At massage school we were taught that the body learns to live with trauma. Surrounding muscles will move to protect the muscle that’s injured. It’s much the same with the psyche. Things may cool down after an initial jolt but what we don’t psychologically heal will end up influencing other decisions we make. That’s because we haven’t resolved anything, we simply adjust the rest of our lives around what’s wounded and learn to live with it. By not healing those wounds we unknowingly let them into the driver’s seat for how we feel, behave, and live. They end up taking over and we live on auto-pilot instead of facing the pain and healing what’s hurt.

I am reminded of a scene from one of my favorite movies, Out of Africa, when Meryl Streep is trying to get a local boy to take the medicine he needs to heal his leg and get off crutches. He resists. He’d rather limp along than take the help. (Does this sound familiar to anyone?) She ends up cajoling him by hitting him where it hurts – his pride. By tapping into what matters to the boy she gives him the gift of healing and he finds a way to accept the gift that is given. Of course he regains full functioning of his leg.

This is the strange way healing works; we begin to trust in something that is very foreign and sometimes frightening by looking at it through the lens of what matters most to us. That’s the miracle in a nut shell, having faith in that which is most perplexing and often most uninviting. These end up being the very things that have the greatest potential for healing our deepest wounds. It’s how we come to wholeness and construct new layers that over time become the solid foundation which we build our lives upon. The wound only shows the way, it’s not meant to keep us stuck.

So why do we nurture the wounding and resist the healing? Each of us will have a different answer to this question. That’s why we do the inner work, so we can untangle our insides and come face to face with our most difficult questions. But the first step is realizing that we are the only ones stopping our healing. We nurture the wound or heal from it, ultimately that is our decision.

So where are you saying no to the healing that wants to reconstruct your life? We begin the journey of healing when we open to the wounds that have us locked inside our worst fears.

kb