I like to fix things, to solve problems, to put things back together.
Occasionally I turn this energy toward myself. I’ll catch myself getting distracted, or my brain doesn’t function the way I believe it should function, or I feel like I’m falling behind because it takes me longer than other people to do the same tasks, or I observe that I’m working so much harder than others and not seeing the same results, or something else will happen that leads me to believe that I’m broken in some way because I don’t fit the mold that our culture prescribes of where I should be in my life and what my life should look like.
So I turn my attention to fixing myself. Then I fall into hopelessness. Because I’ve tried to fix these parts of myself, and clearly it’s not working. I still get impatient and distracted. I still freeze up in paralysis. My thoughts run amok. My brain doesn’t work the way it should.
And that only leads to a feeling of despair, like I’ll never fix what is broken.
Before I know it, I’m like Alice, free-falling down the rabbit hole of judgment, to an alternate reality from which it is very hard to extract myself.
Two of my favorite stories from childhood: The Wizard of Oz and Alice and Wonderland. You don’t need much psychological training to see the trend.
Then people, like meditation teacher Jeff Warren, remind me that I’m not broken. I’m human.
Oh, yes. Imagine that. What if there was nothing wrong at all? What if this thing I thought was a bug was actually the feature? What changes?
If we start from the premise that our mental chatter or distractability or proclivity to over-schedule is a problem that we need to fix, then we start at a deficit. We cannot heal if we are turning against ourselves.
This doesn’t mean that we can’t improve. But improvement builds from wholeness. It can only happen from a place of complete self-acceptance, not from self-aversion.
Healing is the practice of coming into wholeness, embracing ourselves fully as we are.
Healing is not about fixing what’s “wrong” or “broken.” The journey of healing, whether through yoga or any other practice, is about releasing what’s not true to us to create space for our true selves.
There will always be layers to our healing, like peeling an onion.
We will cycle back to the same things because that’s nature; it moves in cycles, in a spiral.
There are no relapses. There are simply new levels of awareness. We reach new depths of our being, and through those depths access new portals of our light.
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