The Medicine of Integrating healing vs Constant Growth

If you are anything like me and on a Spiritual path then you have been constantly growing, healing, shedding, transforming, transmuting, facing your shadow, turning things over, surrendering, forgiving, praying, working on your boundaries, healing your inner child, speaking to your parts and SO much more then read on.

I have been growing full time over the last ten years like it was my job.

A full time job where I was working overtime, working on healing this lifetime, the ones before it, healing my Ancestors and of course being a mother

When I started this healing path, I had a booming bakery that I was trying to manage, and I had just had a baby, and was going through it all with a lifetime of chronic illness, bad relationships and was suicidal, depressed and anxious, so when I found this healing path I felt like I had to constantly go through the fire, and I did.

And it worked - but now my body is calling for integration, and it's hard to know when to stop spinning in a trauma vortex.

What I noticed as I was at this stage of my healing was that because I was a 'fixer' and a 'high achiever' that I had become my own project that I was going to ‘fix’.

So I went down every road that I could; I was always studying a self-healing course, going to retreats, vision quests, weekly and monthly sweat lodges, seeing my shaman, going on the Medicine Wheel, seeing my therapist, an astrologer, a lightworker, a naturopath, a kinesiologist, everyone I could.

It cost me A LOT OF money and I realized that I was working to pay for my healing.

I didn't go out, didn't have fun and my life became very serious.

Everything became about healing, every conversation, my home became an alter, I prayed 3-4 times a day and walked a straight line.

It helped me, it really did, but I wasn't present in my own life, with my own child and my family.

I felt like I was the Knight of Swords; the one who just goes straight like an arrow and achieves and pushes through.

A fighter, a warrior, and I felt that I was attacking myself this way, it wasn't loving, it was fixing and it had a very masculine energy to it, there was no room for human-ness.

And I began to understand that when it comes to healing you have to balance it with feminine energy. And some can even argue that ALL healing is feminine.

So this is when I discovered the art of integrating.

In October, I had a rupture with my Spiritual Teacher of 8 years.

Learning from him was an honor and it was my life, but we had a rupture and it had nothing to do with me; but it did force me to stop rushing & to stop constantly trying to achieve and grow - and to look at my whole life, go within and integrate everything that I had learnt.

I stayed on my spiritual path but it became very feminine compared to the masculine way that it had been.

I was now under my own feminine rhythm and flow.

I was forced to retreat and go inwards, just like we all have been during these last few years and stop.

And because I was forced to stop I noticed that I started to integrate all of the healing and wisdom that I had learnt and experienced over the last decade.

Integrating is the most magical and unexpected thing.

We all try to grow so quickly, we all try to rush our growth and do all this plant medicine, constantly shedding, looking at yourself, seeing what's wrong, what I need to fix and putting ourselves under tremendous force and strain to do so.

Which at times- is definitely needed and what helped me in my path but it can't be constant.

It can't be your whole entire life.

But with integrating you are standing two feet in your own life and looking around you and saying 'what's here, who's around me, how can I be more present with you? how can I strengthen my relationship with that person, how can I support myself, instead of how can I fix this thing that's wrong me me'.

It's a whole reframing, a whole different way of looking at things, and a way to truly love and embody yourself.

I now embody the medicine that I have inherited over the last decade, I'm now walking it, I'm now living it, whereas before I was going through the fire so much that I was trapped in a trauma vortex; which is very common when we keep going through the need to shed.

It was like I never got a break. I was so tired, exhausted, and my nervous system was shot.

So integrating is about embodying your wisdom but also resetting your nervous system because healing is hard and we are no use if our nervous system is out of whack.

It's ok to just do nothing when the time calls for it.

It's winter here where I am in the Southern Hemisphere and it's time to go inwards and slow down.

Integration is an invitation to embody those cycles that nature offers us in winter and during our moon time when we bleed.

Pachamama has given us this perfect blueprint of how to live a healthy life by following her cycles, and there is time to grow and a time to slow.

You might be in the growth stage where it is go go go, or you might be in the slowing down stage, but it's important to honor whatever stage you are in and map it out.