In the world we live in, we are often led to believe that our purpose has to be something noisy, noticeable, celebrity! And yet, it has been my experience that one’s purpose is often something quiet, subtle, privately held. For many years, I have been doing personal Sessions with clients and many have asked me this: “How long will I have to heal before I can get to my calling?” In the old days, I would say something like this: “It depends on how committed you are to the process, and how much material there is to work through.” But that no longer feels like the right answer to give. This is... “Your emotional healing is fundamental to your sacred purpose. It both clears space for your callings to reveal themselves, and it can be a calling in and of itself. Let’s explore letting go of the idea that what calls you is distinct from what heals you.”
At this stage of human development, acknowledging and working through our individual and ancestral material is what is most needed. We have been locked into an armored, dissociated, and survivalistic consciousness for centuries. This may have served us, but it no longer does. That unhealed and unresolved material is undermining our efforts to live more authentic, healthy lives. Working it through opens doors to all manner of new possibility, and matures us so that we can actually show up for all the gifts, callings, and offerings that live inside us. This quote from my new book, “Humanifestations: On Trauma, Truth, and Transformation”, speaks to this:
Sometimes the healing becomes the offering itself. For example, I always knew that I would write, but I wasn’t quite ready. I needed to live more, grow more, heal more. When I did more of that, my writing voice emerged. And much of it was connected to the healing and sense-making work that I had previously done. In other words, the healing became the writing became the calling. And I have seen this time and again in people I know and people I work with. Once you reach a certain stage in your healing process, you may well realize that you have a calling to bring your wisdom, and those techniques that worked for you, to our (emotionally) starving world. In other words, the healing isn’t in the way of finding your truest path. It is the way.
Last week, I had the pleasure of interviewing someone who had precisely that experience. In the following Enrealment Hour Podcast, TRE practitioner Tara Rai tells us her poignant story of self-acceptance and overcoming. She shares the details of her birth trauma and consequent disability, and many of the steps that she took to love herself and live more freely within her body. And the delights that she now experiences bringing her profound journey with TRE to others:
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My wife Susan is someone whose emotional healing journey has been inextricably linked with poetic expression. Growing up in challenging circumstances, poetry became a kind of healing balm and an opportunity to make sense of her lived experience. At first it was for her, and now it has become a relational experience, expressed in the form of beautiful books and courses. For anyone who is interested in exploring poetry as a healing journey, check out her next ‘Poetry Healing Course: Writing from your Heart and Soul’, which begins on June 6th:
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Let me leave you with some questions to reflect on, if they resonate. What has been your experience of healing as sacred purpose? Have you experienced a need to bring your process to humanity? If so, where does this need come from within you? Is this fundamental to our relational nature, or is it something else—a calling that you were actually born with, a path that you are here to walk? Not to say that all of our traumas were karmically inevitable (or beneficial), but do you sense that there is an encoded path living within you? A specific or non-specific directionality that includes healing and helping humanity? If so, what has to happen (in your emotional process, in your circumstances) before you can bring it to others? What is waiting in the wings to be lived and expressed?
Blessings to your path,
Jeff
This really resonated Jeff. The older I get, the more I realise my sacred purpose is to break as many of the unhealthy ancestral cycles as I can in this lifetime. Writing really feels entwined with that - the act of writing helps me alchemise what is shifting on the inside and bring it into the outside world as medicine for myself and hopefully others. Great questions to contemplate too, thanks!
Jeff, your essay struck a direct hit in my heart. After 25 years of full throttle service as a humanitarian aid worker, more than half of which spent outside our home country when we lived in Southern Africa and a former Soviet republic in Central Asia, I felt so broken I had to quit and we moved back to our rural home in the Idaho mountains. Finally, I thought, I will find peace, the nightmares will go away, and the unrelenting anxiety and darkness will ease up, but it didn’t. It got worse. When the roar of busyness and chaos of the world in which I worked went away, all that was left was the anxiety, the darkness, and the nightmares. I became desperate. The pain of existence was more than I could handle, so one morning I decided I had only one choice; my family, my community, the world would be better without my brokenness.
Yet here I am. Loving people intervened, I received the treatment I needed for what I now know was PTSD. Over the years, I experienced and witnessed so many horrific situations, but my work culture didn’t allow me to process those things properly. We were not weaklings, we could power our way through any situation, we thought. Alas, I learned the hard way that I required care as much as those I worked to care for.
Healing did not come easily or quickly, but my counselor always reminded of how things were when we started. Progress was slow and sometimes the darkness. Eventually I was asked to use some of my old work skills to help with a relief response for a little town in California that was destroyed by a wild fire. My mouth said yes, but my mind tried to say no. How could I choose to expose myself to the trauma and loss of others when I was just learning to deal with my own trauma? As they say, courage is the process of taking the next step even when one isn’t sure what will happen next after that step is taken.
Long story short version: the act of “drinking the hair of the dog that bit me” did more to help me heal than anything I tried. By giving myself away to help meet the needs of those whose trauma was fresh and raw, I was healed. By giving my life away, I got it back.
This week, I am working with a team of retirees who are renovating a residential youth treatment facility. I marvel at my friends, most in the late 70’s to early 80s who give themselves away to projects and in return, receive joy, friendship, the satisfaction of a necessary job well done, and the knowledge that by giving their lives away in service to others, they are living life abundantly.
Give it away if you want to get it back.