My Daily Reflections: Healing toward Authenticity

I recently watched a TEDx Talk given by Alison Ledgerwood, the topic “Getting stuck in the negatives (and how to get unstuck). 

I walked away from watching this video with a new perspective on healing, and an entirely different spin on the work of healing.  Possibly the hardest part of healing is just going from thinking we are somehow damaged or broken, to seeing ourselves as amazing miracles of recovery!

So much of my healing work has been focused on discovering “what” is broken, tracing back to “why” it is broken, i.e. what happened in my past that created the broken feedback loop within my brain; and then trying to figure out “how” to go about changing that false core belief.  



And yet even after all this work I still essentially see myself as this broken think that needs fixing.  I still feel the need to focus on not letting the false core beliefs take over again (and this remains extremely difficult when faced with the people who liked my behaviour when it was based on my false core beliefs because I was softer and more amenable to their manipulations).

I still feel this basic underlying assumption that there is something wrong with me when people don’t see the authentic me as valid but would rather see the mask I used to wear in order to preserve the relationship.

I am only recently starting to understand that I have to start to see myself as this wonderful miraculous thing called a human being.  This gift of life is so overwhelmingly precious and we are trained into believing that we are defective because we are not pleasing enough to others.  

I think in healing we need to recapture that innocence of who we were before all the “bad” things that happened to us.  We need to reclaim the miracle of our life and peel away all the layers of guilt and false beliefs that have smothered our authenticity. 

The journey is one of discovering that beyond our personality (which is influenced by the patterns of behaviour of those we were raised by); there is our essence, our soul if you will, of who we really are.  The façade that we wear and present to the world is a mere shadow of who we really are.  Our gifts, our talents, our purpose are all there for the uncovering.  All we have to do is strip away the many layers of falsehoods the prevent out “soul light” from shining through. 

We are not broken things that need repairing.  We are rather walking miracles that have been burdened with carrying the weight of inaccurate perceptions laid upon us (most likely unintentionally) by the wounds of a similar delusion that burdened our early caregivers. 

I participated in a course recently called “the Spiritual Codes”, which presented the notion that we are levels of awareness.  Most of the time we are aware of our bodies and our emotions and our mental thoughts.  But we are not so frequently aware of our soul and even less so aware of our monad.

Breaking through all the conditioning toward our inner higher being is essentially what healing work is all about.  Healing is discovering who we were before we were wrapped in the constraints of conformity.



And herein lies the conundrum.  With our propensity for a negative bias we have to learn first that; no we were not “broken” by the events of our lives, but rather we became blinded to the truth and beauty of our inner higher self.  When we become aware of this we start to see our healing journey as a miracle of recovery,  something positive and joyful and beautiful rather than just an exercise of exploring ways to deal with the pain of feeling broken. 

Healing then becomes an adventure of discovery rather than the chore or drudgery of trying to fix bits and pieces of brokenness.

My mission has not changed.  I still am on this healing journey, this quest to discover and uncover and reveal the authentic me, the higher self that I know myself to be.  I will just be doing it now from a more joyful place, a place of knowing that I am already that which I am seeking, it is already there buried beneath all the junk of false perceptions and inaccurate core beliefs. 

And because I know that every person I encounter also has this inner higher self even when it is buried and hidden from sight by the dysfunctional behaviour patterns of personality, I can more easily find the compassion, which is the essence of a loving heart and spirit and soul.

Always my hope remains that by being authentic about my healing journey, I can inspire others to join me on this journey of discovery.  And I can do this with greater awareness that if they are not ready for their own journey, the potential for their healing exists.

One more piece of the puzzle fell into place for me yesterday as I listened to Gabor Mate and his son Daniel in discussion at a lecture presentation.  Gabor said something that resonated with me. “We can either be authentic or we can preserve the relationship at all costs.  In childhood we relinquish authenticity to preserve the relationship”.   And my inner higher self-applauded and said; “in adulthood we have the choice to reclaim our authenticity if we are willing to sacrifice those relationships that do not honour and support our authenticity.”

And so I return to my learning and my seeking and my quest for understanding and maybe even some wisdom.  To reclaim that authentic inner self that I know is just waiting to be uncovered.  It is this authentic self that I will share with those who are ready to expose their authentic selves to me.

Renate Dundys Marrello

2017 – 12 – 11

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