The unconscious mind has an automatic impulse toward integration. It is self healing and with rest and an opening in our lives to process the contents of our consciousness, equilibrium will reestablish itself.
We could say that when we allow the mind and body to heal then then the wellspring of joy begins to flow through us again and awakens us to connection beyond the narrow confines of our suffering selves.
There are various blockages to healing. So often we have become acclimatised to our strategies for coping in the face of what life has thrown our way, that we are addicted to the momentum of our day to day activity. We fill every moment with distraction.
In our society we are all so familiar with the urge to consume, with substance addiction, overeating, work addiction, addiction to exercise. It can be anything, even an addiction to healthy activity, which sustains the momentum of or lives and keeps us from the journey which awaits us.
A tragedy of this running into activity is that it strips the enjoyment from our lives. We are simply not present to what we are doing when we do it in an addictive way.
Our journey is the journey home, back to ourselves, where we can experience the expansiveness of the present moment, unclouded by urgency and open to appreciate the richness of what our days and our lives offer us.
In the face of suffering with anxiety and body dysmorphia as I once did, my journeys to see my therapist were a time carved out from the routine of my neurotic symptoms and the life which had become so stuck.
The therapy room can be regarded as sacred space, as we are there paying a visit to our true selves.
This is a more accurate way to view therapy than it being a visit to our therapist. It is our own minds which have the key to our healing and our therapist and coach is merely a guide; to think and process with us, to help us to settle, to return and to get unstuck.
It is a mistake to believe that the therapist has the ability to heal us. Our journey is in learning to relate to ourselves in a new way.
During my recovery I began to understand my BDD as a process addiction and I found that this was a very good way to make sense of my experience. There are many maps and models that we can use to understand our experience and those maps which offer us insights and practical guidance to recovery are the ones worth holding in mind.
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