Unbroken
I will not rescue you,
For you are not powerless.
I will not fix you,
For you are not broken.
I will not heal you,
For I see you in your wholeness.
I will walk with you through the darkness,
As you remember your light.
-A Medicine Woman’s Prayer
As long as I can remember I felt like something was wrong with me. I felt broken and separate. I was always seeking, and grasping for something outside of me to fix my insides. I thought the next book or the next treatment was going to provide the answer. Then as I got older I thought the next drink or the next drug was going to bring me closer to enlightenment, and if that didn’t work, at least it would relax my shaky nerves, as I never felt comfortable in my own skin. I sought people, and looked to them to take care of me and provide comfort. I sought far away and distant lands, hoping I would stumble upon some experience or some knowledge that would make me feel whole.
I thought that my life started over when I got sober 7 years ago, and nothing before that mattered because I was broken. But now I thank myself for that experience, because everything has led me to now, to this moment. Like the lotus flower that grows out of the mud, I needed that darkness. I had to walk along that path to come to understand what lies within me, and to see the light that was always there.
I told myself I wasn’t smart enough, wise enough, resourceful enough, old enough, thin enough, cool enough, fit enough, woke enough, exotic enough, traveled enough, sophisticated enough, ad infinitum. Society does a good job of convincing us we are not good enough, through the media/social media, parents with their own unhealed traumas, systems (prisons/schools), and industries such as the wellness industry, the very industry supposed to heal us.
As someone who is a long time consumer and now a provider within the wellness industry, I have seen this first hand. From multi-layer-marketing companies that profit off products that claim to heal us, and the never ending barrage of expensive and high end services that convince us we need to buy them because we are never enough. Don’t get me wrong, there are plenty of great service providers and products out there, and I have been happy to invest in some of them myself, but at some point you have to ask yourself, when is it enough? What would your life look like if you believed you were whole? That you have an infinite well of wisdom inside of yourself, that you already have all the answers that you seek, that you are not and never were separate or alone, and that you have everything you need?
“Who looks outside, dreams. Who looks inside, awakens.” — Carl Jung
