Healing is such an overused word within the spiritual community and beyond that, it has become a catch-all phrase to include basically everything under the sun which has led it to lose its actual meaning. The original meaning of the word ‘healing’ is to make whole again but I would dare say that the majority of what is called healing today does not actually restore our wholeness. It just puts a bandaid in place.
“All of western medicine is built on getting rid of pain, which is not the same as healing. Healing is actually the capacity to hold pain.”
Gabor Maté
This is partially due to the fact that we bring our 3D understanding to spirituality and every other aspect of our life and this leads to using our healing in a very similar way as we often approach medicine and that is to get rid of the symptoms without addressing the root cause. We feel stressed, and we get a massage. We don’t know what to do next, we call a psychic. We feel drained, we get Reiki, We feel energetically blocked, we get our chakras realigned. And the list goes on, yet these are all short-term fixes to a deeper issue underneath that doesn’t get addressed.
This doesn’t mean that you shouldn’t do any of the above, it just means that in many cases what we see as healing are only short-term attempts to feel better that don’t address the underlying root cause that are making us feel stressed, uncomfortable, scared, in pain and so on…
The problem with feel-good healing
I call such modalities feel-good healing because they make us feel good, but so do hot baths, great sex, or spa days.
They relax us, they rejuvenate us, they allow us to catch our breaths and they make us feel good. Swiss psychiatrist Carl Jung said, “I would rather be whole than good.” which of course means something else, however, were he alive today I think that he would agree that it’s also better to feel whole than good. It comes down to the same thing though, no matter how good you feel it doesn’t make you whole (or healed), yet the more whole you are the better you feel.
In other words, feeling good doesn’t lead to wholeness, but wholeness does lead to feeling good.
There’s of course nothing wrong with feeling good, nor is there something wrong with spa days, great sex, or hot baths. I love them, they’re all really great but what they do not do is truly address the issues that keep us from actually accessing our wholeness.
Therefore the biggest problem with feel-good healing is that it doesn’t actually help us heal (or become whole) on the level that truly matters. It keeps us not only stuck and going in circles, but it also keeps us dependent on the ‘healers’. As what is truly causing our issues remains forever unaddressed, we continue to feel the symptoms of our core issues and continue to go to healers to make us feel good. Until the effects of their ‘healing’ wears off and we need to go back for our next ‘fix’. It’s a vicious circle, that many people who believe to be healing have on rinse and repeat.
Set up in this way, there isn’t much difference between feel-good ‘healing’ modalities and Big Pharma – even though the intentions of feel-good healing practitioners are pure and not driven by profit margins in the way we see in the pharmaceutical industry, the outcome remains the same because the mechanism is the same. This is because they both generally focus on symptom control instead of the underlying root cause, which is called palliation.
This doesn’t mean that such modalities have become obsolete because they do have some value as a way to find deeper relaxation and in many cases they are the first entry point for many people to the world of woo. That being said, they are not a stage that we are meant to stay in forever because they don’t allow us to truly address our deeper issues. They are meant to be bridges into that deeper work.
Even when someone can psychically/intuitively see underlying causes, it doesn’t mean that they are simultaneously being healed. One of the biggest rookie mistakes out there is the idea that other people can heal us because they can’t. People can assist us in our healing, the one healer or therapist deeper than the other, but the idea that someone can heal us is an illusion. Just as the idea of complete self-healing is an illusion.
Others can’t heal us for us, but we also can’t fully heal on our own because of our own inner defense, protection, and survival mechanisms that keep us from addressing our deepest unresolved pain.
The reality is that there are no magic pills or magic wands and in many cases, it’s both our addiction to or dependency on the other person or thing to make us feel good as well as the placebo effect that makes us believe that we are healing when in reality what we are doing hardly moves the needle. The reason why so many people feel that they have done so much healing, with little to nothing to show for it or without getting where they hoped to be in their healing process and in their lives is because they are stuck on the merry-go-round of feel-good healing.
Embracing the darkness and shadows
Yes, healing does require revisiting the same themes from different angles often but true healing is always evolutionary. It creates progress and a deepening of our sense of wholeness. But as I said before feeling good does not equal being whole, becoming whole means bringing back the parts of ourselves that we or others have deemed wrong in the past. Being whole means facing all the places where we are disconnected from ourselves out of fear, blame, shame, guilt, and so on. Being whole means bringing back the disowned parts of ourselves as well as the denied parts that we couldn’t live to survive the experiences of our childhood even when those childhoods were good. It’s not just abuse that can lead us to deny or disown parts of ourselves, positive parenting can create its own issues.
The reason we are often unaware or perhaps even oblivious to these parts of us is because they are held deep in the subconscious and it’s as if we have locked them up and thrown away the key. We have years of training in pretending they don’t exist because this allowed us to continue our lives as if we were okay, even when we weren’t. There isn’t a person on Earth that this doesn’t apply to, to some degree. These locked-away pieces are the missing key to your wholeness.
I know the high-vibe tribe and the positive thinkers will vehemently disagree here because they believe that they can simply decide to reclaim their wholeness by believing they are already whole but that is not the way things work in the real world. They think that the subconscious can simply be reprogrammed at will, which defies the psychological complexities of the subconscious mind which is programmed to protect us. It will not simply accept to program new ideas and it will definitely not accept beliefs that contradict what it has been programmed to believe in the past without evidence that the previous belief was false or not true, to begin with.
My all-time favorite Carl Jung quote says it best:
“One does not become enlightened by imagining figures of light, but by making the darkness conscious.
The latter procedure, however, is disagreeable and therefore not popular.” Carl Jung
Healing is the most scientific path to enlightenment as it cannot miss the mark, while yoga and meditation have proven to be the path for some in the past, healing offers a path to all because it allows us to heal the separation between the ego and the soul. As we heal our wounded personalities we become whole again, not only on an incarnation level but also on a soul path level – allowing us to become one again with our soul – aka inner union.
Healing therefore should not be about avoiding your unresolved pain, but about facing it if you really want to be able to address its root cause. Feel-good healing is in a way the antithesis of true healing because it doesn’t ever bring you to your pain, it does the opposite it brings you to feel good which would be great if it stuck, but it doesn’t – it wears off. You can use feel-good healing as self-care as part of your healing efforts, but the mistake most people make is to believe that they can heal themselves fully in this way.
But it of course feels scary to face our fears, our old demons and dragons, and the pain they guard securely tucked away. We don’t want to go there, we are wired to avoid pain as much as we can which makes it feel almost counterintuitive to deliberately seek it out in our healing process. It feels much more enticing to feel good, and that’s what makes feel-good healing the ultimate mental, emotional, and spiritual bypass because it keeps us from the very thing that healing is meant to do and that is restore our wholeness.
As we live in a dimensional reality of duality, we ourselves are dual in nature. We have both the light and the dark within us, the feminine and the masculine, the human and the Divine. Duality separates the whole spectrum into two halves. We can’t just be one-half of who we are, we have to be both halves on all levels. Many people in the spiritual community want the light, the feminine, and the divine aspect of themselves while they reject the masculine, the dark, and the human aspect of themselves. As a society, we live the dark, the masculine, and the human aspect – while many still reject or subject the feminine, the light, and the Divine. Becoming whole means balancing all of these parts of ourselves and bringing them back into One.
You need healing modalities to facilitate that process and the truth is most of them don’t. But when we do work with modalities that facilitate this kind of healing, it emancipates us rather than make us dependent on the person facilitating them. Because that is what true healing does, it doesn’t have us coming back for our needed ‘fix’, it helps us grow and evolve to the next level of consciousness available to us. It helps us become the interdependent, sovereign being that we are meant to be. It helps us stand on our own two feet, instead of being dependent on others. It helps us step into our own power, become our true selves and embody our soul essence.
Granted, this doesn’t happen in one session and you will have to put in the work but choosing the right tools makes all the difference.
A sound bath, cacao ceremony, energy healing, psychic reading, and many of the other new fad healing modalities out there – that promise you the moon, can’t deliver this level of healing because they don’t go as deep as they need to. I love for example sound baths and cacao ceremonies they can be a wonderful way to connect with beautiful people and to ourselves and the Divine within, but I do not look to these practices for healing. As they are in a way the spiritual equivalent of going to the movies or going for coffee with a good friend, and although that can be just what we need it doesn’t mean it’s healing us at the level that we need to become truly whole.
Learning to discern the difference will be an absolute game-changer in your healing and Ascension journey. Not only will it save you a small fortune, but it will also accelerate your healing process when you address the real issues instead of just controlling the symptom.
With my deepest love,
