Those Who Kill Themselves While Trying to Heal...
I used "kill" here metaphorically, referring to those moments when we continue living but feel as if we're not truly alive.
With the rising popularity of the well-being trend, all the information being shared through short videos, reels with a few sentences, articles, and books has made us believe that accessing “knowledge” has become easier and faster. Our minds get swept up in all these notions of how we should live, tossed back and forth between these different ideas.
We all want to heal ourselves, to become better versions of ourselves, and to overcome our problems.
Especially when it comes to certain short “therapeutic” videos, I find them quite risky. When a video says something like “show yourself compassion, give yourself a hug” and tries to fit this message into a 1-minute clip, we are unconsciously making assumptions about the viewer’s relationship with “touch,” without knowing anything about it. We disregard the pressure or emotional triggers that such advice might create when the viewer tries to follow the “well-being tips” they see in these short videos or thinks, “Ah, so this is how I should embrace myself.”
We all want to heal ourselves, to become better versions of ourselves, and to overcome our problems. This is a noble and commendable desire, and I’m sure everyone is doing their best in their own way on this journey of self-healing.
However, we often overlook some of the paradoxes this creates. Perhaps we can’t grasp them rationally, but we feel them. Somewhere deep inside, we sense that something is going wrong. The more we try to “be better,” the more we leave parts of ourselves behind, and as long as we focus solely on solving problems, we inevitably find ourselves face-to-face with nothing but problems.
One of the major issues of our time is the imposition of “generalized” ideas about what is healthy and good for all people. We search for ourselves in books, in pre-packaged solutions. And to validate certain information, especially in verbal discourse, we are forced to generalize. What is right for us needs to be filtered again and again, and it must be experienced and lived to be understood.
If a particular experience doesn’t resonate with us, we need to be honest with ourselves and adjust how we relate to it. But instead of taking this responsibility and measuring things for ourselves, we often wait for someone to hand us their version of the truth. We don’t want to do the research ourselves, or we fail to develop the patience needed to continue that research.
Thus, in our quest for healing, living a life solely focused on “healing and fixing ourselves” tends to blind our inner perception.
We tirelessly work on fixing ourselves, analyzing our traumas, and trying to understand their causes, constantly commenting on them.
As I said, there’s something very respectable about this effort; but at times, we can take it too far and end up exhausting and complicating ourselves in the process.
For instance, having routines is valuable, as they provide structure that connects us to life. However, becoming excessively obsessed with maintaining these routines, to the point of losing our flexibility within life, can weigh heavily on our soul.
Learning to make our ability to maintain structure and our ability to remain flexible work together in harmony, building a bridge between them, could be a practice that truly serves life. And yes, this topic always brings us back to the yin-yang cycle… I’ve touched on this many times in previous writings, and if you want to understand the yin-yang cycle more deeply, you can look into the *Tao Te Ching*.
Of course, we cannot ignore the fact that to fully understand a concept, we must embody it. The *Tao Te Ching* speaks to us of “effortlessness,” but we tend to interpret this effortlessness as doing nothing. We can only comprehend the differences between all these concepts through unconscious communication.
What are these channels of unconscious communication? They are poetic—those that can touch beyond cognitive understanding. After all, we feel life through poetry.
Just as we feel the body through dance, and feel our existence through the body.
I wish for all of us a kind of healing where we can dance with all the knowledge and experiences we gather, without getting trapped in the prison of information that we pile on ourselves in the name of “getting better.”
A kind of healing that we can sustain, without becoming rigid in the process...