When You're Ready, This Is How You Heal

A sample of When You're Ready, This Is How You Heal

When you’re ready, this is how you heal

A collection of essays by Brianna Wiest

Dedication

For the ones who face a fork in the road…

There is only one path:
the one that leads you
to your truth.

Introduction

Healing is not a one-time event.

It can begin with a one-time event—typically some form of sudden loss that disrupts our projection of what the future might be. However, the true work of healing is allowing that disruption to wake us from a deep state of unconsciousness, to release the personas we adapted into and begin consciously piecing together the full truth of who we were meant to be.

The experiences that catalyze healing are not trying to prompt us to simply recover from a blow to the ego, but for the first time, in many cases, to recognize our ego at all. It is a moment of reconciliation where we are asked to realize that, in the words of Michael Murphy, "a greater life is pressing to be born."

If we do not answer this call, it will continue to show up in our lives, often in similar patterns and feelings. We will continuously return to wondering: "How am I still here?" or "How did I get here again?" The answer is that the same wake-up call keeps coming in until our subconscious minds agree to embark on the journey of our own becoming. This is a process of fully restoring us into remembrance of the perfect, whole and complete truth of who we are. It is a life-long quest, because we must tend to the gardens of our minds on a daily basis. Like children, they cannot completely manage themselves. Our lives require a higher functioning, future-considering adult aspect of ourselves to come forth and sit in the driver’s seat.

This is a journey because no healing, whether physical or spiritual, is something that occurs linearly, nor seamlessly. Life contracts before it expands, and pulls back before it leaps forward. This balancing act is not something we should resist, but rather, embrace. The longer we avoid doing so, the longer we will dwell on the event or series of events that arose on our paths for the sake of waking us up, rather than truly beginning the more difficult, but far more rewarding, work.

In many ways, the journey of healing is not so much a chapter in your story, but changing the way you write the entire book. It’s a shift in the way you move through the world, one in which you move from being disappointed that life has not met your every expectation to expanding your vision to perceive all of the magic, the wonder, the awe, the heartache, the loss, the gain, the contrast that makes us all perfectly and unpredictably human.

Our healed selves are not our most flawless selves. They are not immune to sadness or grief or fear. They are just not controlled by those experiences any longer. They feel sadness when it is time for sadness, and grief when it is time to grieve, and contentment on a more regular basis. They fear things that are unknown or important or both, but they do not allow that emotion to prevent them from moving forward. Life can be deeply challenging and profoundly unfair, and without the ability to move through the feelings that may accompany our experiences in real time, we often become trapped in the old stories we once wove around them.

When we are able to validate, accept and process our own human experience independent of anyone else, something magical occurs. We begin reconnecting with our true desires, heeding our subtlest instincts, and cease sabotaging our inspired thoughts and feelings. Through this, we tend to usher in a serendipitous unfolding of events. Over time, we begin to recognize that there is a common thread carrying us through each one of these experiences, which is our soul’s silent guidance: ever-present, and always leading us just beyond what we can see in real time.

As we start to recognize this power, we begin to trust it more. As we start to trust it more, we begin to follow it more closely. We have greater stretches of feeling ease and and love. Our lives begin to come back into harmony through our new grounded, centered perspective. We realize that we were never really lost, we were just giving ourselves some space to process before we could move forward completely.

Your first purpose is to heal.

The sheer impact of you becoming the person you know you were meant to be will have a ripple effect on everyone and everything around you. Nothing will ever be the same. If you cannot imagine how else you might leave a legacy, help others, or do something meaningful with your life, the most important place to start is within yourself.

It’s also the hardest place to start.

It’s far simpler to gaze outward and point our fingers at what we believe everyone else is doing wrong. It is more challenging to look ourselves in the mirror and be honest about the ways that we have not been living up to our true potential, to identify the areas in life where we have some room for growth, and then to consistently push ourselves to show up every day to make those changes manifest.

When we claim ownership over the unique destiny that is meant to be ours, the collective heals with us, because we are all pieces of the whole. Perfection will be impossible, as it is within the contrast that this world becomes what it is meant to be—a training ground for soul development. This is not about trying to take the world and make it what we think its most perfect iteration might be, but to finally do what we had intended all along: to awaken, to remember, to witness our own seeds of potential take root.

In the same way that no two people are exactly alike, every purpose we are called to is unique as well, and this is precisely what this book intends to do: awaken each of us to the small and large ways in which we truly can affect those around us, in the corner of the earth we were given, in the specific ways we know how, for the period of time that is ours.

You are far from alone in hearing the call to wake up from the life you had planned in order to commit wholeheartedly to the life that has been waiting. If enough of us are able to do so, I believe we will have the potential to see massive shifts in our shared physical reality. There is not one person who does not need healing, because there is not one person who does not need to be awakened from their unconsciousness and into all life might offer.

This book is a collection of pieces I wrote over the course of many years of my own journey, beginning as a young girl who suffered from significant mental and emotional health disorders, to the woman sitting on the coast of California on a chilly summer evening—healthy, established, connected and thriving—and writing these words to you now.

If you picked up this book, you’re already on that same path to healing and discovering your true purpose. I hope my words may help ease your heart through the journey your brave soul has already begun.

When you’re ready, this is how you heal

You recognize that familiar, dull feeling in your gut—as though something is wrong, though you can’t quite pinpoint what. You start to take inventory of your life. You recount your job, your salary, your friends, what so-and-so from such-and-such time in your life would think of you now, your nice new profile photo on Facebook. The pieces, when put together, form a picture that should nullify that feeling.

And yet.

You go through life stymied by that ache. It crescendos and crashes. You get distracted by the news or your job or Twitter, or something that temporarily scares you a little bit more.

It goes on, until one day, you realize you’re being levied, haunted, by a pain you can’t quite decipher. Slowly, it wears you down. It’s harder to get up. It’s harder to go out. It’s easier to drink and then drink some more. Or maybe eat, or shop, or post photos of yourself to Instagram. Everyone has a different vice.

The more you are confused by the small, scary feeling you can’t figure out, the worse it gets. And the worse it gets, the more you become convinced that it’s a warning of what is to come. You start to attach thoughts to the feeling, fear stories.

The stories, you realize, are illogical. You’re overreacting. You’re convinced your world is imminently coming to an end and these "gut feelings," the ones you’ve been implicitly told to trust for so long, are simply warning you to take cover.

What you can’t see right now is that nothing is really wrong.

Actually, things are really right, which is why you finally feel safe enough to feel what you really feel. Stop projecting. Stop telling stories. Those dull, unsettling feelings are not in the future—they’re in the past.

You’ve been carrying them with you all this time.

If we don’t finish processing our emotional experiences, they stay with us like the food we can’t metabolize, or old clothes we never get around to packing up and putting out at the curb. Sometimes, they hold within them nourishment, wisdom and guidance. Other times, they’re debris from a chapter long closed.

Either way, they are signals to the spaces in which we are not yet free.

When you’re ready to heal, you will need to lay yourself down in a very safe space and focus on those tense feelings. Have them show you their origins. You will begin to see moments you forgot about, feelings you forgot you ever felt. The past will come up in blinks and vignettes. Slowly, over time, you will awaken to what is really wrong—which is the piece of you that had to break off and build a wall around your heart because behind it was a wound you did not yet know how to heal.

When you are ready, you will step behind it.

You will know that the anger, the sadness, and the anxiety are a veil, a trigger trying to wake you up, not knock you out.

You will need to cry. You will need to cry for the 13-year-old that got her heart broken, for the 16-year-old whose friends were mean to him. You will need to mourn what you lost and when you lost it. You will need to go back in time and insert yourself into those memories as an adult and tell your child self to say what they really needed to say at the moment they needed to say it, though they couldn’t find the words or the courage. You will need to do this, over and over again, until you slowly realize you are becoming lighter. You are releasing. Though you cannot change time, you are, somehow, changing your story.

You will need to sweat. You will need to stretch and move your body, and pay close attention to where you are tight and what feels uncomfortable, and where you are pent up and storing all that pain.

You will need to shake. You will need to lay on the floor and literally shake out everything you’re holding. You will need to let yourself feel vulnerable and small—both of which are, at the end of the day, the two feelings we guard ourselves against the most.

You will need to surrender. Through the tears and sweat and shaking and shifting, you will stop fighting it. You will see your past life for what it was, so you can see your present life for what it is: filled with hope and potential.

Eventually, you will get up, and your world will start to change.

You will exit relationships and begin others. You will call someone you haven’t talked to in a long time. You will suddenly be inspired to attend a new class, or find yourself drafting your resignation email. You will begin writing, reading, sitting outside, and drinking water, feeling grateful for these simple, nourishing things. You will sleep a bit easier. Gradually, you will start to return to yourself. You will enter that emotional fire and burn off everything blocking the core of you from truly being in the world.

Then you will know that when you lose someone, you must cry.

When you’re frustrated, you must be frustrated.

When you want to say something, you must speak.

In the healing process, you don’t just learn how to go back and fix what you didn’t finish. You also learn how to press forward, how to live more intently and presently, how to process your experiences in real-time. The more you do this, the more you will awaken and begin to show up for life. You start speaking again, you start feeling again, you start being again.

When you feel strong enough to look at what’s wrong, you begin to unearth your soul.

It was always there. It was just buried under years and layers of identities and styles and beliefs and ideas that had adhered themselves to you like a shield.

You were never lost.

You were only hidden.

All the time you spent feeling so uncomfortable was just your deepest self trying to speak to you, trying to remind you of its presence.

It was only the core of you saying: Keep going. There is more to life than this.

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