Awareness is the First Step
No one can do our healing work for us. By “healing work” I mean the process of committing to and taking the cycle-breaking actions that force us off the looping train track of our habits and patterns. After a recent eye-opening session with my coach where I became aware of a long-held grief that’s impacted so many parts of my life, we talked about the importance of the “integration” phase of growth, where the “aha moments” we discover about ourselves are able to become woven into our life. He proposes that the start of the journey is the eye-opening plant medicine experience, and from those learnings we then continue on towards healing, growth, and change.
The awareness step is not the “X” on the map with bountiful rewards — it is an invitation to go further. You’ve only just now identified the destination, or more commonly you now have a hazy idea of the path forward but know for certain which treacherous jungle to navigate through.
In the current age of “everyone should go to therapy” — which I support and have also benefited immensely from in my own cycles with therapists — I’ve noticed a trend where the awareness of our patterns has been equated with solving the problem. We can name the thing so it has no power! It’s fixed right? Not quite. Despite the catharsis of identifying and acknowledging the reality of manipulative behavior, body dysphoria, generational baggage, etc (the list really goes on 😓) we are not yet fully relieved from the reality of that experience.
Awareness invites and challenges us to radically accept the full reality of that experience, and then we get to ask the question “what do i do with this?” This is the messy, juicy part I love where I get to support clients through releasing and creating new ways forward. Moving forward productively means acknowledging all the ways our old reality has hurt us and served us. It can mean owning our role in continuing the pattern, making amends, or creating our own closure for the harmful byproducts. Acknowledgement (or awareness, I use these interchangeably here) is a step that I think is often rushed, and rather than saying “okay okay now let’s move forward”, we have the opportunity to broaden our resilience and capacity for empathy if we sit with the different threads attached to the knot of acknowledgment we’ve uncovered.
Without continuing to integrate and apply the lessons in our life, we risk reinforcing old realities with the incorrect assumption they have been fixed and dealt with because we have simply become aware of them. Imagine you’re on a long bike ride and you’ve realized halfway through that one of your tires is flat, but rather than stopping to patch and fix it you continue cycling thinking “now that I know there’s a flat it won’t slow me down anymore”. But if you’ve ever ridden your bike with a flat tire, you know not only how slow and bumpy that ride can be but also that it can damage the wheel and cause bigger problems than just a busted tube.
Taking the time to heal, process grief, and imagine a more joyful and aligned path forward requires effort and is wildly benefitted by having a supportive container and network.