You are not a burden or a failure

You don't heal back to the way you were before, to who you used to be. When your body heals, it doesn't revert back to its old state. Maybe there will be scars, or new shapes and feelings and colours and movement. You always heal into something new, something beyond where you once were. Still you, but you becoming you, too. God always said God would make everything new,* and healing is how newness manifests itself in the world.

Go with me here, hang on for the ride, I promise you, I'm not masochistic, but this is why we must embrace our ailments - our illnesses and pain and damage and heartbreak and wounding - pull them in close, even welcome them when they come, because it's through them that we heal and become and are made whole.

Think of it as an immune system. Very simplistically, for an immune system to become strong, to become itself in the sense of being able to do what it needs to do to protect us, it needs to get sick and recover, get sick and recover, get sick and recover.

Rilke said:

"Why do you want to shut out of your life any agitation, any pain, any melancholy, since you really do not know what these states are working upon you? Why do you want to persecute yourself with the question whence all this may be coming and whither it is bound? Since you know that you are in the midst of transitions and wished for nothing so much as to change. If there is anything morbid in your processes, just remember that sickness is the means by which an organism frees itself of foreign matter; so one must just help it to be sick, to have its whole sickness and break out with it, for that is its progress."

Rumi said:

"If you desire healing, let yourself fall ill."

This is not giving up. This is surrender. Surrender is not giving into whoever and whatever. Surrender is how you enter into flow. It's how you work with what you've got. It's how you accept yourself and where you are and what you have and what you don't and you forget about trying to control the things you can't and you move forward with the things that are yours to steward.

Surrender is scary because the fear of what happens after we surrender, after we let ourselves fall ill, after we break out with our sickness and give it space to do what it needs to, is real. What if I don't get better? What if things get worse? And perhaps the biggest fear of all:

What if I'm not strong enough to handle this and come out the other side?

Surrender, my love. Flow. Breathe. And like breath, let whatever is happening to you and around you flow through your life; inhale, exhale. In, out. Here, and then gone again.

Because the truth is this:

You can face your trauma, your pain, your fear. You can face the mess you're in, the nothingness that you feel, the mountain you have yet to climb. You can face it. It won't kill you. You will not be swallowed by grief and darkness and pain and worry. You will not drown or burn or be overcome to the point of being finished. Facing your life is how you begin to heal, not how you begin to lose. When you run from your trauma (or whatever is you don't want to face), it will chase you down your whole life long in one way or another, and you will try to hide from it is so many different destructive and numbing ways, only to feel it lurking, right behind you, licking at your heels. You think your damage is a lion, driven to devour you, ready to feast upon your weakened heart. But it's not. It's really like a small child, crying, unable to see through the tears and fear, confused and flailing. It's chasing you not to get you, but because it needs to be held and loved and known and made to feel safe by you.

Stop. Turn around. Open your arms. This is your healing. Not your destruction.

(This post is an excerpt from The Practice Co App series called "You Will Heal From This", available to download for iOS and Android! It includes daily devotionals, FREE Mindful Prompt notifications (no subscription needed), phone wallpapers and more. Start with a free trial or subscribe to get access to each new series as they come out.)

Mindful Prompt: "Perhaps all the dragons in our lives are princesses who are only waiting to see us act, just once, with beauty and courage. Perhaps everything that frightens us is, in its deepest essence, something helpless that wants our love." Rilke.

Written by Liz Milani.
Instagram: @thepracticeco