You Can't "Fail" at Healing

Initiated by the cross-quarter holy-day Lughnasadh (sometimes called Lammas), this festival honors the first harvest of the year, as well as the mid-way point between Summer Solstice and Fall Equinox. Most often celebrated on August 1st, the actual mid-point of the summer season happens August 7th this year.

So Lughnasadh is more than a day, it is a season. It is a parcel of time that encourages us to gather (gather together, gather fruits, gather the pieces of ourselves we've cast about in the wild, early days of summer), celebrate gratitude, and bask in the waning summer's light, knowing that these warm days are fleeting.

It is here where we take stock in what and how we've grown this year, and drink in the beauty of all that we've planted and experienced. (Watch my video on ways to celebrate Lughnasadh with ritual and plant medicines for more).

While the intention of this mid-year celebration is to honor all you are, how far you've come, and your innate enoughness, sometimes these moments of check-in with ourselves can lead to feeling the opposite.

Feelings of discouragement, not doing enough, not having enough, etc. can arise when we seek to celebrate all of the abundance in our lives.

It is so common for me to meet people on their healing journeys who feel like they haven't made it far enough, or haven't healed fast enough. In other words, they're not "doing" healing good enough. If only they were more dedicated, consistent, able, better.

This breaks my heart, because most of this thinking is based on our societal programming of needing to do more in order to be good. We have been programmed since birth that we're not good enough, that we need external things in order to be better. This is what drives many people's healing journeys.

My philosophy is that we should never do healing work because we feel like we’re not good enough. True healing comes when we align with the longing to be more of who we already are. It comes when we decide to do the work to remove what has been covering up the shine of our own unique gem of a self.

Healing is also never linear. We never reach the "end" and are somehow perfect. That's also a delusion of capitalism and colonialism.

I will never (nor would I want to) eradicate the parts of myself that have been wounded, traumatized, or operating in fear. Healing happens when we learn to integrate these parts back into the loving wholeness of ourselves.

We can learn to be with these parts of ourselves with more and more awareness, more and more kindness and compassion, more and more curiosity.

You are ALREADY whole. You are ALREADY a healing presence for the world. But what’s in the way of you living that?

One of my favorite quotes by Rumi goes like this:

“Your task is not to seek for love, but merely to seek and find all the barriers within yourself that you have built against it.”

This has been a guiding mantra for me over the last 10 years of my own healing journey. I already am love. I already am whole. I just need to find what's in the way of my belief and experience of that truth.

You already are love. You already are whole.

In the Golden Stone Wisdom School we work with many guides and spirit beings to help uncover the layers of what is NOT us, so we can claim pleasure, ease, trust, and joy for ourselves.

We work with various soul and spirit guides, the plant spirits, a loving stone ally that chooses to work with you, your ancestors, and the elements. All as supportive energies to help you along your way.

I cannot tell you what your healing journey is going to be. But what I can tell you is that your guides are lovingly awaiting you with open arms, to lead you towards a path of wholeness and remembrance of your own brilliance and belonging.