Author: reallifenashville@yahoo.com

In starting this blog, I hope to document a personal anecdote of parts of my own spiritual journey and the personal insights that have and continue to contribute to my greater healing and wholeness.  With that said, I wanted to start off with a short reflection of the origins of my journey and where it has taken me.

You could say that my spiritual journey started as a 16 year old teenager at a revival when I became a Christian, the temporary escape it gave me from a dysfunctional home and the 22 year journey into integrating psychology with theology, the Christian contemplatives and eventually to the spiritual path that I find myself on today.  While initially a savior from a difficult upbringing, the rigidity and dogma of my faith, to say the least, had become debilitating and outdated.  My spirituality had outgrown my religion. 

It was in this time, around 2013, I had started working in customer service for a new office just moved to Austin, TX.  It was during this time that I found and latched onto the writings of Eckhart Tolle, among others, starting with his book A New Earth.  I was instantly gripped and ironically encouraged at seeing for the first time just how of my own ego had created so much of the suffering I was experiencing in my life.  I was inspired, to say the least, at the thought of finding greater ease and contentment through being more present or being more “in the moment”. 

Years later and after reading numerous books on contemplative Christianity, spirituality, mindfulness, and personal growth, I went from working in customer service and delivering pizzas (upon first moving to CO) to becoming and working as a Certified Addiction Counselor in the state of Colorado, after moving there at the end of 2015.  I would soon get into therapeutic books and begin to learn of psychotherapeutic modalities that utilize mindfulness.  This would eventually lead to me going back to school to get a second Masters degree, this one in Mental Health counseling and to becoming licensed as an Addictions and Mental Health counselor. 

Today, all of these life experiences contribute to who I am as a counselor, how I show up for my clients and how I continue to develop in my spiritual practice and in my personal life.  My hope through this part of my blog is to encourage and inspire to others in their spiritual practice.    

I see and read it almost daily in therapeutic circles- healing. You can heal from your past trauma. Healing is available; healing is possible. Writing this I almost feel like I’m some Benny Hinn type of faith healing revival.

Unfortunately, with all this talk about and promises of healing, I’ve seen very little about what that healing actually is or what it entails? With a physical injury, this seems obvious, right? As kids our scars and bruises would naturally heal and fade away. Athletes, after serious Knee or Achilles injuries get expensive surgeries that repair and eventually help rebuild ligaments that were torn.

But, what about psychological healing? What does it actually mean to heal from trauma? How do we even know that we are healing?  Is it merely something that we want to believe and maybe profess? 

So, before sharing my thoughts here, just as a sidenote, this isn’t a bad question to ask any prospective counselor, therapist or coach you might see- before actually seeing them or paying for their services.  Just saying. 

So, what is healing? 

Simplest put, healing is two things—awareness and acceptance.  Awareness of our thought and behavioral patterns of avoidance and the painful feelings that our egoic patterns try to protect us from.  Learning to turn towards or to also be simultaneously aware and accepting of these not only these patterns, which are often automatic, but also of the painful feelings is what allows us have more tolerance of the difficult emotions we often react out of. 

To be sure, this is a simplified explanation.  In truth, healing can be much more difficult.  Our egoic thought and/ or behavioral patterns serve an important function—to protect us!   Unfortunately, in protecting us from intolerable feelings, our patterns can often eventually wreak havoc and suffering in our lives and become maladaptive. 

In fact, they do such a good job of protecting us, we often don’t even realize them for what they are- egoic/ protective patterns protecting us from painful feelings!!  Healing occurs as we see, notice and become more aware of these patterns, the feelings they are protecting and learn to be allowing or accepting of our experience of each. 

This is a process that involves awareness of the physiological bodily sensations of painful and threatening feelings and ideally the meanings that we attach to those sensations in a given situation.  Further, it involves inviting safety and ease to those feelings and the body that inhabits those feelings through acceptance of those difficult feelings and the protective patterns that work so hard to avoid and/ or distract from them.