Stop resisting your own healing
Saying fuck you to the fuck-its 🤘🏾 among hella other things.
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Regular readers of this newsletter know I see an energy healer and the reason you know is because I see her once a month and the experience inevitably shows up in the writing.
I don’t really have language for the experience, which is good, because sometimes there is too much language, for I am someone who swims in words words words and anything I can do to be still and feel is a worthwhile undertaking on multiple levels, not least of which is the actually helpful information I receive when I’m out of my head and in my body, the very opposite of what I can say about most of the information I receive from my brain, which often beholds me to things (thought patterns, fears, untrue yet persistent stories, internalized capitalism) that keep me small and stuck.
So I walk in yesterday and I’ve barely removed my shoes, I haven’t even laid on her table when she starts firing questions my way. She asks me to tell her about my dreams, and tells me that the time we’re in is one of great visioning, portals opening, quantum leaps in healing, and that dreams are often where messages and information from that other realm come through.
Sadly, I hardly ever remember my dreams, and I tell her so, that it’s an extraordinarily rare occurrence for me, and that my priority is simply getting enough sleep. I tell her the bummer truth, which is that I’ve struggled with sleep since I was very young. She asks me if I can trace the beginning of having poor sleep to a specific moment in time, and I know it exactly: At the age of ten, I was pulled out of the parochial school I’d been at since preschool, and sent to a public school where I didn’t know anyone. That year, I thrived academically and actually made a bunch of friends…and, it was the year The Funny Feeling showed up for the first time. I was a ten year old insomniac, guiltily waking my mother up most nights, complaining of this terrible feeling that started in my guts, then moved up and grabbed hold of my throat.
I didn’t have correct language for what I was experiencing—of course now I know it was anxiety—and though my mother did her best to soothe me in the moment, there was no discussion of it in the light of day, no steps taken to support me in a way that might actually bring me some relief.
This was also around the time I began to sense that most of the adults in my life were exasperated with me most of the time. I was “too sensitive,” I cried too much, I was “overly emotional.” I was on the receiving end of lots of big sighs, lots of rolled eyes. I internalized the message that who I was was TOO MUCH and since I didn’t have guidance on how the fuck to manage all the bigness inside of me, where to put it, how to be with it, instead I took it as evidence that there was something wrong with me. Then I spent the next twenty-three years either gathering evidence confirming this hypothesis, or spending most of my time chasing the only tools I’d found that worked—until, of course, they stopped working—which translated to spending the next twenty-three years anesthetizing myself to varying degrees.
I know some of you can relate, and the reason I know this is because I talk to you all day every day. You are my friends, my clients, the members of our SELF MADE community, which is to say, you are my people, and I’m grateful every day to have found you. And, holy hell. It takes a long time to crawl out of this one, doesn’t it? Even after getting to a place where I sincerely view the BIG FEELING as the gift that I offer to the world, this old programming still shows up all the time and the deeper I go the more I see just how deeply the belief that I am bad permeates everything.
So I’m on KM’s table and her hands are moving around me and I’m sinking into that deep feeling place when my mind starts its yackity-yak: running me through to-do lists, yanking me out of the here-and-now. I tell her this when she asks, as she does periodically throughout our sessions, “What’s coming up for you?” I cop to zoning out, the squirrels pulling me away from the present moment and deep into some revived insecurities I’ve been swimming in since starting to date someone I’m excited about.
Then she tells me the thing I’ve been sitting with ever since: That when I vacate myself from the here and now, I am resisting my own healing. I am entertaining that not-yet-undone pattern of self-sabotage that would keep me perpetuating all the old pain and hurt.
She’s quiet again, and I’m basking in the warmth of her hands cupped now around my head. I follow a thread, back, back, back, and there I am again with ten-year-old me, that young girl who only wanted to be seen and acknowledged and accepted, who grew into an adult who went out into the world doing everything she could to seek approval in others rather than herself. So I’m laying there letting this all in, another layer of the onion stripped back. I’m reconnecting to the before, before life started to do it’s life thing, before I started to question my goodness, my lovable-ness, and y’all, I was tender as hell, because from one moment to the next I’m actually believing rather than only conceptualizing that I don’t have to prove that I am worthy of love anymore; for I am worthy of love because I am a human alive, and it’s then that the tears come, and as the weight older than god lifts I damn near float off her table.
🪐
After my experience with KM this week, I’ve been thinking about all the ways we resist the exact thing that will make possible everything we say we want.
Something that frequently comes up in 1:1 sessions is the highly scientific concept known as “the fuck-its.” Perhaps you’re familiar? This is when life is life-y and nothing seems to matter and so we throw up our hands: “Fuck it,” and go back to some old shitty behavior that we know we don’t want to do but also, what is the point of anything?
Another thing: Some us us come into the work and our lives are so full no time to spare and we want to simply, like, lay recovery over what already exists. We do not want to slow the engine down (which, eep, I’m sorry to say, but this is what’s required to create space for healing to occur); indeed, even thinking about doing so can feel so scary. And so we continue apace, confused why we don’t feel any better.
Otra cosa: We forsake our own well-being for everyone else’s: We are boundary-less puddles on the floor, shoving our needs down down down, making sure everyone around is OK at our own expense. If we are constantly focused on everyone else…well. You know what I’m going to say 🤷🏻♀️.
For the record: I DO ALL OF THESE THINGS. And more! There’s so much more, of course. Perhaps you are noodling around your own strategies of resistance as you read. But damn, y’all. If we want what we say we want, we have to sit with the discomfort of the fuck-its, and learn to squirm until they pass. We have to slow the inner engine down, confront our societally-programmed-constantly-running sense of urgency. We have to recognize that our needs and desires and wants are just as valid and valuable as everyone else’s, and learn how to prioritize ourselves first instead of last.
I always laugh to myself when I write shit like this because hahaha, this SUCKS! None of this is easy. And it takes as long as it takes—lifetimes, generations, millennia—and yes, our job, if we step onto this path, is to turn and face our lives, recognize that healing is fucking hard most of the time and rarely something you’d post on Instagram or share the details of over dinner, but also, our job is to shore up our support and HAVE AS MUCH FUN AND PLEASURE along the way as we possibly can.
The journey is a long one, and it is ultimately one we have to go alone. No one can plumb the depths for us (though if I figure out how to outsource any of this I’ll let you know). So we cozy up to friends that we can show our soft underbellies to and who make us laugh. We do what we can to kick it with healers/therapists who can hold the type of space required for us to return us to our tenderness and goodness. We call in creativity! ours or others’—music, words, art, activism, imagination, fresh perspectives and ways of viewing the world. We spend time in desert and forest and water and jungle and big sky and snow and rain and salt.
I know for myself that when an old pattern comes creeping about, I can get so frustrated. Like, really? We’re here AGAIN? Will I ever be free of this? Is there something wrong with me that this is still lurking?
If I can be with this. If I can stay and not abandon myself. If I can pick the pattern up, hold it to the light, see the way it reflects forward and backward through time and space. If I get get underneath it—there’s a sweetness there, if I let it. A soft, quiet potentiality. A tenderness, and kindness turned inward. Tender and kind, out in the world.
🪐
You do not have to be good.
You do not have to walk on your knees
for a hundred miles through the desert repenting.
You only have to let the soft animal of your body
love what it loves.
Tell me about despair, yours, and I will tell you mine.
Meanwhile the world goes on.
Meanwhile the sun and the clear pebbles of the rain
are moving across the landscapes,
over the prairies and the deep trees,
the mountains and the rivers.
Meanwhile the wild geese, high in the clean blue air,
are heading home again.
Whoever you are, no matter how lonely,
the world offers itself to your imagination,
calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting -
over and over announcing your place
in the family of things.Mary Oliver, “Wild Geese*”
*I couldn’t resist!
From the archives ~ this time last year:
⭐️ How to Find Sober Friends // The one about soft underbellies
SELF MADE is a rebellious recovery community that empowers you to liberate yourself from societal programming and boldly step into a life of your design. Posts are written by me, Dani Cirignano, founder, writer, coach, and recovery advocate based in San Francisco, CA.
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Thank you.
Dani this is so good 💕🙏🏻
What a wonderful post, Dani, so incredibly helpful - Thank You!
-Andrew M