Healings That Hurt – Hurts That Heal

Is it always a hurt that requires healing? Or do sometimes we must get hurt in order to heal? Do we ever allow ourselves to heal from a hurt completely, fully, totally? Or do we continue to hold on to a few crutches here and there because we are too afraid to get hurt again, too afraid to let go? Sometimes it takes a fall to realize that not only can we walk but that we may actually be able to run as well without those crutches that we had let become extensions to our being.

We know we have healed, not when it does not hurt anymore, but when we are no longer afraid of it hurting again.

Do we do who we are?

From time to time, we all confront the question of what we should do with our lives. Over time we tend to shorten the question and ask only what should we do. The 'doing' starts to exercise a greater emphasis over what it may mean to our lives. The danger with this is that one could be busy all of one's life and yet, at the end of the journey, still find it to be meaningless and unfruitful. Much more important than what we do is who we become in the process of doing what we do. How what we do changes us to become who we become? Do we like the person we have become in the process of doing what we have been doing? Should we then, continue to do more of what we have been doing or is it time to stop, pause, take a breath and figure out who we want to be and whether what we are doing is helping us in becoming that who we want to become?

How much is enough?

It is too much to expect people to realize the futility of something they do not have. Buddha may never have become enlightened if he just had enough to get by. It was only his having everything at his disposal that made him realize the uselessness of it. He realized that he could not buy happiness, health or immortality with all the money in the world, because he had all the money and power in the world. But for most of us, the idea of tying happiness to wealth and power seems like a bankable dream since we do not have either of them in excess. Only those, who have successfully made the journey to the end of the rainbow and have not found a gold pot there, realize that the gold was actually strewn all along the way and that if they had cared to pick it up as they blindly pursued the distant dream, they would have succeeded in finding their much cherished pot of gold at the end. We find happiness not in what we have on the outside, but in what it brings to life within us.