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How Healing Actually Happens: The Natural Pathway of Transformation
For many years, I thought healing meant understanding.
I began psychotherapy in my early twenties and eventually spent years in Jungian analysis. That work changed me profoundly. I learned to recognize the dynamics of my family, understand the ways I had adapted to an unpredictable childhood, and see patterns in myself that had once been invisible to me. I mined my dreams for images of transformation and meaning. I became deeply self-reflective and extraordinarily good at functioning under pressure.
But in the winter of 1992, something happened that understanding alone could not reach.
For three days, snow and freezing rain fell steadily across central Virginia. My new husband and I were living in a small cinderblock cottage on a horse farm south of Charlottesville. The roads disappeared beneath ice, the electricity failed, and our front door eventually froze shut beneath more than a foot of frozen accumulation.
One afternoon, as I stood looking through the kitchen window at the ice-covered landscape, a wave of terror rose from deep within my chest. There was no thought attached to it, no memory and no obvious danger. My husband and I were safe. We had food, shelter and a woodstove keeping us warm.
Yet my entire being behaved as though catastrophe had already occurred.
The dread stayed. Soon intense physical pain joined it. My neck, shoulders and upper back became so constricted that I could barely move without pain. I continued working and functioning, but inside I felt locked down.
Nearly a decade of psychotherapy had given me considerable insight into my history. It had helped me enormously. But something was happening beneath the level of what I could understand or explain. The ways I had learned to survive—enduring, functioning, holding myself together—could carry me no farther.
I had reached a threshold.
Healing Is More Than Understanding What Happened
Today, after decades of my own healing and spiritual practice and nearly twenty years of working with others as a shamanic healer, I understand that threshold differently.
Insight matters. Understanding what happened to us, naming harm accurately, and recognizing the patterns we developed in response can be profoundly liberating. But we can understand a wound brilliantly and still remain organized around it.
You may know exactly why you are afraid of abandonment and still find yourself overwhelmed when someone pulls away. You may understand why you learned to silence yourself and still feel your body contract when you need to speak. You may recognize intellectually that you are no longer living in the circumstances that originally wounded you while some part of your body, emotions or relationships continues responding as though you are.
This is one reason healing trauma and old wounds can be such a complex process. What happened to us is not held only as a story we can explain. The adaptations we developed can become embedded in our bodies, perceptions, beliefs, relationships and ways of moving through the world.
Healing requires something more than knowing.
Something has to move.
The Natural Pathway of Transformation
During the years following that ice storm, I entered deeply into energy healing, meditation, spiritual practice and the study of trauma. I continued psychotherapy as well. I became intensely curious about what human beings actually experience when something that has remained fixed within us begins to change.
I learned to begin with what was present: a painful interaction, a recurring fear, a constriction in my body, a dream that would not leave me alone. Sometimes an emotion led to a memory. Sometimes a bodily sensation opened into an image or another field of experience. I could choose where to place my attention, but I could not determine beforehand where the process would lead.
Again and again, however, I noticed an underlying movement. Something enters our awareness. We open to what it carries. What has become fixed begins to move. As it changes, something essential becomes available to us again. And what we recover changes how we return to our lives.
I eventually came to call this the Natural Pathway of Transformation.
It moves through five interrelated movements: Entering, Opening, Transmuting, Remembering and Illuminating. These are not five steps that you complete in sequence. Healing is rarely linear. We may move among them, experience several simultaneously, or encounter something years later that we thought we had already healed.
The pathway is more like a spiral. We return to familiar territory, but we do not necessarily return as the same person.
Entering and Opening
Sometimes healing begins because something interrupts the life we know. Trauma, illness, grief, betrayal, loss or the collapse of a relationship or identity can bring us to a threshold we did not choose. At other times, we enter through longing, beauty, love, awe or a spiritual experience that opens us beyond who we have understood ourselves to be.
My own entry began in that ice-covered cottage. I did not think, I am beginning a spiritual transformation. I wanted the terror to stop. I wanted my body to stop hurting. I wanted my old life back.
But healing did not take me backward.
Entering brings us into contact with something that asks for our attention. Opening is what allows us to become sufficiently receptive to encounter it.
That does not mean abandoning discernment or overwhelming ourselves. Nor does spiritual healing require us to accept every image, memory or intuitive experience as literal fact.
Opening means allowing what is arising to become available to awareness without immediately suppressing it, explaining it away or forcing it into a predetermined meaning. Yet encountering the wound is still not enough. Human beings can revisit suffering repeatedly without transforming it. We can even become so identified with what happened to us that the wound becomes the central organizing story of our lives.
For healing to occur, something must change.
Transmuting: When What Has Been Fixed Begins to Move
This is what I call Transmuting.
Transmutation does not erase what happened. It changes the way what happened lives within us.
A wound may have organized itself around terror, grief, shame, rage, helplessness or beliefs about who we are and what we can expect from the world. Many of these responses once helped us survive. The problem is not that we developed them. The difficulty comes when they remain fixed long after the original circumstances have passed and continue organizing our bodies, relationships, choices and perceptions.
As healing occurs, what has been fixed can begin to move. Grief may open into compassion. Shame may yield to responsibility or self-understanding. Fear may loosen enough for choice to become possible. Anger may reveal the boundary that was violated and become energy through which we protect what matters.
The history does not change.
What changes is the hold that history has upon us.
This is an important distinction because spiritual approaches to healing can sometimes imply that genuine healing requires us to reinterpret terrible experiences as blessings, forgive before we are ready, or discover why our souls supposedly needed to suffer. I do not believe any of that is necessary.
We do not need to deny, minimize or sanctify harm in order to heal it.
Healing Is Also Remembering
When what has been fixed begins to move, something else can gradually become available.
I call this Remembering.
Remembering is not primarily about retrieving information from the past. It is the gradual recovery of Who We Truly Are beneath the adaptations that formed around what I call the Wound of Separation.
We may have learned that we are the frightened one, the abandoned one, the powerless one, the person who must please, perform, hide, control or endure in order to survive.
Those adaptations can become so familiar that we mistake them for our identity.
Healing does not require rejecting the parts of ourselves that learned how to survive. Nor do we return to some pristine version of ourselves that existed before life wounded us. Instead, we become capable of holding what happened within a larger understanding of Who We Truly Are.
The wound remains part of our story without remaining the author of it.
Remembering can be remarkably ordinary. You hold a boundary that once seemed impossible. You speak when you would once have remained silent. A capacity buried beneath fear begins to return. You recognize a longing you had forgotten or a strength you had never trusted. You become more capable of loving someone without abandoning yourself in the process.
In the language of the Way of Love-Light, what we are remembering is the Individualized Soul: the particular expression of Love-Light that has remained present beneath every adaptation. Healing does not manufacture that deeper self.
It clears enough of what has obscured it that we can begin to recognize and inhabit it again.
When Healing Begins to Change How You Live
The final movement is Illuminating.
Illuminating occurs when what has been Transformed and Remembered begins to change the way we see and live. We are not simply more knowledgeable about our wounds; we become less completely organized by them.
Where fear once narrowed our choices, there may now be room to respond differently. Where shame kept us hidden, we may become more visible. Where an old pattern once seemed inevitable, another possibility can appear.
This does not mean that we have transcended our humanity or achieved permanent spiritual clarity. Old patterns can return. New wounds can open. Circumstances can overwhelm capacities we thought were firmly established.
But something has changed.
We may be able to remember what happened without being pulled completely back into it as though it were happening again. A painful history can become a source of understanding, compassion, wisdom or discernment. Eventually, some of what we have learned through healing may even become part of the Medicine we carry into the world.
We begin to carry the story rather than having the story carry us.
Healing Has Movement
I did not develop the Natural Pathway of Transformation as a formula for fixing human suffering. I came to recognize it through my own healing, through spiritual and contemplative traditions I studied, and later through accompanying thousands of people in healing work. The stories were different. The wounds were different. The forms of healing were different. But I kept encountering this underlying movement.
Healing may require psychotherapy, medical treatment, energy healing, spiritual practice, community, changes in external circumstances, time, or some combination of these. Some wounds remain with us throughout our lives. Even then, our relationship with what we carry can change.
What I have come to understand is that healing has movement.
Something enters awareness. We open to what it carries. What has become fixed begins to move. As it moves, we remember more of Who We Truly Are. And what we remember begins to illuminate the way forward.
We cannot manufacture this movement entirely through will. But neither are we merely passive recipients of it. We can learn to participate consciously in the movement toward greater wholeness already present within us.
That, for me, is how healing actually happens.
Explore Shamanic Healing
If you understand the story of a wound but sense that something within it remains fixed, bound or inaccessible, a 90-minute Shamanic Healing session offers another way of entering the healing process. We work with what is present and ready to be encountered through the body, energy and spirit, allowing the process to unfold without forcing it toward a predetermined outcome.
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