healing is painful, but it's not hurtful
25 Apr 2019“healing is painful, but it’s not hurtful. growing pains and healing pains are different from hurt.” — Djalóki Jean-Luc Dessables
this statement really landed for me earlier this week during my small group’s formation call. it resonates deeply and it helps explain so much about healing for me.
i genuinely believe that the body knows how to heal itself and wants to. every body. everybody.
it is our work, as healers (of ourselves, of each other) to create the conditions for the healing to happen. and sometimes, when a bone is out of place (broken or not), in order for it to heal properly, it needs to be reset.
healing circle work can be like this. in the past few months i’ve held several circles and there’s often SO much anxiety going in. and i get it, healing can be painful.
but it’s an important distinction to note because the pain involved with healing is, in my mind, necessary in order to move forward.
the pain that comes with hurt is optional. i don’t know if i’d go so far as to say it’s fully avoidable, but i’d like to think about that more and land there if possible. i can imagine a world without pain being impossible but, with enough liberation, i can imagine a world without hurt. that world would have growing pains (growth is betrayal - see quote below) and healing pains, but no intentional or accidental hurt.
maybe there’s some flash fiction story in there… anyway, i’ll leave you with the quote and then head off to the rest of my day!
“Growth is betrayal. There is no other route. There is no arriving somewhere without leaving somewhere.” — john updike, rabbit redux
update: after sharing this with djalĂłki, he wrote this back:
That being said, I also believe that the line between pain and hurt may be blurry in some places. I have been thinking that, from the perspective of the creative source of the universe, if what we call the Big Bang was the manifestation of the initial fragmentation of The One into The Multiple, which is what our dimension is, before Fiat Lux, the Word of the Beginning might have been, Ouch!...
words / writing / post-processing
278w / 11min / 4min