Sometimes we must be reminded that healing isn’t as complicated as we think it is. Yes, life is complex, adaptive, and emergent. There are many factors involved in making it what it is.
But at the end of the day, a few simple, elegant truths underpin our world.
One simple truth I come back to is that life wants to live.
The Self-Healing Nature of Life
Because life wants to live, we can rely on it to do everything in its power to heal itself. Life can be counted upon to help itself, and prevailed upon for solutions to its own troubles.
Left to its own inner directives, life will thrive – unless we make it impossible. Even then, life never gives up on living. We pave the earth, but sooner or later the earth buckles, sends up green shoots anyway.
Isn’t that wonderful? What a loyal friend, what persistence, what tenacity. And we are made of life, so life will always try to keep living as us, for us, through us, and with us, for as long as we are meant to. On this we can rely.
The Life Force and Recovery
Why does this truth, that life wants to live, matter for recovery? Because it means the most natural thing in the world is for us to be happy, joyous, free. The life inside of us will always be resilient, growing, creative and essentially healthy.
If we can only remove the obstacles to the self-healing force, what’s inside will take us towards an optimal expression of who we are, who we are meant to be.
What was in the way of our vitality, that we had to find a way to adapt to? And is that rock, that obstacle, that pavement, that imbed, still there now?
The Burden of Sameness
One big rock that squashes the vitality of most human beings is the requirement to fit into someone’s idea of “normal”.
Though we would never think of asking a squirrel to be more like a lion, or a lion to be more like a shooting star, humans are told all the time to be different than what they are by nature.
If we are loud and delightfully boisterous, we are taught to be quiet. If we are quiet and peaceful, we are told to talk more. It’s as though everyone has to fit into a bland, anonymous, dry template of a human being. Our natural diversity is suppressed.
This is an enormous burden and a ridiculous endeavor. Why should we all be the same, when diversity is all over the place in the natural world?
What destroys the balance of the world is an insistence on one-sidedness, a monoculture of psyche in which all healthy variety is wiped out in favor of an inorganic singularity.
Giving Up on Being Normal
I’m not completely sure how we ended up thinking that everyone being the same is a good thing, but I do know it creates terrible burdens for the psyche, that we all struggle with. As we each try to meet the ideal of “normal”, all suffer.
If we remove the burden of having to be different than we are, and instead take the attitude that we can support ourselves to be what we already are by nature, – maybe even more so, rather than less so! – we are heading in the right direction.
If we are loud by nature, why are we? What did life want to do with us, that required this loudness of us? Are we meant to be a speaker, a singer, a writer? Do we have a lot to say? If so then we will never be happy unless we are supported to say all it is that we came here to say.
If we are mild and soft by nature, again, why are we that way? How might we nurture, support and grow that mildness, that softness, to be its highest and best expression? Are we a mother, an artist, a gardener? Is there a reason why our quietness is just right?
Let Life Live
If we were to take this more pro-human approach to life, then we could drop many burdens, remove many rocks from the parts of us that are always going to try, one way or another, to keep growing big and strong in this world.
I would like to officially invite you, dear reader, to be as wonderfully unique as you actually already are. Even more so! And I will try to do the same. For all of our sakes.
Because life wants to live. And we are life.
