Are You Healed Or Just Distracted?

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Excerpt: Are you healed or just distracted? An important question to ask that might surface some un-dealt-with pain, but necessary pain for growth.

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How to tell the difference? Well, a good place to start is to take away the distractions and see how you feel. Find a place where you can sit quietly and rest your mind.

Specifically, make sure that it is: free from phones—calls, texts, and notifications are all distractions; free from people—family, friends, neighbors, and strangers are all distractions; and free from business—advertisements, store fronts, and being around items that could be bought are all distractions. A spot in nature will do just fine.

Also, try to do it when you aren’t in a hurry and have some quality time to spare.

Once you can successfully remove all distractions from your environment and can sit, the first thing that you’ll probably notice is that you’ll want those distractions back almost reflexively. It will feel like an itch that you’ll increasingly want to scratch, but you’ll have to resist. If you don’t, then how can you know if you are healed or not?

You need to look inward and establish a connection with your emotional center in order to do that. It’s as if you had heart surgery. Until you go back to the doctor for them to check your heart, you won’t know how the recovery is coming along. You can assume all went well and continue living your distracted life, but the risk, of course, is a complication or future failure.

The same is true when your heart is broken or when you experience some kind of emotional trauma that requires healing. You can assume that you’re “fine” and that you’ve recovered from the damage that was done, but until you sit and take a closer look—how can you ever know for sure? And one of the unfortunate, scary realities in the world today is that it’s so easy to stay distracted all of the time!

Even with just a smartphone, you could literally stay distracted from your past issues and pain for the rest of your life. And it wouldn’t even be hard—that’s the scary part.

Now, you might be thinking that “distracted” living sounds better than active inward confrontation type living. But, is living “distracted” really living?

Is time that is spent passively consuming media time that is contributing to fulfilling your potential and dreams? I don’t think there’s anything “passive” about fulfilling potential or realizing dreams. Living your best life is the exact opposite—it’s an “active” process. And part of that process is actively confronting and making peace with your past.

Because how can you move forward in your life if you haven’t moved forward from something that happened before? If you get emotionally stuck on something that happened before, then you need to go back to that place and figure out how to emotionally overcome that hurdle. Otherwise, that hurdle is where you’ll emotionally stay.

And just because you don’t realize that that’s where you might be stuck doesn’t mean that you’re not stuck there. That’s what a distraction is after all, isn’t it? It moves your attention away from where you are.

So, when you find your place to sit, ask yourself, where are you—emotionally? What hurdle(s) haven’t you overcome yet? Is it something that happened in your childhood? Is it something that happened as a result of a relationship? Maybe it’s something that you’ve always told yourself that isn’t true?

Getting rid of all of the distractions will help bring whatever it is to the surface. Start there. And if and when it does surface, don’t be surprised if it starts to hurt. If it does, don’t run from the pain. Emotional healing is about feeling. And until the emotion is felt completely and has made its impact it won’t be healed.

It’s also important to note that you don’t have to go through this, sometimes painful process, alone. If it becomes too overwhelming or unbearable, seek professional help. There’s no shame in getting help for emotional healing just like there’s no shame in seeing a doctor for physical healing. You are a physical and emotional being—not just one or the other. And many times, people are so focused on trying to heal the physical and are so distracted from the emotional that they don’t even realize that it’s the emotional that’s causing the physical issues.

Eckhart Tolle made mention of this in his book, The Power of Now, and said, “If you cannot feel your emotions, if you are cut off from them, you will eventually experience them on a purely physical level, as a physical problem or symptom.” And that is sadly the case for so many people simply because they won’t confront their emotional problems and are too stubborn to seek professional help.

And so there they go, living distracted lives and manifesting physical symptoms from emotionally un-dealt-with issues of the past. Until they sit—until you sit. In a distraction free environment. And confront whatever it is that’s there.

If nothing comes up after 20-40 minutes, then move on with your day. If something does come up, sit with it. Try not to get lost in the thought, but rather become the observer of the thought.

Witness the thought(s) as they arise and stay aware of what’s playing in your mind. Don’t get sucked into the thought and become a character of the thought. Stay above the thought(s) and watch the images unfold in your mind’s eye.

Repeat this process until some clarity is found and the necessary feelings have surfaced. And name the feelings as they arise—i.e. “This is disappointment; this is regret; this is anger.” This way, you can reflect on the best steps that might be taken to handle those named emotions. Otherwise, those emotions will just remain abstract feelings that are all intertwined into one painful mess.

Unpack the tangle of emotions. One emotion at a time. And keep moving forward over those hurdles of the past. When you can overcome the hurdles of the past to meet your emotional hurdles of present day—you know you are healed.

You will know because you can live in the present and soak in the peace of the day without any arising conflicts of the past—or without feeling the overwhelming urge to distract yourself from those ever surfacing emotions. And let me be clear, no distraction comes close to feeling as good as inner peace feels. It’s worth the emotional effort. And yes, it’s worth confronting all of that pain, too. Good luck.

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Read Next: 32 Deep and Insightful Eckhart Tolle Quotes from The Power of Now

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