About spiritual healing and transformation
Let’s be realistic: not everything can be healed. No matter what you do and how motivated you are, some illnesses, disorders and/or handicaps cannot be cured. Fact.
Did I heal my Bipolar Disorder, for instance?
Yes, I believe I did. But I prefer to speak about the transformationof my bipolarity.
For many, many years, I experienced my bipolarity as a serious mental illness. The sometimes hellish manifestation of my not-understood mental, emotional and physical condition made me suffer a lot and at times totally disrupted my life. The doctors explained to me that I had triggered a life-long genetic defect, and to be able to live a relatively normal life, I had to take certain chemical drugs for the rest of my life. It felt completely unnatural to do so, but after ending up in a mess again and again, I started taking the drugs. What did I know…? It helped, for a while. But slowly by slowly, it made me feel even more miserable and my life worthless… There must be another way!
I had no choice but to bring some kind of meaning to such hell. And I did. I drastically changed the story I was telling about myself. By doing so, I transformed the Bipolar Disorder that I had been suffering for over 25 years, into an Awakening experience. I slowly let go of all the medication, drastically detoxed my body and mind, and I have been symptom and medicine free for many years now!
So yes, I healed myself.
At least on a spiritual level. The predisposition is still there, but I now use my bipolar ‘qualities’ in an empowering way.
The stories we tell about ourselves
We live our lives according to our stories. It is important to realize that our memory is but a fluid engagement with the world, through which we try to make sense of events. It’s only one of the many possible stories.
There is no objectivity in our summaries and synopses. It is a random collection of moments that build the story of who we are, and we completely overlook the millions of moments that are not fitting our chosen story.
Many of us are stuck in stories about ourselves that we are (literally) sick and tired of, because parts that don’t serve us have become central to how we experience ourselves (convictions like being not good enough, traumatized, sick, damagedetc.). It’s important to learn to see through these old illusions and unstick ourselves from our attachments to them, so that new and more creative and healing ideas may emerge.
There are many ways to do so. But it all starts by dropping our victimhood and taking responsibility of our lives. Not for all those unwanted conditions, but for the way we deal with them.
This is what my book Van Stoornis naar Gave is about (in Dutch only).