One Step Back, Two Forward: The True Spiritual Journey

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Do you ever have those days that make you wonder why you're even on this path, always digging up bold issues, getting triggered, feeling emotions that you'd really rather not? Yep, we all have them - the days that we wonder why we're even on this path.

The challenge is that these days are super important. So, let's talk about why.

The Winding Healing Path

One of the great challenges of a spiritual or healing journey is that it isn't straightforward. It isn't like learning accounting, where each day we simply learn a new thing, or learning a new language, where we just simply keep accumulating new words and phrases until we become fluent. This is how normal schooling works. You walk in as a blank slate on the topic, learn, and walk out with new abilities and tools. So, it makes sense that we would assume that a spiritual or healing path would be the same. We learn new ideas and meditations, we have great and inspiring discussions, and every day we feel a little bit better and a little less pain. It will be amazing.

But of course, we all know that that isn't how it goes. The reason is that we don't come in as a blank slate ready for learning. We have twists and turns within us. We have dark spots that have been added from painful experiences from the past. We have negative worldviews that cloud our perception of the present. We have emotional patterns that we've developed in this lifetime and maybe before. We have vivid imaginations that take us out of the present moment and into all kinds of fantasy - dark or light - but pure fiction nonetheless. And now we want to experience the divine, or now we want to heal and be whole again.

The reality is that we can't just paint over the foundation of who we are.

If our foundation is made of bricks, we must look at each brick, pick it up, turn it over, look at it and see whether it's helpful to our future or harmful. Does this brick create separation within, or does it lead to wholeness? But of course, even that process isn't so simple. Some of those bricks are booby-trapped with powerful emotions that have been used to keep them hidden and in place. Some negative bricks are woven into positive bricks, so we struggle to recognize them. Many are connected, and when we think of letting them go, it feels like we are releasing everything we know

This is no easy thing, yet it is a huge part of our journey.

Let's imagine that your psyche is a house

Over the years, you have accumulated all kinds of things in that house. Perhaps there is a room where things that happened in the past are too painful to look at. Therefore, every time you go into that room, every single thing in there triggers the painful memories. So, you stop going into that room. You also don't want anyone else mistakenly going in there, so you put a lock on it. After a few years, your conscious mind stops even seeing the door as you walk past it. It just blends into the wall. No one needs to go in there, anyway.

There are also many memories that maybe we don't want to look at, so we pack them into the closet at the end of the hall. Every time something bad happens, we just tuck it into that closet. Eventually, the closet gets full, so we lock it, and over time, we forget that it exists, or at least we try to.

One of the challenges of our society is that we are not taught how to deal with difficult situations in healthy ways. We ignore our feelings and just tuck them away into the corners of our minds until nearly all the rooms at our house are filled, and the doors are locked. But it's okay. We still have our living room, and it's filled with all the things we love. We have a kitchen and a bathroom. We have all we need. We're fine.

We can live in the comfortable rooms of our psyche for a long time, until one day, something changes. Maybe disease or pain appears in the body.

Sometimes, health issues can be fixed from the outside. We can invite someone into our living room and fix whatever's wrong. But sometimes the disease or the pain is coming from one of those locked rooms or closets; something has gone bad in there and is causing trouble. We don't really want to look at those things, but we don't want to be in pain either.

Or maybe we've met some new friends, and they would love to come over and live in our house. Do we have rooms that they could stay in? Kind of. Do we have closets that they could put their clothes in? Sort of. They're just full right now.

But we really want to bring them into our world. Darn, we may have to look at those rooms, or maybe the front room has just become too small. Maybe we are seeking expansion in life. We start to realize that there's more possible. We want to grow in this next chapter of our life.

No matter what, the only way through is to start going through the rooms and the closets… sigh.

Our Healing Journey

So, we embark on our healing journey. We're optimistic. We've heard great things from others whose entire lives have been turned around. Woohoo. We're in!

We walk out of our living room and gaze down the hallway to get started. However, many of the doors cannot be seen because there are boxes piled in front of them. Hmmm… That's okay. Our logical mind figures that we can probably get through 10 boxes a day. So, it should only take about six months, and we'll be good to go. Our healing journey will be complete.

So, we start with the first box we see. We open it, and the memories start to flood back. We pull each thing out of the box one by one, and our heart remembers everything.

A couple of hours later, we are still sitting on the floor in the hallway, reliving everything that was in the box. We cry a bit, and we start to lose hope. We really don't like this journey. There's got to be a way to make this easier.

Aha! I will bring the box into my living room. I feel comfortable there, I feel loved. It will be easier. And it is. We set the box on our coffee table and begin to sort through it.

We have the idea to get an extra box and a garbage bag. The extra box is for the things that we don't know what to do with yet. It's confusing. We just don't know how to process it right now. Maybe there are other clues in the other rooms that we have to discover that fit with this, and together, we’ll understand it better and be able to let it go. But for now, we'll just put that in this new box, and then there are other things that will have to go into the garbage. We look at them, we cry about them, we journal about them, we meditate, and then we let them go.

Some time goes by, and as we place the final thing into the garbage bag, we look out the window and realize that it's dark out, the day is over, and we only got through one box. This is going to take forever!

We definitely have days like this on our journey.

And then there are days that we dive into something in one of the rooms, and it's very heavy. It's deeply woven into our psyche. At this point, we may need to stop and find some help. We need new tools that we didn't have when we put these things in the room. So, we head out on an adventure to find the people, tools and new ideas that will help us sort through what we are discovering. Once we have them, we can return to the room and look at things with new eyes. This wasn't in the plan, but it is exactly the healing journey that we need.

The beautiful thing is that much of what we have hidden within us is interconnected. In fact, there might be identical things hidden in multiple rooms. We may open a box, look inside and realize that, “Oh, we've already dealt with this,” and we can just put the whole box in the garbage.

Sometimes, as we deal with things in one room, if there are duplicates in other rooms, they disappear there too, like magic.

Now, imagine you are opening the door to the final room, and half of what was in there has disappeared. There is barely anything left. We take a deep breath in, and we know with full confidence that no matter what is there, we'll get through it, we'll breathe, and we will feel so much better afterwards.

Yes, the healing path is not linear. It is often one step back to make two steps forward.

The key is that when we are taking that one step back, we want to celebrate it. Dive into those days because this is where we do the real work.

It's all good, and it's all part of our healing journey.