Why I Bless My Triggers

I chased healing for years. And to be clear, I healed a lot during that time.

But what also happened was that healing was focused on the external “questing” part of “maybe this thing will fix me,” and less on the embodied “here’s how life can transform me” piece.

The first 3+ decades of my life were marked with trauma, with a peaking of PTSD from the age of 16 when I was raped by three men I should have been able to trust, and culminating in the time I finally turned to healing work.

Every thing I tried helped. Every modality, diet, regression, shamanic journey, and breakthrough gave me something. Relief. Awareness. Hope. They kept me going. I’m profoundly grateful for all of them. But they also reinforced a subtle belief:

Healing was a “solution” that was somewhere outside of me.

I’m naturally curious. I want to know and I will search for the answers. I adore this about myself. And also — it can become a trap at times, without my being aware of it. That drive to find the thing “out there” locked me into the out-there-ness of healing.

I didn’t actually trust life or myself to heal me.

I outsourced my own power and I trusted the next “special” breakthrough more than the moment I was actually living.

I’m deep into over two decades of healing work now. Phew! I’ve had many a journey into the Underworld. I’ve moved through countless darks nights of the soul. I’ve raged, sobbed, and numbed. I’ve gotten sober and I’ve become recovered. I’ve journaled my sweet heart out, and I’ve Reiki’d myself into Oneness. I learned to tend to my nervous system, and through all of this, it regulated. I became more embodied.

They all helped me. None of them healed me.

What did? Life. By meeting life in the moment and allowing it to shape me, the way an oyster works the sand into the pearl.

Life was teaching me in every challenging conversation. In every awkward exchange. In every disappointment and heartbreak. In every uncomfortable opportunity to open to pleasure or to express even more joy. In every invitation to love more loudly and more fiercely.

I used to think a trigger was “bad” and that the person who delivered it must therefore also be “bad.” I judged, condemned, and pointed my finger at it. I held blame in my fingertip, pointing it at them — or back at myself. I did everything I could to avoid looking at the triggers. I got mad. Resentful. I gossiped to discharge the energy. I drank to drown it.

If there was a way to escape, I grabbed it and milked it. I wanted to be any place other than where I was. This was the shadow side of my seeker. The side of me that picked myself up and took myself someplace else so that hopefully, finally, something would change.

Then one day I woke up and realized, “Holy shit, I may be living in an entirely different country but I still brought me with me.”

It’s so obvious once you know… but at the time I was so focused on escaping my body and my circumstances that I was living in a sort of delusion.

The moment I stopped asking, “Who caused this?” and starting asking, “Why is this showing up for me?” everything changed.

Yes, I used to hate triggers. Now? I feel like triggers are some of the holiest moments we get.

So this is what has led me to this place of feeling healed. Not that the healing is “done” — but that I truly feel whole, resilient, capable of meeting life on life’s terms. And as I do this, I notice that life reaches out to meet me in new ways.

Desires, pleasure, joy, and boundless love are daily ingredients in my beautiful life brew. Life loves some spice so that’s in there too, but I recognize it for the depth and complexity that it adds to the flavor.

This shift was remarkably simple: stop trying to escape life and start meeting it.

Triggers are magical. They activate something in your body that becomes the cue that can then lead you into some of your most potent opportunities to heal and evolve. They are pure fucking gold. (I accidentally left out the “l” in the first pass of that, and yes: they are also pure fucking god.)

These days, when someone hands me the trigger, I don’t react, even internally. I notice it. I use my curiosity to go inward rather than outward. I tune into how it feels in my body, what old story is lighting up, and what life is trying to show me in this sacred moment.

Sometimes I see it immediately and either process it right then (if possible) or create space for it later. Other times, I may need to journal or meditate to get to the source so that I can then access the emotions that want to be expressed.

Either way, the trigger becomes a doorway. An opportunity to know myself more deeply, to shift a pattern, to honor my humanness.

Meeting life exactly as it is, is incredibly rewarding. At some point, I stopped being the victim in my life and I embraced the creatrix that I am. It’s been the fuel for my evolution. It is what has helped me move through the most wounding, the deepest shame, and the most challenging relationships.

It’s what has opened my heart more than anything else. And even though there is no end point to healing, I feel very much “healed” because I have the capacity to move through all of life in more of a dance than a fight.

If this resonates, the next time you’re triggered, allow yourself to notice where you feel it in your body. If you can’t process it in the moment, let yourself know you will later and then be in integrity with your word.

When you are able, journal or tune into the gift of that trigger. Let your higher self guide you to it:

• What’s the root of it?

• What part of me is asking to be loved?

• If I believed life were conspiring for my evolution instead of my suffering, what would this moment be teaching?

• What emotion never got permission to finish?

• What would change if I blessed this messenger instead of resisting them?

And then just notice: What has shifted? What’s different?

Life no longer happens to me. It happens for me. This is an incredibly liberating way to live.

That single shift has healed more of my life than any modality ever has, though I do use tools to support the processing.

I don’t know that healing will ever completely stop, or that I even want it to — I don’t! It’s nourishing and fulfilling… But because I leaned into life as the primary instrument to inform my healing, I recognize the sacredness of life itself as the pilgrimage.

xoxo,

Janet