A Hidden Wholeness
Throughout my life, I have known healing by many names and understandings. I have found that to truly heal, we must recognize the wounds we bear by taking small steps forward in consciousness.
These small steps can be accomplished by having faith in a hidden wholeness waiting to be claimed or reclaimed. Amidst all the feelings that wash over us, we can find the gift of solace in the Silence by making meaning in the exchange of our stories.
Letting Go of What Has Held Us Back
The edge in my own healing was knowing wholeness is the forgiveness of others and ourselves, letting go of what has held us back, and holding on to what gives us resilient hope.
Mine is first a story of brokenness that I carried in my bones for much of my life. The brokenness was the acceptance as truth that I was not worthy of the simplicity of goodness, that my life would never amount to anything, and that I would never measure up, nor would I matter. This thinking came with a cost that held me captive and showed up as fear, lack of confidence, and never pursuing the dreams that meant the most to me.
Healing came when I realized that no matter what had been spoken to me, there was always something within me that shielded me from total acceptance of this as my Truth. The world handed me a broken image of myself that would never satisfy my soul.
Healing came when I realized that it is not that which surrounds us or negatively impacts us that has the power to shape our character and determine our self-worth. That, beloved, is an inside job and can only be filled from within, by you and only you.
The edge in my own healing was knowing wholeness is the forgiveness of others and ourselves, letting go of what has held us back, and holding on to what gives us resilient hope.
The Decision to Be
Shakespeare’s Hamlet addressed “the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune.” As he noted, “To be, or not to be, that is the question.” Healing is not the outcome of a decision but the decision itself “to be.”
One of my favorite theologians Paul Tillich wrote about the “courage to be,” and I know now that healing takes the profoundness of courage for each of us. It is a decision to shift from the scripts that require us to live, move, and find our being in brokenness and begin the transformation from surviving to thriving, from a state of dis-ease to one with ease, from desolation to consolation, from mourning to joy, from a place of accepting brokenness to a moment of knowing our wholeness as a birthright.
While there is nothing easy about the journey of healing, the destination has always been to know more of our own hidden wholeness and to begin the journey that is shaped by faith in being who we are called to be, rather than succumbing to the external options of who others have thought we ought to be.
Today I know and accept my wholeness and the Truth of my being. I declare that I am healed!
I invite you to look at your stories and determine whether you are reading from your story of brokenness or wholeness. No matter the volume, it takes courage to turn the page, pick up a pen, and begin to honor a new story and a telling of your Truth.
Beloved, the greatest story ever told is the story you tell of who you were created to be. Hamlet posed the question, and we live the answer by knowing that we have everything we need to be whole, to be magnificent, to be complete, to be transformed, to be holy, to be you, and to be healed.
This article first appeared in the Unity booklet In the Flow of Healing.