When You Heal, Something Needs To Be Replaced

When you heal, something needs to be replaced. The toxic people need to be replaced by good people. The old habits need to be replaced by new ones. The unfulfilling job needs to be replaced by a better one. And so, as we make space for the new things to come, I have found that it is an important effort to focus on the good things that you do want.

Many manifestation teachers speak about this. Focus on what you want. What you focus on expands. And it's true. However, it's a delicate balance. It's like balancing out the scales. How much attention and time do we give to the topics that need resolving, how much of our energy do we invest in making right the past. By this, I mean making peace with the past. Acknowledging what happened, finding relief, and moving on. I have experienced this as vital in my own life. There is a lot of information on healing out there, trauma-informed experts and healers. They offer their knowledge and guidance for the vast majority, mostly for free. And while this is a beautiful offer that the world can benefit from, it is easy to fall into a trap of self-healing. You can get so absorbed with healing yourself and mending the past, that you fall into a loop of trauma healing that keeps you stuck in the past. It becomes quite intellectual and disconnected, disembodied, all happening on a theoretical level in the mind. This is torture. Knowing what's wrong and not being able to resolve it? If you know you know. This is a horrible feeling to live with. Because knowledge about trauma doesn't heal trauma. Knowing unhealthy habits doesn't change them. Being aware of the way you self-sabotage doesn't make it easier to stand up for yourself. The actual healing happens through tangible results. Real-life action. This is the level where the alchemy happens. You feel disrespected? You speak up. You feel your body trembling and your nervous system rile up. This is rewiring of your nervous system into change, agency and empowerment. Learning happens through the body, through felt experience. It is vital for our evolution and our well-being as humans. We are not untethered minds, floating in space, consuming endless information into oblivion. We are mammals. Living, breathing organisms, with warm blood running through our veins, a tender heart, and deeply rooted social desires and instincs. We learn from each other through social interaction. Through embodied trial-and-error. This is how we have learned as kids. And how we still learn today.

So I encourage you to replace that old part of your healing journey, that thing that didn't fit anymore, with something better more positive. We need the replacement with something more rewarding, more beneficial and more hopeful for sustainable change. It's needs to make sense, it needs to make things better. Otherwise it is really hard to sustain the change and easy to drop back into old habits. This can be applied on a micro- and macro-level. If we don't find things, more hopeful things, to replace the dysfunctional things in our world, it is really hard to sustain the change. Because then it stays wishing and hoping, a fantasy, a future utopia that never comes. We need real-life change, in the here and now. And the same goes for your life. Have a look and assess, how much energy are you dedicating to the old, understanding the pain, and how much are you investing in the future, a new way, and better things to replace that which hurts you? Move forward. Fill the gap. Create experiences that will make you feel good and proud. In a day, in a moment - incrementally towards a better future. The best remedy to an aching heart is hope, joy, and love.