After my fourteen-year healing journey from AIDS and kidney failure, here’s what I’ve learned for sure about healing:
Healing requires death.
Something about you, and your life, must die in order too truly heal yourself, and elevate to a higher level of well-being. Whether that healing is in your body, or that healing is in your life, death is the price you pay for it.
And this death varies for each of us.
Whatever is not true about us, whatever is imprisoning, whatever is inauthentic, whatever is toxic, must be laid down at the alter of healing for slaughter. For some of us, it’s an aspect of our personality, some falsehood we’ve adopted to try and be accepted and to belong. For others, it will be some behavior patterns we have that are silently poisoning us, and taking us further and further away from our life’s purpose, and our soul’s mission. For others, it will be some form of relationship – a marriage, a job, friendships, family, etc – that was attracted/built from a wounded and/or false sense of our self. For others, it will be a mixture of ALL of this, an entire life death, a releasing of everything we know to be familiar, and true, and real. (The latter was my type of death. It was the type of offering that my healing required of me – absolutely everything.)
It makes no difference what we must offer over to die, in order to heal, we must make an offering. We cannot enter into the temple of well-being without one.
This is why so many people who want to heal – who need to heal – don’t.
They are unwilling to let go. They are unwilling to die.
It’s not easy.
And it ain’t always/all ways fun.
The process of healing isn’t always unicorns, and glitter, and puppies, and magic carpet rides all the time. It’s an unrelenting process, and sometimes, it’s down right horrific from the outside.
At some points (at many points) in the process, you will have to let go of what you once believed (and were taught) you were, of what you once believed (and were taught) you must have, of what you once believed (and were taught) you must do, of what you once believed (and were taught) was real, and you must walk blindly into the unknown, not knowing what comes next, or sometimes, if there even is a “next.”
But here’s something else that’s true: even in the death, there is Love, and Light.
Love and Light saturate the entire journey of your healing, because Love and Light are the only entities that have the power to heal us. They are the only things that, ultimately, are truly true about you.
They are the very things that healing comes to reintroduce us to. To help us reembody and express.
But in their first introduction, they come disguised as destruction. They come tearing and ripping down our walls, our belief systems, our lifestyles, even sometimes our physical appearances. Not as a punishment, but as a savior, rescuing us from everything that is obstructing the glory and beauty of who we truly are, of what we truly deserve, of what we’ve been asking for for our lives without giving words too.
This ripping down and falling away of our old selves is the death we must offer over. Like the caterpillar, we must willingly head into our healing cocoon, knowing partly that it’s a chamber of miraculous metamorphosis, and partly that it’s a graveyard, where the person who’s walking into it, will not be the same person who will walk out of it.
And it’s only once we’ve walked out of it, embodied in the glorious, healed version of ourselves, do we realize that the process was all worth it.
That death was nothing to fear.
And that behind death, lies more life.
More delicious, and glorious life than we could have ever imagined.
Much 
