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The Good Life is a Process
Healing is not about, once and for all, fixing your life
Liz Long Rottman
June 08, 2024
Healing is an ongoing cultivation of a mindset. That mindset says “even though I have challenges, I feel grateful for what I have and I can enjoy my life.” A person who is “healed” addresses challenges with varying degrees of lightness and intensity depending on what the situation calls for without loosing their sense of self. They are flexible. Someone who is healed makes decisions based on their needs and wants while factoring in what is in the best interest of others and nature too. They are collaborative and respectful without losing themselves. They do not need dominance over or extraction from the earth or other people.
Like a garden, the good life is a cultivated process
Someone who is healed does not stop healing. When we engage in personal growth and especially if our lives have included great suffering, we often go through a phase where they are looking for the “answer,” the “end of all work,” the “story that once-and-for-all eliminates the unknown.” Getting past this phase means recognizing that:
The good life is a process, not a state of being. It is a direction, not a destination.
It is not that we finally learn or do the thing that makes it all stop or means that we’ve arrived. Rather, the good life is learning and practicing a series of processes that increase the good in our lives. These processes are in the spiritual, physical health, relational, wisdom, financial, mental health, and other domains such as these.
Always in Progress/Process
In addition, there are meta-processes or the “process of my process.” We can approach our processes with different qualities that are more and less helpful to us based on our individual temperament and life backgrounds. Meta-processes include learning, relating, thinking, perceiving, attending, remembering, moving, and producing language. Meta processing is how we tend to approach processes in general.
Each of the above processes may feel distinct from one another, but when we zoom out and look at the big picture, you may find that the way you do anything is the way you do everything. This is both frightening and wonderful. Frightening because it erodes a clean notion of having free will. Wonderful because we can construct a little experiment in the therapy office and learn a lot about ourselves, thereby creating the conditions in which we can exercise our free will. In the words of Moshe Feldenkrais:
When you know what you're doing, you can do what you want
The healing process can be summed up like this:
I become aware of what I am doing (within my context), see if that is what I want to be doing, then make a choice, and observe the outcome. Rinse, repeat.
The key ingredient to our recipe here is…AWARENESS! AWARENESS! AWARENESS!
It can also help to start with the assumption that our woundedness never goes away. We will always have to opportunity to repeat and refine our unique processes of healing. While this may bring up feelings of helplessness or disappointment, this can also spark liberation. We never have to be complete, final, or whole to be healed/healing.
When we have the freedom to be in progress, we access our birthright of enough-ness right now sans conditions. We are unconditionally enough as is. Furthermore, when we allow ourselves to be in progress, we have the spaciousness to all others to be in progress too.
What’s New At Prosopon
This has been a rowdy year here at Prosopon. The practice felt ripe for expansion and the opportunities rushed right in. We view each of these new projects as experiments, endeavoring to let go of the outcome.
The Fruit of Opportunity
Welcome Gabby!
Gabby has graciously joined Prosopon Therapy as clinical staff. Gabby has an extensive background in yoga and has worked as a yoga teacher for five years. She is a powerful therapist, lifelong learner, and comes from a body, heart, spirit, in context perspective. You can learn more about Gabby on her About page at prosopontherapy.com
Please direct all new Prosopon referrals to Gabby.
Supervision
Liz is now qualified to supervise other clinicians and has taken on a couple of supervisees. Depth and quality of education from a both a heart centered and intellectually rigorous place has always been a central value for Liz that she hopes to pass on to incoming cohorts of clinicians through modeling and experiential learning.
The Resilient Bodymind
Liz is honored to have been given the opportunity to teach an elective at the Naropa Mindfulness Based Transpersonal Counseling program. Liz is developing the syllabus from scratch which is a tall order considering she has never taught at a university level before. The Resilient Bodymind: Nervous System Modulation Approaches from Sensorimotor Psychotherapy is a 10 week course that delves into nervous system modulation with the Sensorimotor Psychotherapy perspective as a jumping off point for the exploration of adjacent theories and practices. Liz is drawing on her network of mentors and colleagues for input to guide her creation of the syllabus and construction of the the class.
The Resilient Bodymind
New at the Blog
With no discernable theme this month, Liz managed to write four new posts despite all of the intensive work summoned by these big changes. She apologizes for the typos in advance.
Hopes, Fears, and Salves
Be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart and try to love the questions themselves, like locked rooms and like books that are now written in a very foreign tongue. Do not now seek the answers, which cannot be given you because you would not be able to live them. And the point is, to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps you will then gradually, without noticing it, live along some distant day into the answer.
Holding the Center in Chaos
Hopes
If I surrender to the unknown and hold my center in nature, spirit, body, and community, periods of chaos lead to higher orders of functioning.
That I allow myself to be in progress— always enough.
That I continue to bravely surrender to living the questions and recognize when my fear scurries to find the answer to everything.
Fears
Things fall apart; the center cannot hold; / Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world, / The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere / The ceremony of innocence is drowned; / The best lack all conviction, while the worst / Are full of passionate intensity. - William Butler Yeats
That I reopen my wounds and declare “there! I know I was broken.”
That I get hard and close myself off, crowning myself as the knower of all.
Salves
I have surrendered enough now that I no longer operate on blind faith. I know that softness, spaciousness, and yielding is the better way.
I let go of the idea that “completion” is the goal long ago and I can tell when I am feeling tempted to take it back
I have a process for letting go of what I think I know and moving back into the beginners mind.