Emotions & Us

Stop calling it your “healing journey”

Petra Peyer · 2 min read

When you frame your whole life as healing, healing becomes the centre of everything.

I let myself be inspired by others.
But I choose who.
More carefully than ever before.

Charles Myssy was someone I had wanted to meet for a long time. In August it finally happened – in person – and I went through his shadow workshops with him.

One of his ideas has stayed with me since.
Stop calling it your “healing journey.”

Because when you frame your whole life as healing, healing becomes the centre of everything. And if you are always healing, you are always looking for the next wound.
The next pattern. The next trigger.
Something still to be fixed.
Until it becomes an identity. I am the one who is healing.

But healing was meant to be the way back into life. Not a replacement for it.

Charles calls it individuation.
I call it becoming.
Becoming more fully what I already am.

A tree does not grow in order to be repaired.
It grows because how high it can reach is already written inside it.

Yes, some things need to be faced. Grieved. Released. But in service of life – not so that healing becomes the life.

Then attention returns to where it belongs.
To risk. To creating. To falling in love.
To work that matters.
To mistakes.
To joy.

You are not on a healing journey.
You are becoming. Healing is just part of it – so is everything else that makes your life beautiful.
Give it all permission to be included.

Inspired by the writing and work of Charles Myssy.
~ Petra