While you might well be feeling a sense of horror right now at the way the world's going - environmentally, politically, psychologically, you name it - a simultaneous sense of joy is available. There's joy inherent in contact with the earth and elements, and in creativity, but it's easy to feel cut off from it. And in that joy, there's energy, the very energy you need to change things. terrealuma is being built out of a sense of the need for collective action on a huge scale - and also the knowledge that this can only happen through healing the trauma individuals are caught in.
healing is not self-improvement
Healing - working with a natural tendency towards the restoration of wholeness - is almost the opposite of self-improvement, but the two seem to have got a bit confused lately. A compulsive need for self-improvement can keep people from healing, and worse, can become quite addictive in itself.
And the last thing we need is more addictions to keep us distracted from the real problems at hand.
Healing comes about naturally when the conditions allow it. To enable these conditions, we need to lay off the self-improvement - in fact, I'd argue, lay off the self full stop.
Once we stop concentrating on ourselves, treating ourselves as if we were something separate from the rest of the universe, then natural healing processes have the best chance of occurring. Once healed from the sense of separateness, and all the harm that's been done due to it, we'd treat other people, animals, natural resources and energy differently. Maybe catastrophe could be averted.
Healing starts from direct contact with what the situation is. What if you're not a thing to be compared, judged, improved...? What if entertaining this possibility were to lead, not to depravity, laziness or destruction, but to a desire to act, sensibly and compassionately? Does that make your head spin? That's how habitually fearful we've become.
There's nothing inherently wrong with you. Thinking that there is, and acting accordingly to improve yourself, has become a luxury we, as a collective, can't really afford.
It's not always as easy as realising this and just dropping those thoughts and ways of being like a hot potato. Sometimes you need to do the very same practices that have been marketed as self improvement, but with a different motivation, one more akin to letting go. So it feels like relaxing, powering up, and knowing what to do next.
creative regeneration
If you're curious about the healing methods I use myself, a mix of meditation, focusing, free writing and intuitive art - building on the workshops held at terrealuma last year, I'm now offering a digital version for people to do at their own pace, in their own homes. There are a few places left on the course starting on March 11th. You can read more here
All of those things can be done without signing up for a course, of course. They're natural offshoots of being alive. It's amazing what a simple five minutes of meditation a day can do to restore balance to the nervous system, to power you up and give you a sense of what to do next. Looking at the world around us, we certainly need to be doing something.
Sarah Luczaj, PhD
therapist, writer, artist, reiki master, creative regenerator and co-founder of terrealuma.
offers online reiki healing/chanting sessions, here
