We're called patients: the people waiting to be well again. It's obvious after you deal with the medical establishment and spend a lot of time sick and waiting to be well why we're called that. I'm sure there is some other historical reason for calling Px, patients…but having to be the most patient you've even been for anything is what we end up being.
True to our namesake.
It's a game of faith being sick or healing. A challenge to test your faith in the world and in your own body to make it through these repeated physical let-downs that make us feel so utterly mortal and weak. A constant feeling of defeat upon the heart.
Being deeply broken and damaged requires even more patience and faith, knowing that you can heal again while simultaneously knowing it is one of the most difficult passages to ever journey through. On your day to day trials, sitting with your loss or grief, your hopelessness and pain, pulls at your soul, weakening the tiny fibers that keep you upright.
Knowing you can make it through that requires building faith out of nothing, from dust in fact. But how do we do that when we already feel so low and dark?
Sometimes making it through very dark moments require negotiating with your brain, conversing with your mind's chatter to give you one more minute, one more day of hope rather than fall down the slippery slope of cynicism and despair that is so easily remembered when things are not going well. It's easy to slip once we've been in the pits of despair, so you have to make sure you don't go there because that can literally eat up several days to get out of it again.
But whatever the length of the healing process, we must remember we are patients for a reason. To be patient, especially with ourselves and the healing process, for true deep
healing takes time, as I was told during my darkest nights. I didn't understand why it had to take so long but now I do. Because you're rewriting code in your soul, your redesigning yourself from what didn't work to what you really want. And that is some deep shit to take on!
Believe in the notion that healing IS possible and it CAN be done. Believe in what you need to heal as a legitimate pathway to recovery and feel unduly entitled to seek that which your soul needs most of all, hope.
Healing. Takes. Time.
Just know that it is GOING to require patience, perseverance and time on your part despite any efforts to speed up the process or push it past any point you happen to be at. Understand and remember this fact and you will be able to keep going, with hope and faith that you can recover from whatever ails you.
Keep doing the soul work. It will take you there.
Originally written in 2011
Photo also by Danya Mosgofian©2011
