Episode 84 Healing Our Stories

Healing Our Stories Healing is a cyclical event. We don’t do it once. We do it over and over. As I ponder on this topic I think about all the people I have interviewed – people who have lost children to hiking accidents, car accidents, suicide. People who have lost spouses and parents to murder and suicide. A woman with an eating disorder and a man whose father tried to kill him as a child in order to prove himself a prophet in God’s eyes. This is just the tip of the iceberg. The stories are raw, powerful, and illustrate people who found ways to stand up, heal, and move on to make the world better, to make their own lives better, and to rise from the ashes of pain, loss, betrayal and self-loathing. Today’s conversation is about healing, because it’s a part of every story, and the alternative is to suffer. The things we must heal from are myriad. What affects each of us and how it affects us is very personal–that personal hero’s journey. And the beauty of that is the utter brilliance of it. WE EACH HAVE A PERSONAL JOURNEY THAT SPECIFICALLY PLAYS OUT ACCORDING TO THE THINGS WE INDIVIDUALLY NEED TO LEARN. I THINK THE STRONGEST HEROES HAVE BEEN GIVEN THE TOUGHEST JOURNEYS. So, if yours is feeling pretty beat up right now – take heart – and badass up! You’re one of the superheroes. Oprah Winfrey said, “Like me, you might have experienced things that caused you to deem yourself unworthy. I know for sure that healing the wounds of the past is one of the biggest and most worthwhile challenges of life. It’s important to know when and how you were programmed, so you can change the program. And doing so is your responsibility, no one else’s. There is one irrefutable law of the universe: We are each responsible for our own life.” Let me tell you a story. In 2016 when I started my emotional intelligence training I didn’t really know how to get past where I was. I felt stuck. I knew I didn’t trust men, but I wasn’t really sure how to get around that. Fact was fact. And then, thank God, I started a journey of healing. It involved some crying, some screaming, some vulnerable emotional exposure, it involved telling my stories and reframing them away from victimhood into learning. It involved people who guided me, mentors and heralds. It involved my shadow self and my hero self. I arrived in Columbus, Ohio with my friend Anisa. My herald Sally had told me I needed to go to this conference, and being the ever so obedient friend we bought tickets and figured if it sucked we’d just go and have a great weekend in some place we’d never been. We got to our hotel room and the next three days pushed my buttons. One of the first exercises we did was to arbitrarily find a partner – a buddy, and sit across from them. You had to look them in the eyes. You didn’t have to say anything, in fact, you weren’t supposed to. We were instructed to simply maintain eye contact. This was someone I did not know, had never spoken to, and it was a man. As we sat across from one another staring into one another’s eyes and holding hands, tears started to roll down my cheeks. I was so embarrassed. There I was staring into the eyes of some man I didn’t know, and I couldn’t stop myself from crying.  Wow! I thought. I’m in for a ride. But, I really wanted to figure this out – figure out what was holding me back, figure out how to heal, so I kept at it. The leader of the workshop pissed me off because he was so arrogant and disrespectful to the students, but I stayed and bit my tongue because I wanted to move forward and instinctually I knew something was going to happen here. I didn’t know how this was going to work, or what was going to happen, but I knew I was where I needed to be. So, when the workshop leader tried to kick me out because my hand wasn’t raised high enough, I bit my tongue and raised my hand higher. My coach was incredibly tolerant, loving, but tough with me as I questioned everything, challenged...