what are you even healing?

Original photo, New Orleans '23

This series is called ‘Let’s be healed,’ with ‘healed’ crossed out and replaced with ‘Real’. Real over healed to emphasize the main point of the healing process — to be real, yo. Really, authentically yourself. Present, true to yourself and what you love, and free to act accordingly. Healing is to come to a place where you feel safe, inspired, and like yourself. To be in the moment in a way that effortlessly reflects what you truly value, feel, and want.


​What I intend to do with this series is simplify the healing process in your mind and therefore in your life. I’m filming episodes live on Instagram, and then adjusting the transcripts to publish here, for quick read n’ ref. As of this writing, five episodes have already been filmed and pushed to youtube. Let’s talk more about the main point --

What is ‘healed’?‘Healed’ is a state where you can respond from the present moment as yourself, true to your highest desires with an open, discerning heart. That’s the destination. The destination is not in the past. We associate healing with what’s behind us. You cannot heal the past. It’s over. What you’re actually interested in healing is the effect those experiences have had on your beliefs, your concepts of self, and the ways that you respond to life.

Healing is *not* about coming up with ways to explain why you don’t have power.Healing is about recognizing and claiming the power you’ve always had so you can use it now and going forward. It’s a bit of a trip to realize your total freedom (and responsibility), but that’s the sensation you’re seeking. That’s what you instinctually know is possible. That’s what you’re trying to unlock by healing.

Healing gets confused with being able to explain and understand behavior that doesn’t serve you. I spent several years doing that and hear me out — that’s like having a cut on your knee and instead of tending to the wound, you spend your time talking about and reenacting how it happened. You’re certainly welcome to do that forever and/or as much as it’s helpful to come to terms with the accident, but I promise what you want is the ability to move freely with a healed knee. It’s not about the accident. It’s about a functional knee.

When we start talking about healing, what most people think of are things in the big, bad trauma genre. Abuse, loss, poverty. Yet being unable to express fully as yourself is traumatic, too. Most people have had that experience. If you’ve gone through a school system or were born on Earth in the last 50, 60, 5,000 years, you’ve been trained to deny a lot of what’s natural to you. To sit still, wear a social mask, be who your parents think you should be, look like these celebrities, pursue those accomplishments, spend your time in these ways, value (or don’t) yourself because…
As contemporary humans, we’re conditioned to deny our individuality. It’s a pretty subtle process and it ends up with us having an idea of who or how we should be and feeling bad about ourselves for not ever hitting that imaginary, homogenous, profit-driven mark.

Whether you’re working through big bad trauma or the low-grade societal kind, I’ll do my best to make what I found from 1000s of hours with clients and in my own lab available to you so that you can be your real self as fast as possible. Free to Be here and now, that’s the goal.

It’s super easy to get caught up in looking behind and around you as you start to notice and resent that you aren’t standing up for yourself, following your passions, connecting deeply with others, etc.

Of course, your mind wants to figure out why that’s happening and you start to pull the pieces together — “Oh, Mom did this, Dad didn’t do that, TV did this, and and and…” While that can be helpful in some ways to facilitate understanding (which I’ll talk about in other episodes), it’s so easy to get lost in your stories and forget the point of being in those stories — to heal.

Remember, you’re looking back because you truly want to enjoy right now as you are.We’ll continue this and related topics in subsequent episodes. Questions, comments, shares, and subscribes encouraged! Thank you!

Visit me on Instagram, at habitbook.com or email me [email protected]

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