Our healing will not be Prescribed
“I had been navigating my days without actually inhabiting them. That somewhere along the way, the map became the figural, and my body and instincts and curiosity were reduced to background noise. I knew where I was “supposed” to go but not where I truly was.
I am starting to realize that aliveness needs a different form of navigation. One that is not drawn in straight lines or measured in efficiency. One that shifts according to season and internal weather. One that treats the body as the compass it has always been. One that invites me to shape my days the way a hand shapes clay, not according to a blueprint.
Something deliberate.
Something textured.
Something alive in the way only magic can be.”
Isabell abbott, Spells of survival
I am deeply intimate with the practice of healing. In my own life, I’ve had a fierce dedication towards relief first, then self knowledge and understanding, and then expansion. Which was the natural progression of things for me. Once I realized that with time, attention, and resource I could get relief, I wanted more. In a way (that I’m working on now) healing was my hyper-focus. I’ve been supporting folks in their food and body healing for a decade as an eating disorder dietitian.
Healing is messy, complex, and painful. Things over culturally we try to avoid, or make easy, shiny, and quick. A thing that makes healing challenging in this environment is that we are sold a way it “should” look, and we internalize that the process should be linear, straightforward, immediate, and binary, lest we are doing it wrong- in fact, we must be wrong.
But here is what is real: your healing will not look like anyone else’s. Healing is rarely linear, straightforward, and easy. It cannot be bought with one thing or another, but is rather a slow unraveling. An unfolding into a new shape or space that feels different yet familiar, new and a little scary yet right in a way that your bones feel. You aren’t always sure with healing so you take a step and get more information and then learn to trust yourself to take the next best step. You start to develop more of a sense of trust in your self, your perceptions, and your body. Relief doesn’t always come right away, and often there is a lot of pain and chaos in the beginning as you have not yet reached the point where relief is visible, sense-able. It is never all encompassing relief; healing doesn’t mean you are happy all the time or that you never feel pain or suffering, but instead that you relate to yourself and your body differently when those seasons do arise, as they always will.
Scaffolding for Healing:
Trust yourself
Allow your feelings
Trust yourself
Allow your feelings
Trust yourself
Allow your feelings
We typically want it to be more, more structure, more guideposts, more clarity. However what I have found is the more I leaned into my own knowing, the more I reflect my client’s reality and knowing back to them, the easier it is to find our way towards self trust. This doesn’t mean we don’t reach out for support, it means that we trust ourselves to know which support is best, and what parts of it resonate versus what parts don’t fit.