Two Ways We Heal

There are two ways we can work with suffering.

One is to transform what we carry.

Old experiences leave behind emotional learning: fear, shame, beliefs, bodily responses, ways of protecting ourselves. Insight alone often doesn’t reach these places. We have to encounter the experience directly, while it is alive in the present moment.

Experiential therapies such as IFS, EMDR, EFT, Hakomi, and other emotion focused approaches help us turn toward what still carries a charge. When old emotional learning is activated in the context of a new experience, it has the possibility of changing.

But there is another path.

We can also change our relationship to what arises through awareness.

A thought can be noticed as a thought. A memory as a memory. A feeling as something moving through awareness rather than something that defines us or must determine what happens next.

Through awareness, we learn to disidentify from the contents of our experience. We can witness a thought without becoming the thought, feel an emotion without being consumed by it, and encounter an old story without continuing to live inside it.

Sometimes we need to go into the wound and transform what is there.

Sometimes we need to discover that we are more than the thoughts, feelings, and stories that arise within us.

Deep therapy, I believe, makes room for both:

Transform what needs to be transformed.

Learn to let the rest move through.