A healing practice vs "doing the work"

I had a realization recently that I wanted to share here:

I didn’t “do work” to “heal.” I practiced using the tools and techniques that were necessary to establish a better way to live my life.

Let me elaborate…

It’s not about “doing the work.”

If you’ve watched, listened to, or read anything about mind-body healing, you’ve probably come across people who talk about “doing the work.” They’re typically referring to the various techniques we need to practice in order to heal, such as brain retraining, emotional processing, and self-compassion. This is language I had adopted as well, and whenever I’ve referred to “doing the work,” it’s always been in reference to the techniques that I outline on The Healing Pathways.

I suspect many or most of us hope that if we “do the work” long enough, we will eventually be healed and we can permanently go back to living our lives without having to deal with “doing the work” so intensely again. But I realized recently that thinking about our healing process as “work” may not be the best approach.

I think there are at least three issues with thinking of our healing as “work.”

First, who wants to do work? Using these tools, retraining our brains, and processing big, repressed emotions is hard enough as it is, and referring to those efforts as “work” adds an extra negative component to these processes.

Second, while I’m not sure how universal this is, I typically think of “work” as something we do for a set period of time, and then we stop. What I’ve realized recently is that these tools weren’t just something that I used to heal, and then, when I healed, I stopped using them. Rather, all of these tools became integrated into my life. The tools themselves are the process by which I now live a better and fuller life. These tools aren’t just about healing. They’re about practicing a new way to live our lives better.

Third, “work” is often something we have to get right, especially for those of us who have perfectionist tendencies as it is. We may worry that other people might judge us on the outcomes of work that we do. We might judge ourselves depending on how well we “do the work” or how quickly we recover and can stop “doing the work.” However, if we’re “practicing” something, there’s a bit less pressure to get it “right” each time. If we’re “practicing,” then, by definition, it’s something that we’re expected to do repeatedly without a single, final output. If we’re practicing, we don’t necessarily have an end goal that we need to strive for, beyond just trying to get better at working with these techniques.

Practice, practice, practice

What I’ve realized recently is that, for me, the end goal was not to get healthy and stop using these techniques, but rather, these techniques became so automatic that they are now a part of how I interact with myself and the world. As a result, I’ve gotten healthier, but only because the techniques became a part of who I am.

For example, for the first couple of years, I had to dedicate time to individually practice JournalSpeak, Parts Work, and somatic meditations, in order to learn how to get into a deeper communication with my body and my subconscious. I needed dedicated time to practice these techniques in order to process repressed stuff, feel big emotions, support my abandoned inner child “Parts”, and reset my automatic nervous system responses.

Today, however, I no longer set aside time regularly for any of these practices—though I do still need to turn to them occasionally. Instead, all of these practices became a part of how I live my life.

I may not do JournalSpeak very regularly, but I have constant check ins with my body and nervous system to see how I’m feeling, to listen to any voices that might need to be heard, to figure out what my body needs, and to communicate with my body about whether or not I can meet those needs in this moment. This might occur while I’m driving or sitting at the computer or getting a drink with friends or exercising or any number of other times throughout every single day.

Similarly, I may not do somatic meditations regularly, but in those same moments I just described above, I am scanning my body to identify areas of tension or fatigue, and I have the same conversations with those stressed areas of my body to learn what I need to do to release that tension.

As a result of “practicing” these techniques for so long, I have inadvertently developed an internal process in which I talk with the emotions and the pain and the symptoms, and I allow myself to feel what is coming up.

A new subconscious practice

On rare occasions, I do still uncover big repressed things, and those are more demanding, but this post is about my normal, day-to-day life now. On a daily basis, I’m still employing the skills I learned from JournalSpeak, Parts work, emotional processing, somatic meditation, moving & shaking, and the healing mental states. Literally, every single day, I employ every single one of these skills. But I do so because I retrained my nervous system to adopt these practices automatically, and not because I have to dedicate time to them.

Rather than thinking of this healing process as “work,” it might be more helpful to think of it like the process involved in learning to be a concert pianist. You start out learning the keys and practicing scales, and as you get better, the pieces you can play become more and more complex, but at the heart of any great pianist is a beginner who had to practice, practice, practice to engrain the keys and finger movements into the very core of their being. And once a pianist is truly great, they still practice.

This is true for anything that we set out to do well. These tools and techniques can help us all live so much more fully in the moment and without the suffering of chronic pain or illness, and we need to practice until using these tools and techniques becomes second nature.

This healing process is hard, but that doesn’t mean it’s “work,” and I don’t believe that the phrase, “doing the work,” properly describes the metamorphosis.

Moving forward, I will do my best to change my language around how I talk about this process.