Inner Work & Self-Healing: Why it Matters
Today I want to talk about the importance of inner work and self-healing.
But first, I want to create a little context for why it is important and necessary for EVERYONE to heal and do their own inner work. This concept is multi-faceted and could be an entire book, and I will try to keep it as simple and digestible as possible for you here, so you can start to see what I see.
Childhood & The Human Experience
We come into this world as a baby, in our purest form - a complete expression of love and freedom. We are free to be ourselves, we are trusting, and we are naturally loving and easy to love. We are fully self-expressed - we cry when we hurt, we laugh when we connect, and we scream or hit when something or someone crosses our boundaries. We throw tantrums when we have strong emotions moving through our body. We are completely ourselves and free to be.
At some point, human beings made up what "civilized" and "appropriate" social behavior looks like. This changes over time, and it changes with geography, and it changes between households, so there is no INHERENTLY appropriate or inappropriate behaviors. There's just what we decide for ourselves and agree on in groups that determines this arbitrary measurement. Mostly, it's what we inherent from our families, our culture, and our society.
As we grow up, our fully expressed and natural behaviors become unacceptable or inappropriate, according to these arbitrary social standards. There's nothing wrong with this, it's just something we want to be aware of.
Another piece of growing up that we want to be aware of, is we look to our parents as our God - the source of our life, the source of our food, the source of love - our parents are everything to us.
The problem with this is: our parents are not God. They are human, fallible, and limited. Add to that the fact that we are no longer living together in tribes, and we cannot go to multiple caregivers to get all of our needs met. There is a lot of pressure put on parents and especially mothers in the single-family household to be EVERYTHING to their child, when that is just impossible. You will fail your children, and your children will feel wounded by you. That is just what it means to be human right now. Again, there is nothing wrong with this - it just is. And it's important to recognize, both as a child of a parent, and the parent of a child. It's not personal to any of us - this doesn't happen because we are bad children, or bad parents. It's just the nature of our current circumstances and part of the human experience. By being aware of it and accepting it without judgement, we can be responsible for it and take some actions both as wounded children and fallible parents to mitigate the emotional damage that happens from this phenomenon.
Now, what is the source of this wounding that inevitably happens to us in childhood? Consider that outside of our immediate physical needs for survival, human beings have two social survival needs:
Attachment: healthy attachment to and connection with other human beings. A sense of love, care, and belonging.
Authenticity: the ability to honor, express, and live in alignment with how we truly feel.
What happens in childhood, is we are forced to choose between these two needs, and our need for attachment always trumps our need for authenticity as it correlates more directly to our physical survival. We will not risk losing the love and favor of our parent or caregiver, so we will suppress our true feelings in order to please our caregiver. Now, it is not necessarily true that children need to suppress how they truly feel in order to be loved by the parent - if you are a parent, I'm sure you can attest to the fact that your love for your child is unconditional. But from the perspective of the child and their brain (whose job is to ensure their survival) this is the logic: "I cannot lose the love / attachment of my caregiver. If my caregiver is angry or upset with me, they could stop taking care of me and I could die. I must do everything in my power to not upset my caregiver."
Here's a very simple example: A 3-year old little girl doesn't want to give her grandmother a hug when her grandmother is leaving. The grandmother gets mildly upset, and the little girl's mother tells the little girl, "You have to hug grandma! Look how upset she is!"
From the perspective of the little girl, her authentic expression in that moment, how she truly feels, is that she doesn't want to give grandma a hug. However, her mother and grandmother are both exhibiting signs of upset with her for not giving grandma a hug. In that moment, from her perspective, she HAS to give grandma a hug, thus ignoring her own boundaries and dishonoring herself and how she feels, in order to please the mother and grandmother. (In order to survive.)
A few things can now happen here:
The context of "you are responsible for other people's feelings" gets created. The little girl now will live her life thinking that her actions can control other people's feelings and she will do everything in her power to make people feel good and avoid making people feel bad.
She disconnects from herself and abandons herself in order to please her caregivers. Although this seems like a small thing, if enough of these circumstances happen with similar results, over time this becomes traumatic for the little girl. She disconnects from herself, from her feelings, from her intuition, from her self, over and over. She is now looking to other people and external opinions to determine how she feels. She winds up being a 30-year old woman who has no idea who she is or what she wants, because she's spent the last 27 years navigating life through other people's opinions or feelings.
The little girl learns that she does not have body autonomy. She doesn't have the power over her own body, other people do. She has to do what other people say and please others with her own body, or else she might lose attachment, which feels like death to her. As she grows up, and becomes a teenager and young woman, she might have very poor physical boundaries, especially when it comes to sex and her romantic life.
Now, of course no one INTENDS for any of the above to happen, but it is a very real thing that we need to be aware of and help each other navigate. It makes sense when you think about it and understand how the human brain works.
It's not a far leap to assert that we now have an entire society comprised of adult human beings who are completely disconnected from themselves and their true feelings. We have people who are not living authentic lives, who are not grounded in who they are, and who are not living life from a secure place. We are in personal relationships, work environments, and situations that cause us to dissociate and disconnect from ourselves - this feels "normal" and "safe" to us. And then we need to drink, shop, watch TV, or continue people pleasing in order to feel okay in these environments. We lose ourselves, and we pass down the same behaviors to our next generation. We regurgitate the things our parents said and did, causing the next generation of people who are disconnected from themselves and seeking external things that become addictions because of it. Our society is sick! And this is one of the root causes.
How Inner Work Fits In
The above example demonstrates just how much our brain patterns and our nervous systems dictate our choices, our identities, and ultimately our projection of reality - of ourselves, others, and life.
Our brains are constantly judging and assessing people and circumstances and what is happening around us - they are like computers, trying to optimize our physical and social survival. We're judging and assessing what's going on around us - is this good? Is this bad? Am I safe? Do I agree with this? Do I disagree with this? I need to agree with what is right, and disagree with what is wrong. I need to do what is good, and avoid doing what is bad.
All of this judging and assessing has one ultimate goal: attachment and belonging. I need to belong in a group in order to survive. I need the attachment of a loved one in order to survive. 80% of our thoughts are negative, and 95% of them are repetitive. The majority of our reality is dictated by our past and the decisions we've made, mostly from a negative lens in order to survive life.
By the time we are adults, our brains have made millions of determinations and decisions about who we need to be, what we have to do, and what we can say in order to belong and be loved. Our behavior is completely dictated by these automatic decisions our brains have made. We get more and more suppressed as we get older. We get more and more limited in who we can be, and how we can act. We get more disconnected from our authentic expression of Self - those little orbs of love that babies are.
Inner work and self-healing combats this phenomenon. It is the antidote to an unconscious life - what Richard Rohr calls "sin" and defines as our "patterned ways of thinking." It is what separates us from God and our divine being - our ability to create. Living in unconscious patterns is Hell, and we create Hell by living from them - both for ourselves and the people around us.
So how can we create Heaven instead?
By doing our own inner work.
How to Do Inner Work
Here's how we do it:
Become conscious. Identify our patterns. Become aware of them, accept them, and create new patterns that WE choose from our authentic selves.
Heal from our past wounds. It's no one's fault that we were wounded as children. Our parents certainly didn't intend it, and they were doing their best, many doing a great job. But NO ONE gets out of childhood unscathed. We are all wounded, and we need to heal our wounds so that they don't run our lives and we don't pass them down to the next generation. (This could be a whole other newsletter topic, and probably will be!)
Create intentions from our heart and from the divine inspiration and wisdom that naturally arises out of getting connected to our authentic selves.
Reconnect with ourselves, reconnect with others.
Take responsibility for our feelings and behavior, and allow others to take responsibility for theirs. I've found the more inner work I've done, the more comfortable I am allowing others to show up as their biggest, most adult selves. When I feel small and insecure, I assume others feel that way too, and I try to take care of them and their feelings. This doesn't help anything and often can be destructive to relationships and social dynamics, creating codependent patterns that make everyone feel insane!
Ultimately, self-healing work is about SUBTRACTION rather than ADDITION. You are removing barriers that get in the way of your authentic Self. You don't need anything else - you are whole, perfect and complete as you are: an expression of God's love for humanity. You just need to remove the barriers in your way of EXPERIENCING yourself as that. As Rumi said, “Your task is not to seek for love, but merely to seek and find all the barriers within yourself that you have built against it.”
I truly believe that when people do this type of healing work, and they get connected to their authentic Selves, they start to live a life of love, joy, and contribution. It is a natural expression to love others and to want to be of service - I have seen it time and time again. A thriving society is one full of people who have healed their wounds, and done the work above. Collaboration becomes available. Healthy relationships and acceptance of others becomes available. The beauty of the human spirit and our desire to give back to humanity in our own unique expression becomes available.
Another thing that becomes clear as you start on a journey of doing your own inner work is this: your reality, i.e. your life, relationships, perspective, circumstances, and situations, starts to alter as you do your inner work. You start to discover that your outward reality is a projection of your inner reality. The more you heal and work on your inner reality, the more your outward reality alters.
If reality itself is just a projection of 7.8 billion people's inner world, then we can alter reality itself by all participating in our own inner work.
Ghandi said, "be the change you wish to see in the world." I believe this is what he was referring to. He saw this truth - and saw that THE MOST IMPORTANT WORK THAT WE CAN ALL DO IS HEAL OURSELVES AND CREATE HEAVEN INSIDE.
Only then can we experience Heaven on Earth.
I pray that you find the willingness and courage to embark on a journey of inner work. Our reality and our future depends on you making this choice.
