From painful emptiness to authentic life, a journey to healing

How to find our lost pieces and be whole again

“We must embrace struggle. Every living thing conforms to it. Everything in nature grows and struggles in its own way, establishing its own identity, insisting on it at all cost, against all resistance.”
― Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet

For so many years, I kept asking myself the same questions:

• Who am I?

• Why all this happens to me?

• Why I can’t be as good as that girl?

• Why people don’t like me?

• What should I do with my life? What if I go the wrong direction?

I struggled to find a way to describe:

• Who I was

• What was my purpose

• How can I get there

There was always something that went wrong,

• Intrusive thoughts that made me feel guilty

• Overthinking everything in my life, wondering if I was doing anything right

• Fears, doubts, not taking action, regret and comparing myself to others, feeling I wasn’t enough, depression, then a spark, a motivation, a ray of hope, overthinking about my fears of unknown and “what would people think of me “, setbacks, doubts, not taking actions,….

• I felt that I “owe” something to others even just because I existed!

But did I feel all that when I was a kid?

What happened to me?

What happened to us?

Have you ever had any of these feelings?

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When it comes to living things, everything is complicated.

But our brain can only focus on 1 thing at a time, so we break down the whole to understand what it is.

That’s a good approach in scientific terms, but in life, it leads to destruction; of self, of community, of earth.

¹

Once there was a man who wanted to control the nature, but it was much more powerful than him, so he decided to break it down into pieces. That gave him an illusion of control over nature, he thought he can do anything and have anything he “wants”. And he forgot that this tiny blue dot in the vast dark space, is his only home.

Where did we go wrong?

Well, you can’t accurately tell that, but my idea is it all started when we sacrificed our authenticity to pseudopower that makes us happy for a short amount of time.

It’s like giving up the sun to play with a disposable lamp!

We ignore what makes us uncomfortable, distract ourselves to numb the boredom of living in a high speed world, we think that there will come “a day” that all of this pain, struggle, and emptiness will disappear all by itself. This is nothing more than a fantasy.

All of these distractions has teared our souls and minds into pieces, it doesn’t matter what we have, there’s always a feeling of “something’s missing “ in our hearts.

We are broken apart as a unity, and that weird feeling in our hearts or the spreading loneliness in the world, is a clear sign of this.

In order to heal from all that pain and suffering, we need to take a different path:

The journey to healing, but it’s not a destination, the road itself is the purpose; make it a lifestyle.

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I don’t have all the answers, no one does. And the only person that can tell you how to take this healing journey is you.

This is the true joy in life, the being used for a purpose, recognized by yourself as a mighty One; being thoroughly worn out before you are thrown on the scrap heap; being a force of Nature instead of a feverish, selfish little clod of ailments and grievances complaining that the world will not devote itself to making you happy.”

 ~ George Bernard Shaw

However, there are some tools and insights that can help.

We’re going to talk about 4 words and 5 compassions that will help you build your own authentic path to healing, as discussed in the book by Dr.Gabor Mate “The Myth of Normal”.

We have talked about compassion in detail, in another post, so we’ll focus on those 4 words here.

“What follows is not an attempt to prescribe a one-size-fits-all solution—no size does—but to point to the possibility of healing on individual and societal levels, even in the context of our increasingly anxious and disordered culture.”²

The first step to becoming whole again, is to acknowledge suffering and pain, of ourselves and the world.

Although we need to do an autopsy of our past traumas, and see our truth as it was and is, we shouldn’t get trapped in the victimhood of our wounds; we can’t live in a corpse of traumas.

Don’t ask why me?

It’s you because life wants to give you something, a change of direction, a warning, a hidden gift, a purpose; call it what you want, just don’t give it away, take it and acknowledge it as it is.

One of my professors once said: “We should understand that this world is not the land of comfort but the land of nurturing and transforming suffering and pain. “

You’ll always have pain, something will go wrong, people will disappoint you, you’ll get hurt; learn to accept, acknowledge, and transform it, don’t ignore it.

Don’t ask why, ask how. How can I accept this? How can I grow after so much suffering? How can I take the path to healing?

As a child, we didn’t have the power to ask ourselves these questions, so we put all the blame on ourselves and developed mechanisms to keep us safe and alive. But these mechanisms are hurting us now, we need to be aware of them and shift our energy.

Think about everything that you have achieved and you’re proud of; did they happen when you were laying on the couch, or there was a challenge, a setback that you thought: “this is the end of the world!” ?

We, humans, only grow when we are under pressure.

Think of all great works in the world: art, science, businesses; what do they all have in common? Where did they start?

A painful problem.

If there was no pain in this world, we couldn’t create all that glory and history.

Pain is okay, it’s good, but we must learn how to acknowledge and transform it.

One must still have chaos in oneself to be able to give birth to a dancing star.

~ Friedrich Nietzsche

1. Authenticity ³

What it is?

Well, if you can tell me what is love, then I can tell you what authenticity means.

It’s not a word, it’s something you live with.

You can’t chase to get it, you only can embody it.

And the first step is: Accept ourselves fully and completely.

“By definition, striving for some idealized self-image is incompatible with being authentically who one is.”

Today, I’m not afraid of being disliked, of disappointing someone. I’m not afraid of what I used to think of as my negative qualities. I realized that they are just the other side of being who I am.

~ Anita Moorjani

A direct approach to authenticity is being aware of the times that it’s not there, then being curious about the limiting self-beliefs that stand in for it, or just stand in its way: “Hmm, I can tell I’m about to stuff down this feeling or thought—is that what I want to do? Is there another option?”

The emergence of new choices in place of old, preprogrammed dynamics is a sure sign of our authentic selves coming back online.

2. Agency⁴

Agency is taking the whole responsibility of ourselves: our existence, our decisions, our lives.

Personal choices is not a brand, like Mantras: “be what you want “; we should be aware of the context where these choices are made in the first place.

Most of the time, freedom that society gives us is: to choose between a and b, it’s not a real freedom.

“Agency is neither attitude nor affect, neither blind acceptance nor a rejection of authority. It is a self-bestowal of the right to evaluate things freely and fully, and to choose based on authentic gut feelings, deferring to neither the world’s expectations nor the dictates of ingrained personal conditioning”

3. Anger⁵

Healthy anger is a natural way of defending our boundaries.

In our journey to wholeness, we need to acknowledge this misunderstood feeling.

“Anger’s core message is a concise and potent no, said as forcefully as the moment demands”

“Wherever we find ourselves tolerating or explaining away situations that persistently stress us, insisting that “it’s not so bad” or “I can handle it” or “I don’t want to make a fuss about it,” there is likely an opportunity to practice giving anger some space to emerge. Even the plainspoken admission that “I don’t like this” or “I don’t want this” can be a step forward.”

4. Acceptance ⁶

Acceptance is allowing things to be as they are, not trying to shape them the way we “think that they should be “.

Acceptance is the recognition, ever accurate, that in this moment things cannot be other than how they are. It also means accepting how downright difficult it can be to accept. And underneath them there is always pain.

“To accept that whatever is currently happening is happening—the simple fact of the matter—does not mean conceding that it should happen. To deal with racism, poverty, or any other societal ill, we must first recognize that they are realities of life in this culture. They exist, and we must acknowledge our pain and grief that they do. Now we can ask ourselves how we might effectively work to eliminate not only their expressions but their root causes. We can move on to healthy anger, to agency, to autonomy in action.”

Accept what it is, acknowledge your anger of defending your boundaries ( mental, physical, emotional), take the responsibility of your own life ( accepting, acknowledging, empowering and healing), and make your way to authenticity.

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We can’t build a building on a broken foundation.

Foundation is the past,

primary materials is the present,

and the building is the future.

Heal from the past, build a healthy lifestyle now, and use this power to create your authentic future.

We can’t change the past or predict the future, all we can do is:

changing our perspective on them, and use the present moment to live our authentic life.

And this journey to healing is the way to do that.

Don’t look for “hacks” or “shortcuts “.

There’s no elevator to get you there, you need to take the stairs.

So step up and live your life.

and always remember this:

So trust the process, and show up every day with compassion and confidence.

Thank you for reading, and if you have any questions, thoughts and ideas please share them with us in the comments.

1. This is not a complete list, just what I’ve learned so far.

2. The Myth of Normal, Dr.Gabor Mate.

3. This is extracted from chapter 26 of the book: “ The Myth of Normal”.

4. The same.

5. The same.

6. The same.