Permission to heal

Big Life Stuff keeps occurring for me lately. Some of it is good, some of it is hard stuff that no one wants to deal with, and all of it is challenging, time consuming and emotionally draining. The really hard stuff peaked (I think/hope) the other week, and I realized that I got through all of this because of a couple of specific techniques and lessons that I have internalized over the last few years.

Quick aside: In that last statement: I said “the last few years,” and I want to flag that. Maybe there really is some magic bullet practice or technique that can help you heal in weeks or months (I explain here my own theories about why some people heal fast, and some of us need so much more time), but I never figured out how to speed up the healing process for myself. For me, it’s taken years to get to the point where I don’t have any real physical symptoms, I can deal really well with life’s challenges, and I don’t shut down (though I do, of course, need breaks). Throughout that time, I made fairly continuous progress—with some setbacks along the way—but there was no rapid, miraculous recovery.

If you’re feeling frustrated because it feels like your recovery is taking a long time, please know you’re not alone and that for some of us, healing is just a slow process. We have a lot of old memories and emotional stuff to unpack and rewire. If you’re one of the lucky ones moving quickly through this journey… Amazing! I’m only a little jealous.

Full permission to do what my body needs is something I’ve been slowly building up to. It’s a combination of self-compassion, learning to really listen to our bodies, and learning to let go of what society, our friends, our families, and even our minds might be telling us is “best” for us.

The culmination of this for me was when my Big Stuff was peaking and making me miserable. On one particularly bad day, I developed a headache, which doesn’t happen to me much anymore. The headache went away with painkillers, but I was still tired and groggy, and I couldn’t focus to prep my class for the following day. In fact, when I thought about teaching my class the next day, I could feel twinges of the headache trying to come back. But teaching this class is important to me, and I didn’t want to even consider missing a day.

Initially, I tried to talk myself down. I tried to tap into my self compassion, and my pep talk to my body went something like this:

“Yes, I know this is hard. I know there’s too much going on right now. But we need to be able to work through hard things sometimes. We need to be able to power through this. It’s not even that much. It’s just one, 50-minute class, and then I get multiple days off, and I will rest as much as I need to get through this. We just need to put these issues aside for a brief period, and then I can come back and do all the feeling and processing necessary to get past this. It’s really not that much. We can do this. Why are you resisting this so much? It’s really not that much. Most people around the world have to deal with so much more. I’m just asking that we get through this one thing, and then I can give you all the care and compassion and rest and emotional processing you need.”

Not only did that not help, but, as I went through this internal speech, I could feel the headache starting to come on a little stronger again. So then I got frustrated and had an internal conversation that went something like this:

“What the fuck?! I’m being nice! I’m thinking of you! I’m trying to get the shit done that needs to get done and take care of you! What more do you fucking want from me???”

Not surprisingly, the headache continued to get worse. I wanted to be self-compassionate, but in reality, I had repressed a lot of frustration and anger, aimed both at my circumstances and at myself. In that first internal speech, I was trying to channel my inner self-compassionate voice, but the angry voice had been simmering beneath the surface the whole time, and my body knew it.

Once I allowed and acknowledged that angry voice, I suddenly realized what was going on: I was overwhelmed.

To a certain extent, that was obvious. I knew my body was stressed by everything going on, and I had a lot of emotional build up. However, subconsciously, I was also frustrated with myself for not being able to deal with all of this. As mentioned above, I’ve been doing this for years! Surely I should be able to deal with whatever life throws my way at this point. But, as I had to remind myself, that doesn’t mean that life can’t also just get overwhelming, no matter how solid your nervous system skills.

With that realization, I quit trying to resist the messages my body was sending me, and I accepted that I was overwhelmed. This time, my internal talk to my body went something like this:

“Okay. I’m sorry. You’re more important than my job. I’m going to take care of you first and foremost. If I don’t feel up for teaching tomorrow, I’m not going to.”

I meant every single word of that statement. I felt the truth of it through my whole body. Every cell in my body knew I meant it, and every cell in my body knew that I would honor that promise. Almost instantly, a huge, emotional weight seemed to lift, and the headache went away.

And I stuck to my promise: I didn’t make a decision about whether to teach the class until the next morning.

When I woke up the next morning, I felt that I could do the class. Yet I still lay in bed for a while, in conversation with my body, to make sure there weren’t any repressed signals I was missing. The messages were consistent: Giving myself permission to skip the class was what my body needed to relax enough that I was then able to teach.

To be clear, this did not lead to a Hollywood happy ending. It was my worst class of the semester, and after class, I had to rest and do a lot of emotional processing the rest of that day. But I taught that class. I showed up. I didn’t have physical symptoms. I got through.

I was able to do what needed to get done because I had learned how to acknowledge and allow the deeper, subconscious emotions. Instead of being so stressed about what I “should” be able to do, I gave myself permission to truly and fully put my body and my emotional needs first. In the process, I removed a huge emotional burden, and thus, freed up just enough energy to get through the class.

There is so much emotional energy and strain that goes into worrying about what we “should” be doing, especially if there is anger and frustration around not being able to do it. It can seem ironic or contradictory, but accepting “this is my reality right now, and I’m not going to try to change it” can actually relieve some of the emotional burden and give us the space and energy to do a little more. The paradox, though, is that this only works when we truly mean it. If we say that we accept where we are, but are only doing so because we hope it will help us get better, it often doesn’t work. Our subconscious knows it’s being manipulated.

When we say, “Okay. This is how I am. That’s fine, and I’m not going to try to change it,” we have to mean that with every fiber of our being.

All of the healing techniques that I list can help with that, but there were a few that I want to highlight here:

1) Self-compassion & Acceptance: In my initial internal monologue, I was trying to be self compassionate, but I forgot that I needed to access and accept ALL of my emotions, even the anger that was directed at me. This was one of the hardest lessons for me to learn and one that is often rejected by society, nonetheless, my healing required treating anger and frustration against myself as emotions that need to be accepted, allowed, and treated with compassion.

3) Allowing all of my emotions — I had been allowing a lot of emotions around the events that were happening, but I also needed to accept and feel the anger and frustration at not being able to deal with everything that was on my plate.

4) Listening to my body over the advice of all others — specifically, non-doctors like society, friends and family, who were sending messages that I should be able to deal with this. Any good doctor should be advising you to put your health first, to rest, to take a day off if necessary, and to adopt practices that reduce your stress levels.

There’s a catch with that last point. After years of doing this work, I might need a day off to take care of myself. When I first started this healing journey, I often needed to take weeks and months off. That’s so hard to accept, but for me, and I think for many people, it’s a part of the healing journey. We need to give ourselves sooooooo much more at the start and it may take a very long time to get to the point that we’re living fairly “normal” lives again. There may be logistical challenges to that — most of us have families and jobs that we can’t just ignore — but you can still find ways to keep working these healing practices into your life.

Society may be telling us that we should be getting back on our feet faster, but honestly, I think we live in a very broken society right now. I would argue that you’re better off giving yourself permission to listen to your body over society.