Why the best healing or self growth advice may not work for you

(Hint: it’s not cause your stupid or broken)

If you’ve had therapists, friends and loved ones earnestly give you the best advice they have for how to feel better, or how to get more free from the patterns you feel stuck in and it hasn’t seemed to work, this is for you.

On the path to healing, we all generally have a try a number of things to find our way to the life we actually want.

A metaphor I like is this: Each of our souls has a unique song made up of all the things we try that it is our life’s work to discover. And just like in music it’s not only the notes, but the order that they are played in, and the speed at which they are played, which makes one song different than the rest.

So you get advice to help you feel better like meditate. Exercise. Journal. Gratitude practices. Get unfiltered morning light. More protein. Remineralize your body. Develop your intuition. Do shadow work. If you’ve been on the self growth or healing path for a while, I know you can think of a dozen more easily. None of this is bad advice. But if you’ve tried them and they haven’t worked for you, there’s a temptation to either think that the advice is useless and/or you are defective. Or if you used to have these as practices, but they’ve fallen off and you just don’t want to do them anymore, there’s a temptation to think of yourself as lazy or irresponsible. 

I want to offer the possibility that none of that is true. That maybe that particular tool or practice is simply not currently in the right order at this particular time in your life for you to play your soul song. 

In my body, holding this perspective feels like a kind of liberation. Not only does it free me of so much self judgment, it also renders irrelevant my need to assess everyone else’s offerings and categorize them into useful or not, right or wrong, everyone should do this or everyone should avoid.  It’s a solvent to judgement that drops me effortlessly back off in a place of humility and curiosity. 

It also takes the pressure off.

Then the healing journey can become more playful (which in and or itself is a healing balm).

If you try a healing modality and it didn’t work, I promise you’re not defective. You’re just still composing.