Healing and wisdom

Healing makes you wise, and wisdom helps you heal.

I discovered this for myself after being told by a healer that the cause of my psychosomatic pains was simply that I had never learned to get rid of all the negative experiences in my life.

The healer told me to write out how I truly felt about all the people in my life.

It was such a novel concept at the time. Looking back, I am surprised it wasn’t more obvious to me.

How can a person go from hating, really despising their family one moment, to being happy and loving the next?
The answer is that they cannot.

It cannot be done even after a day, a month, or several years. Because anger that is suppressed does not go away, it just gets pushed down. That’s what ‘suppressed’ means, it means that you’ve pushed something down.

Anger is meant to be expressed, pushed out. For better or worse, that is its nature. Just like fire burns upwards, and water flows downwards. It takes effort to make something go against its nature.

So how could I sit and say that I had an okay relationship with my family, when in the past I have wished that I never knew them, wished some of them dead, and just generally despised them all?

I’m not saying it’s good to feel that way, I’m just asking how I could have felt so strongly in the past, and then a bit later, felt nothing?

That’s the answer, really. Instead of feeling angry, I chose to feel nothing. The price I paid for suppressing my anger was to suppress all my feelings. I lived a kind of bleak and meaningless life – still do to some extent, since I am naturally inclined to be detached.

To have anger, and then suppress it, and live as though nothing has changed? Sorry, it’s not possible.

The anger may change a little bit. It may go bad. Part of it might turn into resentment, part of it might turn into self-hatred and shame, or from time to time it might sneak out as rage or just frustration.

Whatever it is, it colours your life, your inner experience forever.
Forever?
Well, until you get it out. Until you express it somehow.

That’s where the writing came in. The healer told me to write how I really felt. Expressing how I really felt, probably for the first time in many years.

By that stage it came as a surprise to me that I was angry with my parents. I had known that I was angry at them for specific reasons, but that knowledge was always separate from the rest of my life. It was like remembering a character in a book, and briefly identifying with the feelings of that character.

Until someone pointed the way, I had no idea that there might be a connection between these powerful, yet dissociated, feelings, and the anxiety and depression that plagued me.

It was simple, really. On the basis of my bad experiences, and finding myself powerless to do anything, I created an attitude and a worldview in which bad experiences and powerlessness were normal.

I became a person who could survive being treated badly. I became a person who didn’t feel pain, except for the mysterious pains that had taken me to the healer in the first place.

By that stage, I had become a person shaped entirely by bad experiences. Without seeing it, I had rebuilt my character until it seemed impervious to the kind of pain I endured in the past.

The theme of this site is wisdom, and I have defined wisdom as the ability to know by seeing.

The path to healing and the path to wisdom are, in my experience, one and the same. To see the truth within our own lives is one of the surest paths to healing; and as we heal, we remove the pain and lies that distort our vision of reality.

With wisdom, we are able to pick apart the knots of hurt and false belief within us. And these old wounds must inevitably be healed if our minds are to one day reflect the truth clearly.

I have not found a single method that works, because all my problems are different and unique. I have not found a single teaching that covers everything, indeed, my experience has been like a series of ever more profound and healing lessons about myself and reality.

In the end, I can only be guided by truth, wisdom, and love, and face each challenge as it comes.