you’ll bring your healing gifts to others. Your life will be a gift to the world.”
~ Melody Beattie
As I have progressed through life, the wounds that refuse to heal are the ones I struggled to let go of. Those wounds generally have a prevailing theme maybe a different cast of characters, different stories, different time, but one theme. Can you recognize your theme? As rejection junkies: what is your “drug” of choice, what are the common elements? Like all junkies, it either swallows the best parts of ourselves up on this pursuit or we let go, let God and we heal.
When you begin the path to healing, gently kiss the broken parts of yourself, say good bye to the external source. Bring yourself back to the aloneness that is required for true healing to began, it is there you will find your true source of love.
