For Those Who Wish to Heal, How do We?

For those who wish to heal, how do we? An unfortunate misfortune, a terrible front of character, ill timing, misreading, simple human awfulness. Grief and its seven stages don’t feel like a simple staircase with checkpoints needing to be reached, they feel like arenas all surrounded by large brick walls, extending so high and closing off the top, connected to form a circle. The stages like arenas split into sections open to each other, but with few discernible features where you’re left wondering how far you’ve come, and how much more you have to go. Throughout the castle, a gauntlet of locked doors, obstacles, and missions to get to the next stage approach you from all angles.

What about those of us who no longer suffer grief but those of us who still feel haunted by the past? Visions come, as if a man peering eerily through the window, but elusive as you try to step out and search for him. Even if you manage to capture him he hardly puts up a fight. Soon you realize he’s escaped, and we’re only more afraid than we already were. We manage to face our fears the first time, but missing a primary step we start right back at the beginning. Turning again toward the window only to have the air, we were so simply breathing before, become hard to capture again. Allowing nothing but a distorted swallow in the back of the throat, its sound seeming to echo in the vacuousness that is you. The man reappears again, standing behind the large floor-to-ceiling window, looking in at you.

When healing, these elusive beings taunt us, prod us, poke, cajole, twist, tarnish, maim, and seduce us. It’s uncertain the shape in which they intend to approach, but they do. Memories and moments stream in without our ability to find the stop, distorting our entire equilibrium. For those who wish to heal, how do we? While in this large cyclical arena that is grief are we aiming to find a way up, down, center, or out? Trauma birthed from past trauma birthed from past trauma. To the center? A never-ending cycle of healing. Do you transcend or find the middle? Are there answers?

If there are, the only ones that would have them is the one with the key, the key to enter a not-so-friendly place, but a place you must enter nonetheless. You have free will to enter if presented from the outside. It’s partly a choice, but sometimes you’re thrown in with nothing but a “get up” and when you do the dark arena shifts based on the holder of the key to an ever-shifting, bricked-up, decrepit building. “For those wishing to heal, enter here” is posted on the front door. The building unexpectedly appears in a place you’ve looked before, uncertain whether this is somewhere, or the door leading to nowhere.

For those wishing to heal, start here. Enter into the space, and commit to participating in the games that life wishes to play for you, and with you, learning the subjective lessons involved. For that which you are in search of, more than likely, lies embedded in that which you are afraid of. You may come to learn the threats you were afraid of are similar to the animatronic, head-rotating, clown on the front stoop of your neighbor's home in October.

Mind what you see, take in as observantly as you can, and understand there are no small moments. Each moment is an opportunity to find healing. A fool is meant to travel on an adventure learning the lessons involved, and only walks right back the way they came to turn around and travel the same journey, seeking the same answers, learning the same lessons. For those wishing to heal, heed the signs. Especially on the path taken by the many forms of you that came before the present you.

For those wishing to heal, take heart. Touch your heart, hold your heart, sense your heart because it's there. Beating unconditionally. For those who wish to heal, understand your heart beats to send a little bit of help your way every single day, and the only time it stops is when you no longer need that help. Every beat, pumping strength, pumping health, pumping soul into your body to live as it is meant to; abundantly. Each pulse, sends reinforcements into an arena full of moments, outnumbering the excruciating, and granting shields to the wounds that were inflicted upon you. Healing toward some semblance of homeostasis.

But if healing in this case resembles homeostasis I also think we may be misunderstanding what homeostasis really is and, thus, what healing is. Homeostasis is not granted without an understanding that without discomfort there can be no homeostasis, and without homeostasis, there can be no discomfort. Otherwise, we would only be living a homeostatic life, and we are doing anything but. Maybe our discomfort lies more in our disillusion with what homeostasis is. Living luxuriously, a golden-crusted omelet and a creamy Godiva chocolate melted into our coffee every morning. Fame, money, greater shelter, lavish clothes, and this month’s latest shoe with a whole new layer of cushioning for added comfort. There are two potentials for a person like this, go into the arena of grief and line it with bubble wrap, hoping the walls won’t hurt them, only they will be the ones to find out that it’s not the walls that are closing in around them. Or one may never enter, waiting for a particular point in their life, or an item to be received that has no point being there, or someone else to do the healing for them.

For those wishing to heal, it won’t be easy. Most of the time, what we need in life isn’t easy. It’s not that we can’t have easy, and at some points, maybe a long stretch of easy. It’s not that we have to hurt either, it’s that we will. Suffering is inevitable. We don’t chase hurt, pain, or suffering, but it does find us, whether we like it to or not. Though not innately malicious, suffering aches to help us in some roundabout way, seemingly masochistic in its approach. It wishes to play the game alongside you, collecting bruised knees as the two of you crawl underneath the hedges, scrapes and cuts as you play roughly with fake swords, collecting a cold as you wrestle in the rain in the mud for a bit too long, ignoring your mother’s warnings. Suffering, in a particular light, appears as the sole consistent companion, awaiting you on your journey into the arena toward healing.

For those wishing to heal, know you’re not alone. I am healing, and so is everyone in our world, with varying degrees and circumstances at varying times. We are also suffering, though we may not wish to be so. Yet, life cannot be as beautiful as it is without an internal ability to suffer. Homeostasis cannot be obtained without discomfort. Spring could not be as beautiful as it is without the winter. Words like “beautiful” cannot exist without “ugly”, “pain” cannot exist without “comfort”, and “small” isn’t contextualized without “big.” The Law of Polarity. The only Maxim I could hold any certainty in so far, is that we’re all going to be hurt one way or another, whether it is ourselves or someone who hurts us, we’ll be hurt and we will seek to heal. Where then we’ll be left asking, “For those who wish to heal, how do we?”

Much love today and every day,

Matt Piper 🐅🌱