No matter who you are, where you live, what you do during your days or your perspective on life—if you are human, you are healing.

If you are like me and you hear yourself think, I don’t need healing, just hear me out.

For a long time, I heard the word “healing” and drew back. I started to build up these walls against the idea of needing to heal from something. I associated healing with someone who was hurt, someone who had been weakened.

I did not want to admit to myself that I was such—that I had wounds. Even today, I hear yoga teachers talking about helping people heal through yoga and I find myself flinching, thinking, I don’t use yoga to heal me; I use yoga to help me grow!

I am just now starting to see the enormous truth that I have been missing—one that has stopped me from fully embracing what it means to heal. What it means to be alive.

Every body is a storehouse of memories, emotions, impressions and actions. Each person carries with them every experience they have had over their lifetime. In our culture, we hear ourselves credit these experiences all the time—mostly when referring to positive growth. We acknowledge the experiences that help us as individuals to grow, to reach new limits, to expand our minds and our boundaries. The ones that feed us and help us to understand who we are and where we want to go.

But what is positive growth if not healing?

If we think about it on a cellular level, when cells grow positively (e.g. when skin cells regenerate quickly in order to heal a cut or a scrape), we consider this as the body healing itself. If we are to experience negative cellular growth in our bodies, that is what we define as cancer. Or as hurting. Broken.

So now we have determined that we are all humans and are all living. If you are living, you are growing; you are expanding.

Now ask yourself: Are you growing positively, or negatively? Are you healing or hurting yourself?

If you are reading this, then most likely you are taking steps in your life to heal yourself.

So my question to you (and myself) is this: How can we live our lives and heal at the same time?

The answer may sound simple: through positive growth.

But it is so much more difficult to embody, to practice and to live. Sometimes we get so bogged down with responsibilities, work, relationships and life in general that the idea of healing ourselves seems like just another task on the list.

When I had the idea to write this post, this was the question I heard myself ask—how can I both live and heal? This question felt really big, and can feel even bigger when just being alive feels like it’s hurting us. When the suffering is outweighing the joy.

So, how we do we make the shift? How can we approach the task of healing as a way of life, rather than one or two specific actions? How can every task on our to-do list help us to heal, help us to positively grow?

I don’t have all the answers. But the questions are a good place to start.

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Relephant Read:

Healing the Heart Through Acceptance.

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Author: Maria Borghoff

Apprentice Editor: Carlene Kurdziel / Editor: Toby Israel

Photo: Steve Snodgrass/Flickr // martinak15/Flickr

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