Welcome to the second lesson in this series. This is part of a free curriculum for people exploring personal and spiritual growth. If you haven’t read the first lesson yet, I suggest that you do so here before diving into this teaching.
In the last lesson, we explored happiness from an existential angle. Not just the surface layer stuff, but the kind of lasting happiness that comes when you connect with something deeper inside yourself.
True happiness that comes from the soul, not the mind.
But for most of us, thereโs something in the way.
Something we can’t quite put our finger on, like an invisible barrier preventing us from basking in the love and light we hear so much about, and you know what?
It’s a massive pain in the ass!
That ‘something’ is wounding, and believe me… We all have it, just to different degrees.
It might look like trauma, unresolved lessons, or the emotional weight weโve picked up along this ‘life thing’ we’re all scrambling through. Big or small, this baggage creates a barrier between you and the fuller expression of consciousness youโre reaching for.
So, this is what we’re going to unpack in this article.
What Does โHealingโ Really Mean?
Since embarking on my 9-year-long nomadic journey, largely to understand my own suffering and figure out what on Earth is actually going on here, my understanding of well-being has changed drastically.
At first, I thought it was linear
Something hurts, you fix it, and then youโre back to your old self.
Thatโs the way the modern world treats it too.
Struggling with mental health? Go to therapy. If that doesnโt work, take medication to take the edge off, and hope it resolves. These things can help, but rarely do they reach the roots, which is probably why weโre in the middle of a mental health epidemic.
Thereโs wisdom missing.
We treat wounds as isolated problems to patch up. But true health is more like an ecosystem. When the whole system is balanced, life feels beautiful, vibrant, and exciting. You’re in touch with deeper soul expressions like love, compassion, and gratitude, and life just flows!
When part of this ecosystem is rotting, everything is affected.
And often, the wounds arenโt visible.
Emotional baggage hides deep below the surface. Add in karmic weight, ancestral threads, and the energetic debris we carry, and itโs no surprise healing can feel like an endless maze.
But thereโs nothing wrong with you for feeling this way.
We all carry dysfunction because part of the human experience is to be dysfunctional. Healing isnโt a sprint where you cross a finish line. Itโs more like a lifelong process of tending to the garden.
Weeds will keep popping up, and it requires a little ambition. But with steady care, a decade from now, it will be thriving and full of life.
And, Why Is Healing Important?
Healing and happiness go hand in hand because your life experience mirrors your state of wellness.
If you were truly healed, you would radiate unconditional love, live at a high frequency, and feel deeply connected to the divine. In which case, I would probably bow down to you and start calling you Buddha.
For the rest of us, every issue can usually be traced back to an unresolved wound.
Self-esteem struggles, money blocks, limiting beliefs… Theyโre all signs of something rotting in the personal ecosystem.
When weโre wounded, that pain seeps into everything:
Beliefs, emotions, values, mindsets, perceptions, habits, even the way we experience reality. I think of this across four levels, which I understand as the four bodies.
Wounding manifests in the:
- Emotional body: Grief, shame, resentment, guilt, and other painful/low-vibrational emotions, etc.
- Physical body: Illness, disease, hormonal imbalance, etc.
- Mental body: Limiting beliefs, negative attitudes or mindsets, bleak outlooks, etc.
- Spiritual body: Disconnection, losing your path, a fog over authenticity, lack of meaning, etc.
If you’re severely depressed or feel like life is hell, it’s because some unattended wound is desperately seeking your attention and infecting your entire life experience in the process.
It’s like an infected wound becoming so unbearably painful, because it’s your body’s way of flagging your attention.
That’s why we experience pain in the first place, no?
It’s a mechanism that tells us that something is wrong, so we can tend to it. So, if there’s a problem with your mindset, or emotions, or so forth, it’s because it’s trying to tell you there’s a deeper issue that it’s manifesting from.
Healing restores us to our natural purity and connection. If you want to flip the script and shift towards a life full of joy, love, and abundance, healing isn’t a side gig. It must be the entire path.
Here’s the thing.
People we label as ‘bad’ are usually just deeply wounded and lost in their darkness. The addict is numbing unbearable pain. The bully is projecting their own hurt. The self-saboteur is imploding under the weight of all their baggage.
Pain spreads when it isnโt healed.
Unaddressed, wounds donโt just stay contained. They leak out, contaminating your well-being and, at their worst, fueling cycles of suffering and destruction that bleed onto other people too.
A Better Way to View Healing
We are all dirty because we’ve all accumulated baggage from our experiences. Some people carry a pile of dirt, and others are buried under a mountain of it.
This dirt is the accumulation of:
- Past hurtful experiences that have never been fully resolved.
- Emotional residue from old wounds.
- Outdated programming, conditioning, or influencing that doesn’t serve your growth.
- Karmic energies that you either brought with you or adopted in this life.
- Ancestral baggage like guilt, shame, fear, or resentment that you’re carrying
We all have a soul, and that soul is bright!
But over time, the dirt can build up, obscuring that light in the process. The bigger the pile, the more disconnected you feel.
For people living in deep suffering or spreading harm, the pile has buried that inner purity almost completely. That’s why they feel no compassion, no remorse, because they’re drowning in darkness.
But the light is never gone. Itโs only hidden.
So, healing is the act of clearing.
And it isnโt a one-time thing. It’s not just a ritual, a therapy session, or a ceremony, then suddenly you come out squeaky clean.
Those can help, but theyโre just shovels out of the heap.
Real progress comes with steady purification, layer by layer, until more of the soulโs brightness shines through. And as you progress along this journey of purification, you will see this light manifest in your life in incredible ways.
Some Things You Can Do
I wonโt go into too much detail here, or this email will turn into a mini-book (which it’s already doing), so letโs keep it brief.
The main driver of healing, at least in my experience, is learning to sit with the pain. No judgment. No resistance. No distractions. Just surrendering to whatโs there.
Because pain needs to be processed.
The more present you can be with it, the deeper you go into it, and the more you learn from it… Itโs like digging into a wound to remove a bullet. Painful, yes, but necessary. You only get out of it by going through it.
This is where I see a lot of people get it wrong. They constantly distract themselves, avoid, and resist for that temporary relief.
In the short-term, sure.
Maybe it helps.
But the endgame isn’t looking good because this mound of dirt just keeps piling up. They’re gonna suffocate under it eventually if they keep taking this approach!
Processing wounds can take an hour, months, or a lifetime, depending on how deep that wound is.
A harsh comment might dissolve quickly. A betrayal might linger for months. Healing from severe trauma can be a lifelong journey.
The point isnโt to rush it. Itโs to trust your bodyโs wisdom in knowing the pace. Only it knows how long it will take to resolve something, and it always knows best…
So trust it!
Alongside that, different modalities can help move the needle too.
A few examples:
- Mind and body practices: Meditation, yoga, breathwork, tai chi, prayer, worship.
- Energy and sound: Reiki, pranic healing, kirtan, therapeutic touch, sound baths, mantras, crystal work.
- Nature and spirit: Plant ceremonies, shamanic cleansings, time in nature, connecting with the elements.
- Expression and release: Crying, journaling, art, dance, singing, and venting to someone you trust.
- Therapeutic support: Psychotherapy, trauma therapy, somatic experiencing, hypnotherapy, shadow work, parts work, soul retrieval, self-compassion practices.
- Holistic approaches: Nutrition, fasting, Ayurveda, Traditional Chinese Medicine, herbal remedies, functional medicine.
Thereโs no one-size-fits-all formula.
These are just some of the doorways people use to clear their own piles of dirt and reconnect with the light inside.
Balancing Learning With Practice
Two things matter most: Consistency and diversity.
Consistency means showing up every day and constantly moving the needle. Ten minutes a day might not feel like much, but give it a year and youโll likely see some big changes.
Diversity matters because healing touches every part of you. If your whole body is battered and you only focus on healing your arm, youโll have a healthy arm but a broken body.
Different modalities reach different layers of well-being.
For example, if you only do breathwork while neglecting emotional or physical practices, progress will crawl.
But hereโs the hard question: Are you actually doing the work?
Or are you distracting yourself or stuck in old habits that prevent the wounds from scabbing over?
If youโre serious about creating a happy life, healing HAS to be a priority.
Time alone softens some wounds, but the deeper ones need active attention. Little by little, varied and consistent practice moves the needle.
Ignore it, and life will keep circling back with the same lessons.
To Recap
- Wounds block the deeper happiness youโre looking for.
- Healing is more than fixing symptoms. Itโs about restoring balance across the emotional, physical, mental, and spiritual bodies.
- Pain has to be processed, not avoided. Presence is important.
- Many different modalities can help, but consistency and diversity matter more than chasing a single โperfectโ method.
- Healing isnโt something you tack onto your life. It must be part of your lifestyle.
- There is a light inside every soul, despite how lost they are. A mountain of baggage just obscures it. So don’t add fuel to the fire, show compassion, and try to reach the light in the person.
Take five minutes today to ask yourself: Whatโs one โweedโ I can tend to right now?โ
I hope it has somewhat changed your understanding of the importance of healing and what it means from a more substantial, spiritual perspective.
But as always, don’t just read it and then brush it off to the side. Actually start incorporating this information, and I promise that your life will change for the better.
Now that we’ve had a look at healing, let’s move on to the next core piece of your development.
Inner work.
