It’s Not a Detour

In spirituality we tend to try and braid three different aspects of ourselves into a holistic life: mundane/regular life, spiritual path, personal spiritual practice. It’s fairly common for people whose spiritual path is to be in service somehow to go through and initial healing phase or “Come to Jesus” moment where those things we’ve been living with and waiting to Get a Round Tuit become front and center. Because a path of service starts with a Round Tuit. It’s also pretty common for personal spiritual practices, at least initially, to take us on a healing journey. For most people, the spiritual practice stems in part from a need for healing or a desire to improve which is a type of healing.

However, once that initial phase of life is done, we tend to move forward with the braiding as if things move in a straight line. As if the equation is effort in = life improvement so things just get progressively better as long as we’re putting in the work. Of course, life isn’t a straight line, we’re not disconnected from others or the rest of the world so are impacted by all sorts of things, and our growth is no more a straight line than any other organically growing thing. So things happen which, while being part of our path, being necessary for our growth and continued becoming, also call for healing. Tragedies occur, drama shows up between people, the unexpected lands at our feet, something triggers what we thought was long past, and there are entire countries worth of undiscovered self inside us which we can live and entire life and never notice…until that one thing…until that one moment…until it’s that time.

Too often people think of this as a detour. It’s taking them off their path, it’s something that is keeping them from moving forward, they should have dealt with this before, and get frustrated that this is even happening at all. But healing is not a detour. Healing, no matter when the need arises, is a necessary part of the process. It could be that all the seemingly straight forward progress that we’ve been making has been leading up to this moment. Or that the goal we’ve chosen requires this step in this particular order. Or that what we are becoming requires that we get through this bit because it’s going to give us a crucial piece of ourselves necessary for the path ahead. Regardless of how twisty the way seems or how much we think a process is making us deviate from where we should be, if we’re healing, then we’re headed in the right direction.