Healing: An Ongoing Commitment

When dealing with any chronic health condition, you have a big decision to make at some point. That decision is whether you will commit to your healing fully or not. And when I say commit – I mean really commit, not just do what you need to do to get by.

Doing the bare minimum

For most of my life, I spent living in survival mode. Compared to now, I'd say I did the bare minimum for my skin and body – mostly because I didn’t know any other way. Although I thought I was doing everything I possibly could to support my body in healing, I was missing huge parts of the puzzle and didn’t realize it until many years later.

Healing externally AND internally

The biggest lesson I’ve learned is that in order to heal the outside, you must also heal the inside, too. This means healing the mind, the heart, and the soul. I never really thought about this growing up because I was never taught to. I didn’t understand how powerful the mind-body connection was. Then, I started to truly heal from within and see the profound changes firsthand. That didn’t really happen until I exhausted every other option and had no other choice but to just try.

So many people talk about it, especially in this day and age. We talk about how important therapy, meditation, mindfulness, etc., is. However, even the majority who talk about it don’t always fully commit to the healing process.

Making a commitment

There is no going back once you commit to this kind of healing. Once you start to unearth your traumas and past experiences that may contribute, there is no stopping it. It is kind of like opening Pandora’s Box – you can’t just close it again or pretend you don’t see all the things coming out. You have to face them.

Everything in nature, human beings included, has a breaking point. This is the point where we say, “that’s enough.” The moment we decide we are tired of suffering is the moment we choose to commit to healing.

Healing is hard work

The truth is, the inner healing is harder than the outer, although they both go hand in hand. Taking supplements, putting on lotions and creams, avoiding allergens, and all the other physical things we do to manage our illness and keep our bodies healthy are often easier in some regards.

What is extremely hard is looking at all the things we have suppressed within our minds and hearts and shining a light on them. It takes an immense amount of bravery and courage. It means unpacking and looking at all of our deepest fears and pains, which have wounded us our entire lives. You know, the ones you pushed away somewhere to the back of your mind and decided it would be easier to forget about them.

How committed are you?

The question is – How dedicated are you to your healing? How committed are you? How badly do you want it? And how comfortable are you in your comfort zone of pain and darkness? Are you willing to slowly climb out of that comfort zone? Will you sift through every single trauma of your life, look at it from all angles, sit with it, and ALLOW it to hurt? Because that’s where the true inner healing lies – in feeling all of the emotions we never allowed ourselves to feel or express.

You will want to keep working at it

Once we begin that process and pull out one “root,” there will be 20 more waiting for us. It takes time, patience, and perseverance. But once you start to see your inner and outer worlds truly merge, and your external world begins to reflect the inner by healing the wounds and rashes on your skin – you won’t want to turn back.

You’ll want to keep doing the work. And that means showing up for yourself every single day, no matter how hard it gets.

You will cry, get angry and frustrated, and it will be painful - but that’s the point. You'll have to sit with it all and ask what it is trying to teach you. You have to decide never to go back and finally put your healing first, above all else.

Would you commit if you knew that was the key to healing your skin and preventing flare-ups from recurring? Would you take the risk? Aren’t some risks simply worth it?