xiii. a few thoughts on healing

(**important disclaimer: healing is an individual experience. Some diseases/health conditions are incurable and no amount of inner work, lifestyle changes, etc. can make them go away or alleviate their symptoms. In sharing my thoughts, I am speaking about my personal experiences with a specific set of circumstances that describe some, but not all of, my personal journey. I hope that the reader may find her/him/their self in a way that might be supportive, but my personal truths are not universal.)

I think a lot about healing.

What it means, looks like, feels like. 

I wish I could say I have a perfect description.

I don’t, by any means. I am living into new ideas each day.

Ideas are a funny thing. 

Do you ever have thoughts that feel like they have idea potential but don’t quite make it all the way there? 

Or feel like like you're so in the midst of living and feeling like everything around you is meaningful, profound, somehow making its way under your skin?

I often do.

It’s as though everything is touching me in a way, like my system is reconstructing itself, like I am changing a tiny bit at a time, but things around me keep ticking on as usual.

I often wish I could press a pause button, incorporate these truths into my body, slowly and intentionally.

Some days, if I am really mindful, I feel I can.

Those are usually the same days on which I move really slowly and kindly, like a graceful creature through water; on the days I hold the hand of my inner child as I move through the world and see myself through loving eyes.

On those days, little moments integrate more effortlessly. 

I love those days.

Lately, I’ve skipped out on writing about ideas because I fear if I start I may never stop.

Maybe my fingers will fall off from typing too much, maybe I’ll forget the time and miss out on some important appointment, maybe my eyes will glaze over.

How can you stop once you’ve opened the door to your soul and your soul contains a thousand realities at once? 

These thousands of realities used to torture me when I was younger.

I felt as if I almost couldn’t stand living with what I felt were the enormous contradictions in me and around me.

I went through so much change and movement in the course of 10 years, I felt it all: I was this and that, I was here and there, I felt A, B, C, and everything in between. 

“If I do this, then this will happen, but if that happens, then this won’t happen, and if that doesn’t happen, that that also won’t happen, and if that also doesn’t happen, then that could definitely happen” went my thoughts, and then: “ugh, fuck off and leave me alone.”

The contradictions made me angry. 

Shedding old skins, growing pains, the torturous and valuable insight that comes from change and upheaval. 

The need to heal is preceded by a certain degree of unwellness. Lately, I have come to think that unwellness is often equivocal to distance.

Distance to the self, to one’s needs, to one’s actual nature.

It looks like what happens when we stop listening.

Or never listened at all. 

When the body is in one place and the mind is in a room across the hall.

The frustration emerges from the discrepancy that says: “I know my reality could be different, but things are the way they are.” 

Any therapist would tell you that acceptance of one’s circumstances is key, and it is… 

But it’s also proximity.

Proximity to oneself, to all the stuff that is there. 

Opening one’s arms to oneself and leaning back into them. 

And while it is proximity, at the same time it is space. 

Because giving oneself space is required to be able to move in any direction. 

These sort of apparent contradictions used to drive me crazy. I couldn't wrap my head around them. Recently, I have more understanding.

When I recognized my need to heal, it was on essentially every level.

My voice, which had suffered trauma and damage. 

My body, accepting new diagnoses and trying to make sense of persistent symptoms.

And, of course, my spirit: worn down from all the change, pain, and struggle. 

Every time healing takes place, it’s multi-systemic. 

Moving closer to one element means moving closer to another. 

Allowing room for one contradiction allows room for another. 

Breathing into one pain softens another. 

Feeling one emotion opens the door to another.

Taking one small step toward healing can feel minimal.

Sometimes, fruitless.

But it’s setting little systems in motion, every time.

Trust. 

“Trust the process” is something one often hears.

Let’s be honest - it’s bullshit advice when the process hurts. 

Wanting something more concrete than that, I began to find a different approach:

Trusting myself. 

Myself, BTW, is a combo deal: there’s my body, my brain, my spirit (or my many spirits), my soul... there's this role I inhabit in this present moment as Lauren living in Hannover and working as a singing teacher and voice therapist.

When these elements are allowed to work together, when there is room for all of them to play their part, trust in myself tends to grow.

When they’re shut out, not listened to, or suppressed, trust in myself wavers. 

Trusting myself is an active process, a construction. I build trust: 

• when I make a difficult choice that prioritizes taking care of myself

• every time I set a boundary

• every time I believe an instinct, a gut feeling, and attempt to learn what it could be teaching me

• when I take the time to research and learn new things and draw parallels to my own experience, finding answers for which I have searched for a long time

• when I insist on getting the medical care I deserve to have 

• when I make it through a difficult day intact

• when I allow a truth to emerge unapologetically and I stop trying to take responsibility for another person’s discomfort or emotions

This trust leads to knowing myself.

The more I know myself, the more I can integrate all parts of myself into my experience.

That is where healing begins.

I give room for all the truths, roles, and descriptors to exist simultaneously.

I hold the belief in every circumstance that I deserve to be acknowledged, seen, and cared for. 

I allow forgotten, abandoned, or under-recognized parts of myself, the ones that were with me from my youngest age, a seat at the table. 

I treat myself with the dignity, grace, and recognition that communicate:

“I see you there and want to hear what you have to say.” 

I practice putting aside the mentality that I am some project that has to be completed or fixed.

I repeat the same work again and again and trust that I am cultivating what needs to be cultivated. I strengthen myself in the knowledge that I am slowly building resilience.

And I live into the contradictions.

I seek answers; I become the expert in myself. 

I try and find the willingness to set aside the stories I’ve told myself about myself for a long time, the ones to which I’m clinging.

And I try to allow for multiple realities at once. I’m not exactly who I’ve always been, but I’m not really someone else either. 

I really am here, and I’m also there. 

I sought for years after I finished my music degree for answers to my voice and the difficulties I was experiencing.

I sang in new ensembles, studied with new teachers, bought books, and tried to wrap my mind around vocal pedagogy, which at the time felt immensely too complex to truly understand, as if a wall stood between me and the subject matter. 

I did voice therapy; I used every free period or free moment I had between teaching music lessons to sing.  I realize now, looking back, that not all the systems of “me” were ready for the amount of overhaul it would’ve required to change all the things that would’ve had to be changed in order to have seen true vocal progress.

The mental and physical blockages, the trauma I had experienced, and the debilitating perfectionism were too strong and couldn’t be forced away by my will: they had to be lived through and a process of healing needed to begin.

The three intense years I spent at the Schule Schlaffhorst-Andersen learning the profession I now practice were the beginning of a lot of this process of healing on many levels. 

I began the program six months after having received an incredibly important health diagnosis and making the required changes in order to get my body back into a healthy state. 

I was in a state of integration: integrating a new truth about myself and what it meant about my life, moving from Berlin to Niedersachsen, and beginning to feel the intensity of the experiences the years prior.

A large part of this program included very targeted body awareness with a specific focus on the breath. Through this, my body began to reveal to me all it had to say.

It was like opening up a dam and releasing all the water at once. 

An intense upheaval was happening on a bodily level; every day I received messages too loud to put aside any longer. The vocal upheaval began as I learned what it felt like to release the trauma from the 10 years prior, one lesson, tear, moment, and day at a time; as I met people who made space for my experience and saw it for what it was: valuable, important, and heart-breaking.

It happened to my soul and spirit as the emotions of the previous decade surfaced and I learned to hold myself and allowed myself to be held.

It was a more turbulent stream that I can describe, but every step belonged and every step was important. 

The truth is, four-and-a-half years after the beginning of this healing process, I am smack dab in the middle of it all.

Looking back on the trajectory of my life up until this point, after 32 years of life, I observe how I did things for many years; how I got to the point of requiring the upheaval that ultimately came; and how things have shifted, are still shifting, and will continue to shift for years.

I don't have all the answers to my body or health, to my voice, to my spirit or brain or soul.

I try and open myself up each day to the idea that they are likely coming together little bits at a time; I see and am grateful for the multiple ways in which this is true.

I attempt to move from distance to proximity. 

I allow room for each of the contradictions.

I breathe into it all. And then breathe again. 

I feel it all.

Strengthen my trust in myself. 

Give room for Body, Brain, Spirit, Soul, Lauren.

I integrate, or, at least, I allow things to integrate.

I used to deeply fear that I couldn't be a good teacher and healer if I were not yet fully healed myself.

I release this belief a little, over and over again, with each new person who walks into my room; they're often asking, at least to degree, similar questions that I asked and continue to ask myself.

My life teaches me through repeated lessons the value of the path I've walked. I allow myself to grieve what didn't go well and to hold on to the belief that I have the time, resources, and capabilities for the things that are important to me and that the words "healing and "too late" don't exist in the same sphere.

And, in playing an active role in helping others to move toward healing, I continue to heal alongside them.

It happens as I go.