Recently I was led in a meditation in which the heart opens to experience a quality it has been longing for.

In the 10 minute space of the exercise, I felt peace blossom within me, and a deep lonely part was met. It was the feeling of a hard to reach itch finally being scratched. I sat in a state of bliss, rocked by the pleasure of this small moment of healing, and thought to myself, “it feels sooo good to heal, why don’t I do it more often?”

As I considered this thought, my perspective on the nature of healing made a subtle shift. We experience healing as the recovery from a wound, and as such we associate it with being hurt or weak in some way. It can feel vulnerable to acknowledge even the need for it, let alone to ask for help.

When we do attempt to heal, we tend to view it as a means to an end, and thus resent the time and energy it requires. There’s an idea that “if I can just get this over with, I can go on and have a happy life”. It’s the cure to being broken in some way, whether from an injured knee or a childhood trauma.

All of this says that healing is looked at as a journey of getting away from somewhere, rather than going to.

The experience of my meditation felt like a small taste of the great bliss available in every day life. Rather than chasing it as a cure for feeling sad or lonely or some other undesirable something, I felt it as an invitation to discover how life can be even better than it is already.

What if healing is less about being injured, and more about evolution? Meaning, the healing process is actually about discovering a greater capacity for love and joy inside yourself, and not just getting over a difficulty.

I suggest this in part because of how wounds change us. We become different from the experience of them, and view this as bad because we don’t like being hurt. However, maybe the injury is the first crack in the seed, necessary for the flower to grow.

If you spend your time trying to put the seed back together, you will probably experience greater the feelings of loss, pain, and frustration. If, however, you look up, not because you see light but because you’re curious what you might discover, and begin to climb for the joy of rising, who knows what you’ll discover, especially about yourself? Flowers look so very different from seeds.

Don’t see healing as a journey backward, to how you were before a wounding or how you “should” be. See it as an evolution forward, into something new and more miraculous than you can imagine. Then the process of healing is not a tedious interruption to life, but a journey into greatness.

This is not to say that the healing process is always fun, or that you’ll always enjoy it, but it carries within it a profound joy that is beyond the mere recovery from a wound. I’ve experienced it in myself and witnessed it in my clients, and know it’s well worth the adventure asking for help embarks.