How our Need to 'Heal' Can Backfire

And the secret that changes everything

Photo by 🇸🇮 Janko Ferlič on Unsplash

Healing is everywhere these days: Biohack your way to optimal performance. Unlock your highest potential. Transform your trauma. Break through your blocks. Ayahuasca your way to Enlightenment. Expand, ascend, evolve.

It sounds good, right? It definitely did to me for years. But there’s a problem, which is what I call the shadow side of healing.

For a lot of people, healing has become just another thing to achieve — another self-improvement project fuelled by the underlying belief: I’m not enough as I am.

Unfortunately this is exactly what keeps people stuck in the same patterns for years.

The Trap of Constant Fixing

I’ve been watching it everywhere: friends, clients and myself. People diving into deep work, chasing the next breakthrough, convinced that if they just clear one more pattern, release one more trauma, then they’ll finally feel …I would like to say whole, but for most people it's even more vague than that.

For most people it's happy, powerful, free, devoid of suffering, successful, healed, safe etc. (which one is it for you?)

But even if it was wholeness, that we aspired to, it is still not something we get to after enough breathwork sessions, somatic releases, or plant medicine journeys.

It’s something we…slowly (sometimes painfully so) and organically grow into as our maturity develops. If our inner work and our desire to heal is keeping us on a hamster wheel of self-improvement, it’s not healing anymore. It’s another form of self-rejection. Another form of saying No to life and the love that is available, always.

The Subtle Violence of Self-Improvement

There can be a violence in the way we push ourselves to heal. A subtle aggression in the way we try to force our nervous systems to process faster and expect our bodies to open on command. Which I see a lot on different kind of retreats. When we start treating our inner wounds like 'problems' that need to be solved rather than living things that need our care and compassion, we are missing the point. We become our own inner perpetrator. Our own enemy.

And this can be so subtle…so innocent at first.

But after a while it simply gets exhausting. It burns us out. It creates a weird paradox where the more inner work we do, the worse we feel because deep down we wonder: what's wrong with me? Why is this not working? Why do I still go back to the old me after retreat or session is finished?

The emotional releases that in the beginning gave so much relief, the circles and the ceremonies that were like a light at the end of the tunnel, all start losing their potency…

Not because these tools or healing itself is bad, but because force doesn’t create safety.

And only when we feel safe does our being truly open up.

So how do we create this inner safety for true opening to happen?

How can we reconcile that seeming paradox of 'improving ourselves' (and there is no denying that there is room for that in each one of us) and simply 'being good enough'?

The secret is in the attitude.

If we see ourselves as a project that needs completing, it will backfire. Then we are still operating from the limited dimension of the mind. The world of good and bad. Black and White.

What we need to bring online is our heart and connect to love and kindness. As tacky as that may sound. It's the same thing we connect to when relating to a child.

Of course the child is limited. It may still not be able to walk, for example. But we don't push it to make that first step. We are patient, we watch and we deeply listen without judgment.

And this is the secret key to healing: intimacy.

The change happens when we stop pushing and start listening. When we allow space for what’s unresolved without needing to fix it right away. When we shift from doing healing to being with ourselves in a new and intimate way. The way we would attend to a little child…or to our Beloved.

That’s when the body softens and the mind stops fighting. We start feeling a sense of inner safety, because deep down, we started to attend to ourselves with kindness, with understanding…and to give ourselves the opportunity to unravel the mystery of our body, heart and being in our own time.

It's a truly mystical experience, one that defies logic because it's given to us by grace not produced by our own willpower.

To me healing is a deeply spiritual experience because it forces us to let go of our control and to surrender to the unknown. To learn to trust the goodness of life itself and in doing so, we learn that there is indeed a greater power than our own small self.

Ultimately it's life itself that is the healer- not the tools and workshops we do. Slowly but surely we learn to walk the paradox. Growth and self-acceptance aren’t opposites; they belong together, like a tree naturally reaching for the sun.

Only in the mind it feels irreconcilable. If we look through the lens of the heart, it makes perfect sense. For love and life are never stagnant.

But first we need to make that long journey back home from our head down into our body and heart. Only then can we truly start they journey.

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I’ll be teaching the foundations of Inner Safety in my online workshop starting April 23rd. If you want to feel more at home in your being, check out my website for all the info.