When I first started my personal growth journey, it was all about healing. Discovering parts of myself that were wounded, acknowledging those wounds, and giving them what they needed.
Healing is a deeply satisfying journey for me, one where I feel physiological differences in my body during and after the process, and see tangible difference in how I go through the world and interact with other people.
It was much later on, when I attended a Vipassana meditation retreat, that I dove into a new concept called acceptance. Vipassana is a practice where you focus intently on the physiological sensations of your body, experiencing them in the moment as fully as possible no matter what they feel like.
You find the fortitude to do this by remembering that each moment will pass and therefore not attaching to the cravings and aversions that inevitably arise as we go through life. This sense of non-attachment paradoxically allows you to experience things more fully, because your mind is not preoccupied with getting more of, or avoiding, any specific experience.
I learned a whole new set of tools at Vipassana, to help me go through the world: a way to better handle life’s shit even when I didn’t have the bandwidth to fully heal or process what is happening to me.
Sometimes healing is a privilege. Sometimes there are too many things going on, inside and out, to be able to make sense of it all, to give everything what it needs. In this way too, life is imperfect. Learning to accept this and the many other pains that are part of being human, is a valuable skill for finding reducing suffering and finding inner peace.
When I work with clients using Hypnosis Assisted Healing, I try to impart both skills: both what it means to heal, and what it means to accept. With every new sensation or emotion that rises up, we first with sit with it, noticing our ever-shifting internal world. Observing how much healing, ironically, can emerge through accepting – when parts of ourselves we’d rather not experience are still given the space to fully express themselves.
And then of course we move on to healing, giving these parts what they need, understanding where they come from, incorporating any disconnected aspects of ourselves back into a broader whole.
In every session, there is the goal of the process itself, the specific thing that the client has come in to work on. Beyond that, the goal is to impart lifelong skills for better managing our inner world.
Learning to both heal and accept as ways to enhance our own well-being.
