Why You Don’t Have to be ‘Healed’ to Have What You Want

Image: Ana Degenaar

There is a big misconception that can arise when we are on our self-growth or healing journey that I want to clear up: You don’t have to be fully healed to have what you want.

You don’t have to clear every limiting belief, unblock every past painful experience and be perfectly emotionally regulated before you can attract success, the right relationship or the life that you dream of.

Of course, bringing awareness and understanding to our wounds and working with our emotions IS important if we want to move out of stuckness and into flow. But we don’t have to get to a place where we’re entirely unblocked and no longer triggered by things before we can call into our life the things we truly desire. In fact, this kind of expectation often comes from a place of perfectionism and the mistaken belief that we don’t deserve to have what we want until we are ‘enough’ of something (in this case, healed enough).

Unfortunately this belief is sometimes subtly promoted by those working in the healing and self-development space. For example, we get told that we have to ‘keep doing the work' (i.e., paying for that particular person’s product/program) indefinitely if we want to see results in our life. While there is a clear benefit in committing to regular practice, believing that we need to be actively healing non-stop only encourages neuroticism and a lack mentality…

And ultimately, it keeps us disconnected from our power.

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What I think is a more accurate (not to mention more empowering) picture of healing or doing the work is this:

Life will show us where we need to start healing. It will show us through the situations or dynamics that keep recurring in our lives or the areas where we seem to be consistently stuck and lacking forward momentum.

Our job is to get curious.

To be willing to look a little deeper and explore the parts of us that feel resistant, that feel unworthy, and that are running on survival programming. And to start releasing some of these mental and emotional blocks through practices such as breathwork, journalling, somatic experiencing and therapy. To start making choices and acting from the energy of our most confident and self-loving version of self.

When we do this, life will naturally start to connect us with the things that we are longing for. And through connecting with these things we’ll be able to learn more deeply about ourselves and to further evolve and heal.

Because the ‘healing work’ doesn’t just happen on our own. It happens in relation with others and in our interaction with the world. We learn and heal through being in a romantic relationship, starting our own business, experiencing success, making the big changes etc ⎯ not just through working on ourselves.

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So, if you find yourself feeling overwhelmed by all the healing work remember that you can start living, creating and RECEIVING right now. Life is the healing work.

⎯ Kat