Gentle Rise of the Phoenix

PICTURING THE PRAIRIE Paintings by Philip Juras at the Chicago Botanic Garden 2021

I am a Phoenix.

I used to think a phoenix was a mythical bird-like creature the burned itself up, turned into ash, and then rose from the ashes renewed after having gone through an incredibly pain-filled process. I’m questioning my understanding and definition of “pain”.

I assumed the burning and re-birthing was a one-time thing that looked intense and sounded like a good way to get a full system overhaul quite effectively, albeit a bit extreme and harsh.

As I journey through the multi-layered healing process of releasing my own past traumas, I see a resemblance in the ways of the phoenix in how I heal.

Starting off, I believed healing had to be painful, take time, and was most effective when you worked hard at it. After all, “if it isn’t hard, it’s not worth doing” was an underlying belief fueling my actions. As I moved through the first layers of my healing, they were tumultuous and felt painful enough to resemble a full-on burning down of my spirit to extinguish all that I saw as “bad” within me so that I could be sure to let it go. After years of burning to ash and rising as a renewed version of myself, I’ve come to understand things differently.

First off, the phoenix doesn’t rise from the ashes one time. The burning process is like breathing. It’s automatic, done with ease most of the time, and a natural part of the process. It isn’t to be feared or avoided, but embraced. I can burn through a new layer of myself in an instant, a day, or over a couple of weeks, and I can repeat the cycle any time it’s needed.

Secondly, the burning and re-birth of the phoenix don’t have to be a damaging process. We are taught to think of fire as being destructive, but it can actually be incredibly healing and cleansing. Prairies are scheduled for controlled burns to reset the land for new growth. Nature uses fire as a way to cleanse the earth and make it more fertile. It’s natural, normal, and beneficial. It can be incredibly beautiful — as captured in the painting above by Philip Juras that I saw while visiting the Chicago Botanic Gardens. The image took my breath away. Somehow it appeared to be majestically healing the land.

Third, painful doesn’t always mean bad. There are forms of pain that some might consider good - a deep tissue massage or the soreness of a workout. Pain can be beneficial if it’s to reset a broken bone, deliver a needed medication, produce a form of pleasure, or create a desired outcome like the tattoo of your dreams.

Fear around being a phoenix feels scary to me. Fear of the unknown, the expectation of pain being bad, and the anticipation of what you become once you rise from the ashes. It’s the shedding of what was and the space that it creates that feels uncomfortable.

Many of us have set points in our internal compasses that focus us on the negative potential outcomes of a situation. We’ve been conditioned that way by society, media, religious organizations, and such, to varying degrees. Some of that conditioning may be justified in keeping us safe or providing a moral compass to live by. When we focus on the negative, we attract it to us and shut out the potential for positive outcomes. It’s the law of attraction. What we focus on, grows.

We have the power to change our thoughts and actions and to control how we respond to experiences in life. I’m choosing to embrace my phoenix-like healing journey as I burn off the beliefs, fears, thoughts, and energetics that no longer support the positive outcomes and desires I seek.

I’m choosing to lean into the potential pain, embrace the burn, and dance with the cycle of rebirth that comes so naturally to the phoenix. May it become second nature to me as well.

Painting Layers

I was inspired to create a painting called Angel Wing and pulled out a big canvas. I saw what I wanted the painting to be in my mind’s eye and went straight to work bringing it to life. As I was doing so, I heard all these beliefs in my head around not being an artist, not being good enough to be an artist, not being formally trained or taking classes that would qualify me as an artist, not having someone else who is an artist validate my work, etc. I threw all that away and decided I can be an artist if I want to be and an artist is simply someone who creates art. I create art through my knitting, quilting, painting, photography, and various other crafts. I recently started signing my work and taking credit for the work I’m doing. 

As I added another layer to the Angel Wing painting, I decided that it needed a full coat of white paint in order to smooth it out and make it feel more polished. As soon as I completed the layer of white, I felt a sense of dread. I really loved the previous layer of the painting. I even took it to my bedroom and held it against the wall to see if it felt finished. It didn’t feel complete so I took it back to the painting table and added the layer of white, all the while wishing I could somehow undo the most recent layer and go back to what was. 

I noticed the discomfort I was feeling with the new layer of white on the canvas. I added color to it and felt that it just wasn’t as good as the previous layer. I found myself resisting the next layer and in that resistance I heard a clear message: Trust the process. What if the next layer you paint is ever better than the first layer you did? 

I trusted the process and kept painting. After two additional layers of paint, the project was complete. I signed my name and hung it on the wall. 

The lesson I uncovered from the discomfort in painting over something that was pretty good but didn’t feel complete was that sometimes, we get comfortable. That doesn’t mean that we need to stop. We can move through the layers of discomfort and explore what else is available and ahead of us. For me, that meant trusting the process, adding a few more layers of paint to the canvas, and getting it to a place that felt even better than it was before. 

The same can be said for life. We are complex beings with multi-layered lives. When life gets challenging, we can shrink and want to go back to what we know is safe, or we can continue on the path, trusting that where we are headed will be even more amazing than where we came from. 

I like to think that, instead of feeling like life is repeatedly pushing a large rock up the side of a mountain, as in the story of Sisyphus, there is a nook on the path that we can step into to safely protect us as the rock rolls down the mountain without harming us. We can trust in the process and not feel like everything is so big and hard to manage.  

When we trust in the process and continue to move into the next layers of our lives, we can create real lasting beauty and magic. Instead of fearing the blank canvas, be willing to cover it over and start again knowing that the new layers will be influenced by the previous ones while taking all that is good and incorporating it into what’s next.     

Why do we fall? A peak into the healing process…

I went out running with our dog, Jax. I planned to run about four blocks. I don’t really run and certainly not long distances, but I was trying something new and running for pure fun and the joy of it. Silly running to feel my body and release energy.

We ran out the door and into the front yard when Jax spotted a yellow dog across the street. I thought we could ignore the dog and keep running without Jax needing to run toward the dog and bark to protect me. I was wrong. I also thought that running faster would get us out of the situation faster. Again, I was wrong.

As I took off at full speed to sprint down the sidewalk, Jax crossed in front of me to run across the street to the other dog. He took all my momentum with him as I fell flat on the concrete and slid into the grass along the sidewalk. My knee, palm, and ego were scrapped up and badly bruised as I adamantly refused help from the yellow dog’s owner. I got up, shaken to my core, and turned around to run the same route home—all 400 feet of it.

While I was falling face first into the ground, I was in denial. “I’m a healer. Healers don’t get hurt. I’ll be fine. This can’t happen to me.”

Reflecting on that thought is amusing to me. It’s like a doctor saying, “I’m not hurt, I’m a doctor.” Just because I know how energy works and how to avoid a lot of painful situations, doesn’t mean I will. I’m not perfect. I’m human. And that’s okay. Not only is it okay, but it’s critical to being a great healer. What a great lesson in having compassion for oneself!

Running back to my house, I was shaking and pumped full of adrenaline. Once inside, I yelled for my husband to help me assess the damage as I ran a bath. I peeled the clothing off my body to see how badly I’d been hurt and was pleasantly surprised to see relatively minor scrapes and bruises.

From the comfort of my bath, I shook, cried, and struggled to get my breathing under control. I haven’t fallen like that in many years and can’t remember the last time I really wiped out. Up came all sorts of fears and beliefs that were ready to be unended and overturned. It was that moment that I was grateful to be a healer. Not just for the physical pain I was in, but to process the mental trauma of the fall and the deeper lessons and meanings it was giving me. I often explain these as the gems that come from the piles of crap we sift through disguised as life experiences.

Underlying the fall was a fear of being hurt. And the shame of being a hurt healer. The belief that healers shouldn’t get hurt. I noticed an elitism in my subconscious. A story that I don’t need help because I’m a powerful being who can get through this on my own. By understanding how the human mind and body work, I can help heal many ailments and work through challenges, but that doesn’t mean I won’t have my own ailments and challenges. And while I might feel like I’m in on some big secret way of healing faster and preventing dis-ease, that doesn’t mean I’m immune to everything. My ego wants the attention and to feel special as a really powerful healer. But I’m no different than a person experiencing homelessness on a journey with addiction. They are different paths in the same world. We’re both humans on epic journeys. What right do I have to judge him? What benefit does it serve? Those are his life choices and these are mine. Is my life easier in comparison? It’s all relative. I don’t have all of the answers. I’m human, and you are too.

I was embarrassed that I fell, that my dog was not better trained, that I pushed through the situation instead of slowing down and using the treats in my pocket to get the situation under control, that I didn’t follow the plan to prevent this from happening.

On one hand, I could thank my dog for sparking my fall and offering me this beautiful healing journey. But I’d have to forgive him first. He was a dog, not a malicious creature out to harm me. And yet, that forgiveness felt raw and out of reach. I didn’t want to go running with him anymore. Interestingly, that brought up two areas of healing for me – efficiency and safety.

Efficiency came up because running together was an efficient practice. The dog and I both benefited from the exercise and release of energy, it was faster than a walk, and we’d benefit from being in nature with fresh air with running as a form of meditation helping us both. That checked off a lot of boxes on my to-do list each day.

Then there was the safety factor. As a woman, I’ve been told it’s not safe to go out alone in the dark or at dawn so as not to be assaulted. Jax acted as my bodyguard so I could safely go outside during those otherwise dangerous times.

So what if I didn’t need to take Jax with me on a run? What if I could be safe running without a dog? What if I could just be safe? What if I was safe no matter what?

There was a newfound freedom in that thought and that reality. There was additional freedom in having permission to not always be efficient. What if I didn’t check off six boxes on my list by running with my dog? If this was meant to be a silly running fun time, taking the dog and accomplishing all those things wasn’t really the point.

What if I was safer running alone because the dog wouldn’t trip me, I wouldn’t have to constantly scan the area for other dogs, and I could focus on my running form or meditation?

I found myself on autopilot powering through moments to get to the finish line, the moment when I could check the box and say a task was completed. There’s a saying that the journey matters more than the destination, but what if they could both be amazing?

Falling taught me so many lessons as I pondered my actions, my tendency to power through situations instead of being an observer and considering a slower pace or gentler path.

As I realized that healers are also humans, and humans fall, make mistakes, learn from them and … HEAL – it dawned on me that to be a great healer, I need to be able to HEAL MYSELF too. It was in healing myself that I gained understanding of others’ pain and suffering, their experiences and struggles. I became more compassionate, less judgmental, and took myself to an even more powerful level of healing abilities. Just like any other profession, when we made a mistake, we learned how to do things differently for a more desirable result.

My kids wanted to be sure I was alright and offered me advice on how to prevent falling again. I realized what I really wanted was for someone to give me a hug and say, “It’s okay. You’re human. We all fall down. Take the time you need to heal yourself. You’re going to be fine.”

Seeing that perspective allowed me space to be that voice of compassion for myself better than ever before, and for my clients going forward. Being a great healer didn’t mean being perfect or godly. It meant being human and knowing first-hand how to move through pain, suffering, and trauma because you’ve been through it and can guide others through their own experiences.

One of my favorite quotes is from the movie Batman Begins, when a young boy named Bruce Wayne falls into a dry well and his father Thomas says, “And why do we fall, Bruce? So we can learn to pick ourselves up.” 

My wish is that you have the courage to fall, the strength to pick yourself up, and the humility to ask for the support on this imperfect human journey.

Let the healing, growth, gratitude, and love continue!

Permission Granted

In winter, I wear layers. I’m known to even wear scarves, cowls, and shawls around the house. Admittedly, I knit and have an extensive shawl collection at this point but… it’s mostly because I’m cold.

As I sat bundled under blankets, wrapped in a shawl, and wearing layers my husband casually said, “You do know you can just turn up the heat, right?”

It hadn’t occurred to me that I could control the temperature in my own home. I was still under the original programming I had been taught growing up — adults control the thermometer in the house. Don’t mess with it or you’ll get in trouble. Leave it alone. It’s set that way for a reason.

Now that I am a grown up… I can control the thermometer in my own home.

Life changing.

Sometimes, all it takes is for someone to remind us that we have permission to do what we want and ask for what we need.

If you need more support with giving yourself permission to make changes in your life, schedule a healing session to step into more alignment with yourself and what you want.

Forgiveness

Who or what can you forgive today?

Start with one person or thing, even if it's something small.

Visualize that person or thing in front of you.

Then, with intention and an open heart use the Hawaiian practice of ho’oponopono.

Say/write/think:

1. I’m sorry

2. Please forgive me

3. I love you

4. I am grateful/ thank you

Thank that person or thing or experience for the lessons they taught you through the challenges you've overcome or are in the process of releasing.

This is an amazing, and simple, way to let go. That doesn't mean it's easy so give yourself space to heal.

It works for friends, parents, partners, bosses or Co-workers, those who have harmed you, health conditions, weight concerns, battles you've fought, and experiences you've had. Try it with time, money, anger, depression, anxiety...

Make it a daily practice and feel the release.

If you need more support with forgiving others or yourself, schedule a healing session to release your traumas and boost your healing process.