2026-08-09 ## Healing is not a job, its a way of life ## ![[dishes.png]] ### A superficial observation of our attitude toward our working environment. Gratitude for the body, for its ability to withstand everything I throw in its way. For its ability to adapt and change and heal all on its own without my effort. What a blessing it is to be human. - Looking back on my 20’s I see that I didn’t do any kind of therapy. I ate well, exercised plenty, but I also worked all day. I was a software engineer for a start up company in Toronto, and in case you don’t know anything about Start-up attitude, it means that things were always “due yesterday”. There was high pressure to get a feature out in order to beat competitors, and this would result in many late nights at the office. It was such a normal occurrence for my colleagues and I to arrive to work at 10am and leave around 6pm or later. I could only tolerate so many years of that because it felt like I had no life outside of work. In my 30’s I started meditating. Daily meditation is a thing in its own, and it is healing, but spiritual practice is not a substitute for therapy. They do complement each other very nicely. I was carrying a growth mindset for many years into my practice, hoping that I could gain something from many hours of sitting. I was bringing to my practice an attitude of doing. Its understandable, really, because I treated everything else in life that way, and I was not taught otherwise. I was treating my sessions as another job on my to do list, a chore, a clean-up process. Not that those attitudes aren’t helpful. Those slow years were fruitful. I saw improvements in all other areas of my life. I can do things with a greater sense of ease. I feel less stressed across the day. When a stressful event occurs, the stress of that event lasts a shorter time. Boy did it pick up when I brought a different kind of attitude to my sessions. In school I was shown a documentary regarding the San Bushmen of the Kalahari: the first humans of our planet. They did not use the words “trauma” or “therapy”, but it became clear to me that the purpose or intention they held for their healing practice was similar to my own intentions for healing, which was to let of the patterns that no longer served me and to have more joy and vitality in life. The difference for them though is that healing was a regular part of their routine from a young age. Their parents taught them how to do “integrative” work. Not only that, they lived in an environment conducive for the healing work that they needed to do. So they did it regularly and consistently as part of their way of life. In contrast to them, my parents didn’t teach me anything about healing at all. In fact, they were workaholics who were away all the time! We were financial loaded, thankfully, but I was not taught self-regulation skills and trust the wisdom of the body. I see the innocence in my parents by realizing that they too were left out on how to heal because their own parents, my grandparents, didn’t teach them either. My grandparent’s parent didn’t know it either. I believe that generational trauma will continue for any particular family lineage for many generations to come until someone in the family begins to teach their own children how to healing. There are many families that are lucky to have that in their family lineage. The San bushmen, for instance, passed down healing knowledge for over 250,000 years. It wasn’t knowledge that was entrusted to particular skilled people that knew medicine. Our doctors do this in modern times. Instead, their knowledge touched the ear of every single member in the tribe. Every member had healing knowledge passed down from their parents. Somewhere along the way between the last few thousand years and now, our families have stopped with the ancient healing practices, stopped passing them down to our children, and we instead remain so focused on our careers. As for me, I was doing what I was taught. I approached healing work like a task in my To do list. It was a chore; like a pile of dishes that needed to be done after cooking. My life was so busy a few years ago that instead of washing dirty dishes, I simply opted for the easier, quicker alternative which was grab a clean plate from the cupboard. This strategy works in the short term, but then I would have a mountain of dishes by the end of the week. This exact pattern is how cumulative trauma forms. I believe everyone is carrying cumulative unresolved stress in their bodies almost 24/7. Here’s another analogy: If I wanted to run long distances, I can’t do it with a heavy backpack. I’d have to take the weight off. Not only that, I’d have to make sure the contents of my bag were only exactly what I needed. When I first began my healing journey those years ago, I was walking with a bag full of useless stones all day everyday without realizing it. ChatGPT generated Image, with 10% Humor This has been happening to me and the people within my community for decades and decades. So much invested time has gone into my work, rather than into my internal state, that I feel lingering pain of inadequate self-regulation; a lack of self awareness that renders me incapable of accurately determining my own capacity for things, which subsequently lead me to take on more responsibilities than I know I can handle. I think my work is the number one of culprit of such cases. Healing and trauma work got placed at the bottom of my priorities because I needed to earn my income. **The Specific Unhelpful Attitude: Lack of Acceptance: ** Several years of schooling, and then fixing tech problems, I had a well rehearsed and embodied attitude of grit-fully and persistently tackling any problem that came my way. I had to get the job done. Like an engineer with no fear of breaking things, I’d manipulate the many variables in the system until something eventually gave me the result I wanted. Naturally, this was the way I approached internal problems. However, there-in laid an obstacle: the internal issues that I was looking to resolve within myself did not respond well to this approach. There is a concept in Gestalt Therapy known as the paradoxical theory of change which states change happens when a person fully accepts who they are right now, rather than when they try to force themselves to become what they are not. What you resist persist, and by working towards making a change in how I am feeling, I am actually resisting the emotion by not allowing it be there. In other words, I cannot “engineer” my way through my own problems in the way that I was taught in school! I can’t try this or that in order to fight of the emotion. The only thing to do is to yield to it. Submit to it. Allow the horror stories to come to fruition. I believe this is a reason why a therapist is useful when doing trauma or healing work; they have to model for us what it is like have an attitude of self-acceptance, which is ironic because we go to therapy in order to change something about ourselves that we don’t like. Our work-minded attitude is the very thing which can impede our own maturity and healing! I’ve seen variations of this type of attitude in my groups. This seems to be a recurring prompt: “Does anyone know a good way to release pent up trauma in the body? Need extreme release ✌️” One response made me laugh: “ I slammed a few plastic brooms against the side of my brick home a few weeks ago until they shattered. Not saying that’s healthy, but definitely got rid of some pent of Range JmHO” I’m a fan of the Daoist approach to any long overarching project: instead of working on big chunks to a point where I’m left depleted for several days afterwards, I prefer to take tiny bite sized pieces on a daily basis. It is more pragmatic for me because I have work, I have school, I take Martial Arts. I don’t want to sacrifice what I enjoy for the sake of regularly doing something which is very energy intensive. Digestion of experiences really takes a lot a commitment of energy, and I believe that’s also part of the challenge. Doing trauma work in this bite-sized way, I can see how and why the San Bushmen did their healing work on a regular basis. When I go to beach to do my healing practice, I find that I’m not healing from something from the past few years. I find myself more frequently healing from that very same work day! So I see now that everyday I am adding a tiny pebble to my backpack. Since the pebbles is so small, I don’t notice the difference in weight day to day. Working in a stressful software job for years without any kind of therapy work resulted in a very heavy baggage. A decade later and I’m still having to clean up from my stint in Toronto. **From “I have to” to “I miss this!”** Not to imply that an all or not nothing approach is good or bad, but that trauma work need not be so intense and “all committing,” as the advice I often see on these groups: “You have to feel it all out, muster the courage and just go for it!” I think some part of us knows, that we can heal very quickly, its just that its a little bit like diving into the deep end of a pool for the first time without knowing how to swim. I’ve seen an excited little kid do this at the pool once. Oh the sweet innocence. Then followed sheer panic, and frantically needing to swim back to the edge of the pool. On the contrary, healing work can be bittersweet. My own routine has gone on for such a long time that if I miss a session, I desperately look forward to it in the strange kind of masochistic way that gym-goers look forward to their gym session. My healing is built into my routine; its not a chore anymore. My sessions feel good, satisfying, and relieving, and easeful, all in addition to the material which comes along with healing, which is the unprocessed unwanted emotions. It is always time well spent. Actually, its the most pragmatic I can do for myself because of its subsequent effects on all other life areas. We know that a good morning exercise fills our blood with endogenous morphine (endorphins) which is literally a built-in anti-anxiety, and anti-pain medication that gets triggered when we exercise. It makes sense to work out so as to be ready for the day. Likewise, healing is a process of taking off weight, of taking off a stone that’s been inside my bag for years. Doing so makes all other task easier and quicker and lighter. That’s all for now, Thank for reading, and I hope you gained a few pointers a long the way. - Feel free to answer any number of questions that resonate with you in a chat or in a private journal Pondering Prompts: - What attitudes do I carry in different life areas? - Do I cook in the same way I perform my job at work? - How do I handle my things? - What does self-acceptance mean for me? - Do I always dread all of my healing or my therapy sessions? - What would motivate me to do the work I need to do?