Recently I’ve been listening to spiritual teachers, coaches, and even some therapists who seem to promise that if you work hard enough you’ll reach a state where you are fully healed and un-triggerable. Wouldn’t that be so wonderful?
Yet I think such aspirations are not only unrealistic but that they become a hindrance to healing and growth in time. We reach a point where we’re feeling the same old disgust and impatience with ourselves, but now it’s dressed up in more refined spiritual or psychological language that boils down to “I don’t want to deal with this!”
This mindset of healing is quite aggressive—that our needs and wounds must be uprooted, or transformed, or eradicated to reach a particular desirable state of consciousness. When we merge with this perspective, we tend to be uncharitable, condescending, and inhospitable to those parts of us that are younger, shyer, more tender, more unruly. We cannot meet our needs on their own terms, and so we cannot work with them.
