I’m just trying to heal.” - said everyone, everywhere, for 1000s of years.
This is my conclusion after 20 some years of trying to heal and 12 years of trying to help others heal. I am starting to believe that the reason we’re all still trying and so often not succeeding is because we try to heal on our own, all the while ignoring the basic principles and universal laws that operate in the world we live in. We didn’t get damaged on our own, so how are we going to heal on our own? A force went in and did the damage, so a force has to come out to relieve the damage, so it can heal. Like so many other things I believe and teach, this really isn't rocket science - but it is still hard to wrap one's life story around.
There is this scientific law that you may have heard of, from a guy named Newton. He had a few. The one that I try to honour in my life and in my nutritional therapy practice is his third law:
“To every action in the universe there is an equal and opposite re-action.”
As it’s gone so far, it works quite well to strategically set my clients protocols up in a way that does not trigger this force too strongly. (this force, btw, is why diets don’t work: so please, for the love of god, let’s all stop dieting against Newton’s Third Law.) With my clients I work in gentle steps, I work with buffering, I work around medications. If matters are more serious, we are working around toxic relationships and life situations that cannot be controlled. It’s a hard job sometimes. I refuse to give up on them though, mostly because for the past 25 years I have refused to give up on myself. Otherwise I would not have the tenacity and resilience to not give up on them.
This past month I got a bit of a surprise from Newton’s Third Law and I now see that law in an entirely different way. As I already said, my strategy is always to try not to trigger this law from sabotaging my clients, or from sabotaging me. I try to be very conscious of it. But here’s what my apparently dense intellect has missed till now: if this universal law has been triggered in the past, you can’t work around it, you have to let it play out. You can’t reduce the equal and opposite, it’s going to come no matter what. We can, in a mindful way, reroute and redirect, disperse and digest some of it, so it doesn’t nuke our entire life, but you can’t make the force go away. Today, for the first time in my life, I had to surrender to this. It’s going to make me a better coach for my clients and it’s going to add to the wisdom I utilize when putting protocols and strategies together for them. And, as is the growing trend in my writing and my work, I am going to be really vulnerable in the uncovering of this - in the context of my own life, because I know it’s the way for me. I know it’s how I impact people’s lives and how I facilitate them into their own aha! moments. Strange as it is, I find that the more surrender, honesty and responsibility that I put into being vulnerable, the stronger I get. The more vulnerable I am in the telling, the more easily I trigger revelations in others.
One of my teachers once said “Grief is the doorway back to longing.” Only when we reconnect to what we really long for, can we even start the journey back to the life we want. So I welcome things that make me grieve, because they bring me closer to my true self.
I hurt someone a few days ago. I hurt them because someone else hurt me, and that person who hurt me, probably did so because they were also hurt by someone else, who was hurt by someone else who is probably already dead and no reconciliation can ever happen. This is the world we live in. It's everywhere. And as hard as I try to be aware of the landmine-type wounds I have, tiptoeing around them with mindfulness and consciousness only goes so far. They either need to be surgically removed, which some trauma-type therapies can do (and have done for me,) or, as I have realized today, they just have to be accepted as being there and all you can do is surrender to the fact that one day something will set them off. We cannot expect to outwit Newton’s Third Law all the time. The universal forces are too great.
I had this conversation with some girlfriends a while ago. I told them I was contemplating dating again but it just seemed so impossible because I knew there were sore spots inside of me that were going to trip me up no matter what I did, I just didn’t know if I really wanted to walk out into that field with no back up. One of the wise woman at the table that night (who is always coming up with logical and comforting concepts for me) said, “Well you just have to tell whomever you are dating those things. A mature partner will be able to walk through that with you.” It made sense to me. So I decided to give dating a try. To my surprise, barely three days later, the first person that one of my landmines was going to hurt, asked me out.
As of today, I believe that I have always ignorantly and arrogantly assumed that if I am mindful and conscious of something I will be able to mitigate and manipulate the laws of the universe. I think most of us try to do that on some level all the time. Looking back at all the teachers I have had and all they have taught or tried to teach me, they did all let me know in some way or another that I’d have to learn how to stop trying to manipulate the timeline. Like ‘The Flash’ learning the hard way that messing with the universal laws and trying to circumvent basic cause and effect never works out the way you want it too. Haha.
I accepted the invitation for the date. I wanted to know where I was at, I wanted to know what the damage was and the only way I could know would be to open myself up to new feelings that would trigger old feelings. I knew that much. What I didn’t know was how much damage was really there and that I would not be able to contain the equal and opposite reaction that would come out once the block, that I had used to push the pain down, was removed.
I had a very sad pregnancy, so many not good things happened. The guilt I feel about how the whole situation likely impacted my child is overwhelming all by itself. As it turns out, and likely due to a prolonged period of survival mode, I severely underestimated the impact it had on me. Things that happened during that time and after my baby was born left me traumatized, homeless, carless, in pain and I lost my business in the city. I had to return to my hometown and start over.
Looking back I don’t know who that person was that allowed all those things to happen to her. To truly recover I will have to forgive myself and those involved, it's the only way.
So here’s the conundrum I now face and the understanding I am trying to grasp, it’s a difficult one for me and I don’t have an answer yet: When a fellow human has wounded your trust in such a deep way, is it even possible to undo the damage on your own? Is it possible to do it without another person reaching into the wound in some way or another, to pull off the scab or disturb the scar tissue, so the infection and violence can be released? Is it even possible to heal without hurting or impacting the good person whose, perhaps misguided and careless - but not intentional, words and actions, cracked open the block that had been sealing off the second half of Newton’s Third Law? For all the awareness, tools and resources and extensive knowledge I have about all this, and despite the success I have had in dispersing some things like this in my life, I could do nothing about this particular one. The force was more than I could hold. So someone else got it too. I was mean. I hurt him. My ignorance, in assuming that I could control the pain as it came out, hurt someone else. The conflict I feel about what happened is a confusion I have not felt before – the confusion rests in the fact that now I just don’t know if there was any other way. I’ve had counselling, I have had PTS therapy that did wonders for me, I have healed a lot of layers of the things that happened. But some of them…well, apparently not. What if some damage can only come out the way it went in? And that’s a horrible question because what’s the point of healing something in a way that causes someone else to be hurt? At that point you’re looking at Newton’s 1st law too, and the law of the conservation of mass. Sigh. I hate this, but here they are anyway, because it just makes so much sense.
The First Law of Motion states, "A body at rest will remain at rest, and a body in motion will remain in motion unless it is acted upon by an external force." This simply means that things cannot start, stop, or change direction all by themselves. It takes some force acting on them from the outside to cause such a change.
To me, this speaks of the need of a trigger (external force) to act on the old energy of pain that is stuck, so it can move out.
“The law of conservation of mass states that mass can neither be created nor destroyed in a chemical reaction. Thus, the amount of matter cannot change.”
Or, in my head, the energy or force of the pain does not go away, it can only be transferred or transformed.
Is this something we need to accept on the other side of healing? Do we need to accept that this world is so out of control already and the wounds are too many and too deep, that we accept that part of serving our fellow humans is to be a trigger to allow them to feel the pain inside that needs to come out for them to heal? Do we accept that we will sometimes be an innocent bystander and feel the force of someone else’s crime come back on us? The law of the conservation of energy states that:
“energy can neither be created nor destroyed; rather, it can only be transformed or transferred from one form to another.”
Pain and wounds are transferred down from one generation to the next, it’s why we are all so messed up now. I think what we are struggling with now collectively is that we are tired of this shit, we want to figure out how to transform it and not damage our kids the way we were damaged, so that means we are playing with the law of conservation of energy above. We are attempting transformation instead of transference. Those are two VERY different ways to do something. This has increased our divorce rate to 50% in the stats. However, we all know that if the 50% of marriages that are still visibly intact but are full of dysfunction and unhappiness, also fell apart, the divorce rate could be potentially be up around 80%. We have so many dysfunctional paradigms that were programmed into us before we turned 8 years old, that we are trying to move some of them out before they kill us on the inside. Never mind the traumas that came after we were 8 that layered on even more pressure. In the process we seem to making an even bigger mess of it. And I am getting to the point where I just don’t know if there is any other way to do it. It’s going to be messy. How can it not be?
Is that not how the whole world is feeling right now? Past generations built our economy of ‘wealth’ on resources that were taken from the earth and they did not pay it back. We just keep taking oil, water, minerals and trees to sell and profit from but never pay the wholesaler. And now the current generation is paying the price because mother nature has come to collect. I’d be mad or apathetic if I was a millennial too.
It’s all a bit scary, globally and personally. I now wonder about my story, how bad is the damage really? Why would I even try to date again when something stuck inside me may come out too fast and punch someone else in the face? (not literally.) It’s the same feeling I get when I look at some of the timelines that form into stories on paper in my office. How the hell am I going to help this person peel all these layers back so they can have some good moments again? I feel the same thing when I do strategy consulting for businesses and large firms. I look at where the benefit costs are going, which prescriptions are increasing, which departments have the most sick days and why, I see the silent and powerful drain of presenteeism, and I see the future of how much all these things are really going to cost the company and I wonder how this economy will survive. No one has the energy left to weigh those costs, it’s too overwhelming.
What is it that makes us STILL keep trying so damn hard to heal? Why are we still trying to save the day? Why do we keep trying after epic fails, to understand ourselves and others in a way that could maybe make a good relationship possible? Why do I not give up on myself, or on anyone or any company? How can I look at the direction our collective health has been going in, factor in the increasing velocity towards total breakdown, and not give up?
I know why. It’s called Newton’s Third Law. And it’s called surrender. We have swung so far this way, into so much dysfunction, at the end of what our souls, minds and the earth can tolerate, that we are reaching a critical mass that will instigate the next equal and opposite. You can call #theavocadolady crazy if you like, I don’t mind. I may very well be. But I believe there is an almost magical force in all the universal laws out there (some would call it God, or light or love) and they are soon going to swing us back the other way. It will be messy, sure. But it’s also going to heal things that we didn’t know could heal. It’s a shift in perception, it’s a surrender. As Einstein said: “The same level of thinking that created the problem will not solve the problem.” Accepting higher laws and surrendering to them is a whole new level of thinking: it can open up doors you would have never thought would open because it never even occurred to you that they were there.
So. Now that I have firmly established to all men in Southern Manitoba that I am not currently dateable, lol, I guess I will focus on continuing to surrender and keep on creating the life I want, on the assumption that one day the laws will take effect and these things won’t hurt anymore. I will trust in the higher laws and know that that my job is to simply surrender to what has been given to me to hold – and to prepare myself to release it as mindfully as I can - and when I can’t do it that way, surrender to the fact that I will have to do some apologizing as I heal. To add some balm to that, I would express gratitude to the epic teachers I have had in this life: because of them I have the comfort of knowing that seeking forgiveness and forgiving is what will force me to grieve a little more, which gets me a little closer to what I long for – because that’s where my true power lies.
If we all were able to move and grieve down through the layers, back to what we really truly deeply want and desire, what we are truly meant for, the whole world would move into the slingshot back to more function, love and happiness, even quicker.
So here’s hoping we make it out the other side. And here’s to my newest teacher, Newton’s Third Law. Namaste, Newton.
And to the person I hurt while trying to heal, thank you for forgiving me.
Sonia
PS. I did have it in mind to write a song about some of this - but then I remembered someone had already written some of it... you know, humans.