You've Done the Healing Work, So What Comes Next?
I understand all too well the weariness that sets in on a healing journey, and the subtle undertone of feeling there is something more than what currently exists. Feeling unclear, despite the learning, studying and searching. How staying devoted to your inner work has, at times, left you feeling alone and tired.
Then there are the days when the dots connect - a glimpse of the vision returns, or a revelation arrives while you're driving, or bathing. That uplifting surge you feel when your soul is calling you forward. And the pain that comes when you resist it.
Those years spent trying to make sense of the hardships. Finding the courage to revisit old wounds and seal them, or the deep excavation to try and find meaning. The soul-stretching times when you've had to reach for the strength to rise from your knees in the dark and keep going, because there was no other option.
I want you to know that just because clarity hasn't arrived as you expected it would, doesn't mean you are on the wrong path. It is also easy to lose sight of how far you've come, especially when you feel like you're still travelling instead of arriving.
Your past, being broken open, the hardships, the searching - this has been you, remembering.
In this essay:
Why you don't feel clear yet, and why that isn't a failure.
The fear that surfaces when you step beyond your healing.
What the purpose of your healing actually was.
What your experiences have been preparing you for.
A missing piece of the journey no one talks about.
Why You Don't Feel Clear Yet, and Why That Isn't a Failure
It can feel daunting, even frightening, to step beyond the containment of your healing. There is a fear that if you stop searching for the cause of your pain, the suffering will never truly subside. That you may stay broken, stuck, failing or unlovable.
There was a time I felt terrified that if I stopped healing myself, I would stop growing, or stay stuck. Looking back, I think my cocoon of finding and fixing also felt safe. But when I allowed myself to be pulled toward what lies beyond the edge of my healing, a significant layer of my suffering dissolved. I began to feel free.
When we constantly search or fix, we stay attached to our pain, and our suffering remains active. It is what fuels the search and widens the void. But on the other side of it, there is a deeper relief and a clarity waiting.
The Fear That Surfaces When You Step Beyond Your Healing
Last year, I sensed my decade-long tenure as an international healer was coming to an end. A slight panic set in, and I began questioning who I would be if I wasn't healing and helping people.
Why did I go through an awakening and have my healing gifts return, if this wasn't my calling?
Why did I build this successful healing practice in the first place?
What was it all for?
And then it hit me. This had been my preparation. Healing facilitated the retrieval and regrouping of all of my fragments, re-established my stability, and gave me the tools. It had sparked my remembering.
From Healing to Agency: What the Purpose of Your Healing Actually Was
I know first-hand what it's like to feel the void between who you no longer are and who you came here to be, and that niggling temptation to start looking for another wound to heal, or another course to undertake, in the hope that you may find your missing piece.
The emptiness you feel at times is not actually the loss you have suffered, or the feeling of being lost. It is your soul, weary after a long journey, calling you to rest so it can integrate all that has been.
During my own awakening, I assumed that the healing was the path, and being healed was the destination. It wasn't until I allowed myself to surrender that I learned what had felt like curses in my life were actually blessings, and the acts that felt cruel and senseless were revealed as my initiation.
Nobody prepares you for what happens next, once you remember who you are and are able to reconcile your life experiences - the place you're left, without knowing what to do, other than wait.
So what was all of this for? Your wounds are not the medicine. The way you have tended to them is. The medicine is what has alchemised within you because of that tending.
You may notice that you are more patient, because you know this journey cannot be rushed. You are more compassionate, because in your darkest hour you had to find it for yourself. Perhaps your capacity to hold space has increased, because you have accessed the deepest parts of your soul as life broke you open.
It is because of what you have lived and survived that you now know grace.
So whether you are mothering, creating, working, serving or simply living your life: healing was your activation - it awakened who you truly are. Agency then allows you to live and choose, expressed from that place. Authorship is how you consciously create a life that reflects it.
What Your Life Experiences Have Been Preparing You For
There is a space so many of us have been trying to leap across without even knowing it exists. It is here that we begin to feel as though we are failing, missing something, or that we haven't healed enough.
No one talks about the season that exists beyond healing and before agency, because we have not known it before.
At no other time have so many of us been able to hold control of our healing, our relationships, our finances, our spirituality, our physicality - our lives, all at once. This new era is gifting us with what no generation before us has been able to hold together: autonomy, agency and authorship, in this one life. This is the full capacity to choose and create from the place you have finally come home to.
This is why healing doesn't fill the void on its own. We were taught everything would arrive straight after it, and when it didn't, we began searching outside ourselves for the work we thought we should be doing.
A Missing Piece of the Journey That No One Talks About
This next season requires something different of us. We must metabolise and make peace with our past, so that it can nourish our future. We must begin weaving all of the parts of ourselves, all of our lost fragments, together, so our soul identity can be fully actualised.
This weaving is needed to create something extraordinary, sacred and medicinal, that only you can offer this world. It is how the wisdom of your lived experience becomes the hallowed ground upon which you live, create and serve.
For some, this becomes the way you mother, love, lead, make a home, or change the inheritance of your family. For others, it becomes your sacred art, your work, your legacy.
If your clarity hasn't arrived the way you expected it to, it is not because of anything you've missed or done wrong. It is because the missing piece in this collective season is only now revealing itself.
And, now it's time to start weaving.
If you'd like a place to begin, The Alignment Wheel maps twelve areas of your life at once, and will help you to find your next steps from here. It's free.
With Love,
Olivia.
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