When we’ve drifted so far away from nature, from ourselves, and from our own innate ability to heal (mind, body, spirit), it can be a long journey home.

An arduous, confusing, winding, chaotic, tumultuous journey, and yet one of the few deeply, soul-gratifying journeys we can take.

The odds aren’t in our favor in this world to heal. The energy perceivably working against us is stacked skyscraper-high some days. The world as we know it does not greatly bolster or support healing in its most pure, unadulterated sense. This is the honest truth. One of the truths co-existing as we walk this earth plane, one moment feeling shattered like glass with all our fragmented parts, the next feeling as if the splinter is the way more light has been able to enter and blast us higher into remembrance.

No one tells you any of this. It’s a journey we find ourselves on by life or health circumstance or perhaps one we voluntarily take whether through agreement on the soul or human level. It’s one where we might look back and think, “Why on earth did I sign up for this?” or “Anything, but this, please.”

Many of us are on a journey of healing, in all meanings of the word. By now, more understand and know that the body, mind, and spirit are not separate parts but a whole integrated system working and existing together. To leave out one is a great disservice of humanity, and yet, that is the world and systems we have been living in. Feeling sick? Take a pill. Feeling depressed? Take another pill.

This is not to boast or judge anyone’s individual choices on their own health and healing journey. Just to speak to the fact that many of us more natural-based healers are seeking something more, something woven within the fabric of our existence, a universal medicine and elixir beyond the realms of man-made “medicine” by powers and people at play who usually, historically speaking, do not intend to help us heal, rather who keep us sick and under control of their own thumb.

Whatever choices we make for ourselves is the needed choices we need to make. Period. End of sentence. Your journey is not mine to take. My journey is my own to take. My medicine is my own to choose and follow. And yet, following an unspoken medicine, one of the earth, of herbs, of natural return to our bodies’ wisdom, is greatly condemned and shamed. It’s like digging through a giant pile of sh*t in search of a fleck of gold. One tiny speck of glimmering light and hope. No wonder it’s not a clear-cut, straightforward path to healing.

Whether we are healing on the physical, mental, emotional, or spiritual level, we can’t address one without affecting the other. As we heal one level, another is indirectly impacted. Energetically speaking, it’s all one. And, even still, those like myself who understand this truth intellectually, don’t always feel the truth of it until we are going through it, through the fires of hell, to see and truly know the web of it all and how trauma and healing impact us on all levels.

Many of us are digging for the gold. Digging beneath the surface to find the truth. To find the truth of healing. To see and know that there is a wisdom in our own manifestations of dis-ease, even if we fight our way tooth and nail through it. To know that surrender to the illness or acceptance of such is truly the bravest thing we can do, and in that surrender, open to perhaps a bigger picture unfolding, here for us, not happening to us.

Yeah, yeah, it all sounds so great when we put it that way. But when we are in it, battling a chronic illness or debilitating anxiety or depression, we don’t see it. It’s often too f*cking painful to see the truth. Because then we have to be totally accountable and responsible for it. And it’s no longer our parents’ or society’s fault, or even the guy who screwed us over in more ways than one, and we are no longer a victim.

Unearthing the victim requires so much courage and ability to take our pain and hold it in our hand, not with condemnation, blame, or shame, but with great tenderness and compassion. Allowing ourselves to hold it with nothing less than love is like sticking another dagger into the source of wounding. And yet, we do it all the time.

Hell, I still do this all the time. For the past eight months, life has bestowed upon me my own dark night of the soul (again), a health and dis-ease journey of great distress, fear, and confusion. Many days, I could barely make it through the day without collapsing in defeat. I saw the insides of my psyche turned inside out. I got to see what was running the show. I got to see the shadow, become the shadow, breathe in the shadow, and breathe out the shadow. I got to play victim, judge victim, shame victim, and ultimately try to embrace and accept the victim in me. I saw black most days. I saw hopelessness. Defeat. No hope and lost hope of my ability to heal, of my body’s ability to heal. I still feel this some days. But, there is a growing strength that comes through in dis-ease or illness that is unlike any other I probably would have discovered otherwise.

So, instead of staying stuck in the mud, we start to dig. We dig and dig and dig. Hoping to find the light. And, maybe, we just stop and pause, lie in the mud and bury and burrow ourselves whole, choosing passivity and complacency for a time being. All is welcomed and understandable. And, then, the daylight breaks through and we remember that we must keep going, keep showing up. So we dig some more. And maybe, days, weeks, months later, we see a speckle of gold, a glimmer coming through the pile of sh*t. Hope dances on our shoulders and lightness calls to us. We worry we will get carried away, so we stay stuck in the pile of mud for a while longer. We see the light now, though. And now we can sense the duality of the healing journey.

The darkness as the invitation to dig. To dig deeper, to dive for the light. And, yeah, some days, we want to stay buried in the darkness. And, that’s okay too. It’s okay because we are human. And we are not robotic beings without limits and max capacity of facing the same thing day in and day out, barely scraping our way through. But, the human spirit is resilient as we know.

So, we keep going. Healing in this day and age is truly the mark of a warrior. Of someone who has traversed death’s edges and chosen to stay because that tiny, quiet voice within urges them that this too has purpose. That we too have purpose in going through this.

Digging for the gold in life circumstance these days is choosing to see what is right here. To expand our awareness to see it all. Not just the sh*t pile we might be standing in, on, or that we’re fully immersed in. It’s not about denying the existence of the challenge, or pushing it away, but allowing it to be here without us becoming so deeply entrenched in its living, breathing existence, that we too, forget to live.

So, if you’re digging through some sh*t right now, don’t forget to live still. Don’t forget to take breaks. To get outside. To give yourself permission to think about the good for just a few minutes or even an hour. To think about how far you’ve come already in your healing journey instead of how far you have to go. To give thanks and honor yourself, your courage and commitment for the healing that’s already happened. To acknowledge yourself and your bravery for the healing journey you’re on. To trust that there is a life coming for you on the other side of this rebirth. And that you may just now be going through the birthing canal still. Dark, confined, tighter spaces, but you can sense the light coming. The life on the other side coming for you. So keep going, keep digging.

The gold is not far away now. It’s within the very fabric of this healing journey, interwoven and stitched into each part. Here for us, here to aid our further evolution and decend back into the heart space.

So, let yourself remember that you, too, have a infinite capacity to hold it all, lightness and dark, and to let the light of your heart breathe a little more. Let the child within you out to play and bask in the sunshine a little bit more.

And, allow this healing to be the gold, too.

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