The landscape of our emotional and spiritual healing are best viewed from several levels. When you look at emotional and spiritual healing from more than one level, you can then find the way to look at it from the most relevant level in your specific situation. All the other levels do not matter now, even though one level may become more relevant as you spiritually grow in your future. Emotional and spiritual are two sides of the same coin. Emotional healing will always provide growth spiritually if the painful event or setting is looked at correctly. The ‘looking at it correctly’ part can take a long time without support and comfort from others who wish to nurture you in your understanding it fully. We as humans are not designed to withstand all the traumatic circumstances that life can throw at us when we are alone. We are strongest and most resilient when in a group, family or as a couple, because we can lean on each other as needed.
One common thread of truth I have found in every setting or event causing emotional pain is this: Lone wolves are easy prey, both to circumstances and to other predators. This is true in nature and especially true spiritually with us as individual people. If we are positioned too far away from others in our lives, then we need to find others and embed them in our world in close relationships in one form or another. No matter what the cause of your emotional pain, to facilitate healing will always mean increasing the closeness in relationships with others who are loving to help you heal. That means either increasing the number of close friends you have, or getting closer to those you already have in your life.
Above we mentioned, ‘the landscape of our emotional and spiritual healing must be viewed from several levels.’ The levels refer to how this obstacle came into our life, in other words how we first felt it or first began to experience it. For example, experiencing a great loss, such as the loss of a child or parent well ahead of their time to leave our lives. This undoubtedly would devastate anyone, especially if the loss interrupted strong nurturing such as a growing child in the poorest of health, or the loss of a parent when the survivor still greatly needed that relationship. Such a loss alone, looked at by itself, would devastate anyone and moving on would be impossible. This is where looking at it from just the physical and mental level would not provide any comfort whatsoever. So now we will look at it from a spiritual and more eternal level to see if that helps our understanding any.
God gave us a faculty we used much when we were young that over time, we by nature did not use so much as we became adults, and that is our imagination. Our western culture view of imagination is that it is contrary to intellectual understanding and is a detriment to our ability to learn and function in life. We are told it is an escape from reality, not a tool to help us better understand it. Our imagination is necessary for us to understand the emotional and even deeper, spiritual dimensions of who we are as individuals. Intellect is necessary for understanding our common likenesses to others and society, but it is our imagination that helps us see our uniqueness and difference that makes us the unique individual we are. Imagination is necessary for us to see us. This also includes experiences in our life path purposefully laid out for us. This life path, including all the experiences in it, are all spiritual and therefore part of us and our uniqueness and they complete us as a specific individual.
Okay you may ask, ‘how does imagination help me to overcome the emotional trauma I have experienced that is so overwhelming?’ Good question, and we have a great answer: The landscape of our emotions and spiritual world is always dominated by the spiritual side of life. Understanding fully our spiritual nature will require our imagination to do it. Bats can fly effortlessly in the dark because they use sound, we can understand and navigate in the spiritual world because we have our imagination. Logic, reasoning, and intellect are not adequate on the emotional and spiritual level.
We said we need our imagination to understand ourselves. That also means the entire spiritual dimension of who we are as well. Our spiritual side includes all our spirituality, and that includes not just our personal uniqueness and our gifts, talents, interests, and things such as that, it also includes our future, a plan for the life path we are to follow which is a very important part of the uniqueness of who we are. Our personality and our natural outlook are intentional, as is our specific life plan and destiny. If that is the case, then we must consider that our traumas, losses, and sufferings may be an intentional beneficial part of our life path. Looking at ourselves with our intellect and our imagination leaves us open to the possibility that our life’s bad events contain more than just suffering in them. At the simplest level, the painful events in our past requiring healing were caused by our errors, such as hurting others and they are therefore only a source of punishment.
That rarely is the case for most of our emotional and spiritual healing needs. Put simply, if we see that we are a unique person, and we are open to the fact that our uniqueness includes our specific life path we were given, then our painful experiences also must contain powerful intentionally included lessons we were sent here to learn from, to grow us as eternal souls. Our intellect might not allow us to see that, but using our imagination will make it clearly visible. Why are we pointing out our imagination as a tool in our emotional and spiritual healing needs? Because our imagination is part of even deeper emotional tools, we need to develop to become fully human and complete, and those are the emotional tools which we know as faith, or trust. Looking at life through the eyes of our faith will more easily show our uniqueness and our beauty to ourselves; also, we can see our life path, and its sufferings in a more purposeful spiritual light. Traumas and losses are rarely given as punishments and indications of minimal worth. They are almost always given or experienced by us as lessons from which we are to learn wisdom.
Looking at your loss you experienced first seen through your intellect is insurmountable. Because you see you as a lesser person at the hands of life and random nature that is all powerful. However, when seen through your imagination, where you see you, the unique person living out a predestined life path with lessons and training sewn into its years, organized by a loving creator, then we can start looking for wisdom and reasons for it all. Moreover, this allows us to open our faith and trust in life if we feel God, Life and Humankind has a vested interest in our future and our eternal spiritual growth.
The event, setting or loss you came through will better enable you to guide and support others later that will have to face the same mountain. First it will be you the sufferer, and later your role will be as a guide and guardian angel for others. Spiritual guides do not always prevent suffering when it is not preventable, but they nurture the victims through it. Let us use our imagination and wonder if possibly we signed up for this to help weaker others to go through this stuff with our support, who otherwise would not make it. Let us imagine that maybe others signed up for these things ahead of us to help us get through this. Maybe we can pass it on. That way all the suffering we have experienced taught us something and therefore would not have been in vain.
Just for the record, this is an emotional and spiritual encouragement ministry. We are selling nothing here and are not at the present time even set up to take donations, and probably never will. Your healed life are our reward enough, and we are very pleased with that. If you want to, please share your strength with others in your future so our nurturing can live on.