Healing Through Mindfulness

GEORGIA O'KEEFE BLUE LINE, VIA WIKI ART

Seeking to live our lives mindfully offers many rewards. Without doubt, we are offered opportunities to feel calmer and more centred. It also offers opportunities for self-discovery and by extension, in the quiet times when we seek solitude. These are sometimes uncomfortable situations and ones we don’t always welcome. Feelings of loss and hurt can arise from that dark place where we thought we had so neatly buried them and denied their existence in the busy lives we have created. 

I have been engaging in some healing of my own around the theme of loss. Issues from my childhood surrounding the early death of my father when I was a small girl have arisen again with a need to firstly be acknowledged and then by way of healing to nurture myself in the validity of that grief, to hold it for as long as it needed to be held and then to finally accept it as a part of my life’s journey for whatever reason and to be at peace with it, free from blame. It’s what needs to happen so we can continue to grow and move along our life’s path towards our purpose. Being prepared to be alone and thoughtful offers us opportunities to heal.

I am by no means alone in this situation, loss and trauma arises in many different depths and from a multitude of situations. No one is immune from its reach throughout life but how we deal with it allows that loss to be resolved or to become a dark shadow that looms in the background of our lives.

I come back to the value of present moment living as a way of healing whatever we mourn and harbour. I haven’t always lived a mindful life. I was as adept as anyone at busying myself to escape confronting issues. My own has come and gone over the years with me thinking I’d dealt with it but the reality is it keeps coming up, albeit for me in a weakened state as time progresses. 

NUDE SERIES VIII BY GEORGIA O'KEEFFE

I have learned that spending some time alone is helping me deal with loss.  Unless we find that centred place within,  we have little hope of healing whatever ails us as we firstly need to even acknowledge it’s existence and constant unconscious busyness is a block to self-discovery and self-realization! It’s one of the reasons I view the need for children being taught mindfulness is very important and as valuable a gift as any that can be given by an adult. To learn to make time for the quiet is to learn about the self as it can be the place to discover it. Once we know ourselves we can allow the healing to take place because that which cannot be acknowledged has no hope of ever being healed, what is buried within will arise and can be healed by its acknowledgement. Just brining awareness to something is healing. 

As a writer, I have found the act of writing is a wonderful healer for me as it brings me into the present moment so easily. Once I start it wants to flow! Writing allows all that is buried deep to arise and demand my attention that it exists. It is for me, therapy, an extension of the heart and all it feels. These feelings will not be denied no matter how deeply we try and bury them for they are real until they are acknowledged and held and we nurture ourselves enough to let them go and move forward in our lives. 

When we allow ourselves to experience the present, we allow our wounds to surface instead of being deeply buried in our unconscious busyness. We can then begin to heal.