Meeting Ourselves Honestly: Trusting Our Natural Process of Healing and Growth

One thing I’ve noticed in my years of working with people’s bodies is how often we resist being honest about where we’re starting and the reality of the process, the actions and changes that lay before us.

So often we want to be somewhere else, not the actual place we find ourselves. Mostly our minds want to be further ahead than where we are at, or we simply don’t want to be in the moment we are in at all.

We find ourselves (yes me too) wanting to leap ahead, to skip the discomfort of the “now” and land at the finish line. Or totally avoid the truth. Often, we layer of a bunch of excuses, unawareness, delusion on top, to really avoid the reality of the pain in moment.

Truth is most people are here.

Now part of that is reflexive ..… get me out of this stress, it is too much to deal with I am exiting. Which is fair at times, life can be brutal and hard. However, if we don’t meet the reality of where we are at, we can’t change the reality of where we are at.

And most importantly, we shut down our natural signaling for change, growth & healing. The reflexive stress chaos covers up the signaling of the real move, that the deeper reality needs for resolution.

We have a natural desire to heal and grow.

It is natural to want to move forward, to evolve and to heal. But that is a different movement to avoiding, denying and not meeting reality in front of us.

I often find myself saying to clients, “I know you want to run a marathon, but that’s like earning a PhD, right now, your body is still in daycare.”

It’s about recognizing that our bodies, like anything in nature, move through stages. When we’re injured, exhausted, or overwhelmed, our body is signaling the need for rest and care. It’s in daycare, needing high levels of active care, rest and help. A stage from which it will naturally grow beyond and graduate to the next stage when the time is right.

Very rarely do we lean in and trust this natural path of healing. Or trust that we will outgrow the level we are at and naturally want to grow.

Trusting the Timing & Process.

Our culture teaches us that effort is the answer to most things.  If you’re not where you want to be, the solution must be to work harder, push through, or find a hack. Or that injury and illness are a problem to be rid of so we can get on with the effort-ing.

But this perspective doesn’t align with the body’s optimal function or our multi dimensional nature. It comes from a lack of knowing the body’s natural wisdom and brilliance.

We don’t force babies to walk before they’re ready (or at least you shouldn’t). If we do so, we harm them. We must trust their innate instincts, knowing they’ll crawl, pull themselves up, and eventually take those first steps when their body is ready. We don’t question that there is a process and order of events that the body experiences, that this takes time and timing for the body to develop.

And yet some how we forget as adults. We try to get around this truth. We run before we can breathe well, we want to go squat a PB while we are wetting ourselves, we want a pain free life with out being able to stand up against gravity well.

The body needs to go through levels and layers of skill, adaptation and repair at each stage to prepare for the next level. And both the process and order of healing/ growth is important.

You can’t out run process and order. You cant expect a child in daycare to complete a Phd process nor apply primary school level understanding in your masters, it simply doesn’t work. For the body this means what it needs at injury level is different when it is years into conditioned exercise training.

Most people don’t know what this is because we are sold Phd level exercise programs, when in reality we are in day care and we are struggling to even breathe well.

Surrendering to the Body’s Wisdom

….aka the Slow to Grow.

When we trust our bodies, listen to their signals, they will make their way from daycare to a PhD, no problem. You can get there, but you have acknowledge where your starting at and go through all the stages. You need to step through from daycare to primary to high school to university entry, through a master's, possibly an honours and finally a PhD.

The body has an incredible capacity to adapt and heal, but it requires a slow down and patience to sense the body’s wisdom. Paradoxically, the faster you slow and discern the exact needs of your body, the more accurately you can listen to it’s needs and the more optimal the conditions you can give your body. Meaning the faster your more likely to heal and grow.

Rushing through the process or trying to skip stages only leads to further injury and illness and delay in improvement.

Growth doesn’t come from forcing or rushing the process. It comes from surrendering to the moment, trusting the process will evolve, and allowing the body to move at its own pace. This doesn’t mean it won’t require work, it means that one day it will naturally desire to do work, there will be a signal that says…Yes! Yes I do feel like lifting that weight now and my body is ready to do that….i am ready to expand into my next level.

X Carla