You aren’t going to be done healing before you die.

I’m not trying to be a Debbie-Downer here. It’s actually a wonderful truth. Change = Life. But I’m gonna say it’s healing that allows change to happen, and we’re all going to be healing until the end of our lives.

Especially people who have lived through major trauma, have walked through the shit-storm and come  out the other side. Healing isn’t optional for them, and sometimes it takes decades before they find the right combination of things to start making progress. A bad therapist isn’t better than no therapist at all. It’s always a set back, always more stressful, always a frustration, and often a trigger. If you don’t find somebody that gets you, walk away. And that can be a desperate search that can take years and years and years.

That is not time wasted. That is simply part of what is getting you from where you are to the next place. Every horrible person that comes into our lives teaches us something big. Every bad therapist, every bad healer, every wrong medication, it all teaches us something, shapes us in a way that, we hope, ultimately, makes us smarter and stronger and, in spite of the  badness or the wrongness, better in some way.

Even if we don’t appreciate it, don’t like it, don’t realize it, don’t embrace it.

Because healing can be awful, even when it is going well – maybe especially when it is going well. We are willfully putting ourselves in pain in order to get inside ourselves to learn the excruciating lessons that lead to a little more freedom, a little more wholeness. Healing can be terrifying, or it can be joyful, and yes, it can be both of those things at the same time, too. Maybe it is both of those things when it is done particularly well.

One of  my dear ones lost an important relationship recently, and said something about how no matter how hard they worked or how much they healed it just wasn’t ever enough. And my first thought was, anyone who can’t understand that this is a life-long practice and a journey that leads right up to the graveside doesn’t deserve to be with someone who is working so magnificently at this unutterably messy and painful healing process. Fuck that person. You are better off without that nonsense. Everyone is better off without that nonsense.

A huge part of the problem is, we’ve stigmatized all these things that can’t be measured and detected and quantified. 

Any illness, and struggle that does not leave physical evidence is considered taboo. We don’t talk about it, we don’t welcome it, we don’t want to know. Mostly, people want to avoid dealing with it so they can deny that they have the same kind of pain. Maybe there’s a kind of pride in stuffing that pain down so deep that it can be ignored, to a point (the rest of us call that letting it fester). I have known I don’t even know how many people that can’t function without a television blasting. They can’t be alone in the quiet without having a meltdown. They stuff their pain and do everything possible to distract themselves from it, because when they can’t, it is right there. And they are terrified to even look at that.

But healing is the path we’re all on, from birth straight through. Everybody has experiences that shape them, some good, some bad. Even when parents try to do everything perfectly. Look at poor Sidhartha; his parents tried to keep him safe from every misfortune; no one ever spoke an unkind word to him; he didn’t know there was such a thing as suffering – and it hurt him, he felt despondent and restless and completely useless. Even in a place where everything was perfectly tailored to his liking, he became depressed. So one night he snuck out of his gilded fortress and . . . had a pretty darn big reaction. So what did he do? He went to the other extreme, he denied himself any comforts at all. He lived on three grains of rice and a little polluted water a day. He was homeless, nearly naked, living in the streets, putting himself into terrible danger and weakening his body by abusing it so severely.

But – if he hadn’t done that, if he hadn’t done the wrong things for all those years, he’d never have learned what he learned, he’d never have come to understand the things that have made Buddhism one of the truest paths of enlightened conscious living the world has ever known. He had  to go through some wrong, bad shit, and then go quiet for forty famous days and nights, go deep inside and look hard at his pain, in order to figure out the path his healing needed to take.

No, the Buddha wasn’t healed after those fabled forty days. He struggled the rest of his life with the mental and emotional pain of his former ignorance, and the physical pain left behind from the abuse he put his body through to try and atone for  it. It got easier, sure, and the more he taught others the better it got – but his healing journey wasn’t over in one lifetime. Nor will yours be.

There is a certain amount of frustration in being with someone who is actively, deeply, in their healing process.

I get it. But don’t be stupid. How many times have you been emotionally unavailable because you were depressed, how many shoulders have you cried on, how much alcohol have you consumed in order to numb the pain? How many people have you hit, or screamed at, or otherwise hurt? This road goes both ways. Get over yourself. If giving your partner the space, time and safety to work on their healing process is somehow inconvenient . . . I think you might be part of the problem. Part of many problems. A problem on legs, in fact.

The stigma about mental illness has to end. Healing is not a sign of weakness, hell no. The bravest people I know are people who face their shit head on and deal with it. They need a standing ovation, not condemnation. Let me be the first to rise and cheer wildly as I witness you, and you, and you.

It’s like I tell my music students. The guitar is like a big mountain, and once in a while you get to a point where you think, ahh! now I can see the end! aaaaaand then you get to that plateau and realize there’s a much, much steeper mountain between you and your goal. Aaaaaaaand there will never not be a much, much steeper mountain between you and any goal of mastery. Mastery is a long journey, but real masters know they will never arrive at pure mastery until they have died and been reborn many many times, and probably not even then. I’m 56. I’ve been playing the guitar for 52 years, and I have learned more, and realized how much more there is, the most profoundly in about the last five years. The better you get, the more you realize you have to learn. Some of it gets easier with time, but significant growth and change take exponentially more determination and  energy the further you go, because you can handle harder and harder stuff.

This exactly mirrors the healing journey. The closer you get, the more you have to work at it to keep getting better. But, here’s the best part, both about being a musician and being on a healing journey: the higher you climb, the better the view.

Need a new view? SoundWorks can help.