What does it mean to"Heal"? Understanding the healing process

Nowadays it seems that everybody wants to heal — but we may not fully agree on what that means. Healing is not simply about becoming more functional or meeting your health goals, although this may happen along the way.

Healing is a much deeper process of unfolding and discovering your profound nature, integrating all aspects of yourself in the love of your Essence.

It requires an element of surrender. You may or may not reach physical health, financial success or the relationship of your dreams. Those concrete goals are often the ego's desires, whereas healing means attuning to your soul. It is not about avoiding pain, grief, or the so-called 'negative' emotions and events of life — nor about escaping our mortality. We all die, sooner or later. What healing offers instead is something far more valuable : spiritual maturity, an enhanced richness to life, and a kind of joy and love that are independent of outer circumstances.

The healing process brings wholeness by experiencing the fundamental truth of who you are — the love of your Essence — and grounding there. From this place, you can welcome all pieces of yourself, and of your life, as sacred — knowing that everything is here for your growth and evolution. In that sense, healing may well last our whole lifetime.

With over 10 years of training and experience across various modalities, I offer here my understanding of the healing process — pinpointing the different stages along the way to help you orient and go deeper in your transformation.

The Stages of the Healing process

Wether you work by yourself, with energy healings or other modalities, your transformation will usually go through these various phases.

1. Leaning into your Discomfort

The story often begins with noticing an area of discomfort in your life — a relationship that feels stuck, a pattern that keeps repeating, a physical symptom that won't resolve, or simply a quiet sense that something wants to change. The first step on the healing journey is the decision to lean into that discomfort rather than avoid it, numb it or push it away. This seemingly simple act of turning towards yourself is, in itself, an act of profound courage.

2. Discovering & Unravelling your Defenses & Resistances

As you deepen your exploration of your discomfort, you often become conscious of the inner dissonances at its origins: the patterns, masks, limiting beliefs and general defensiveness that you use. It is important to approach this phase with curiosity, softness and self compassion. You are simply discovering ways your system learned to protect you.

At this stage of the process, people often encounter what I call secondary pain : the grief of having defended for so long, of not having been true to your most profound desires, of the years spent not quite being yourself. For instance, realising how you used self sabotage or how you repressed parts of yourself such as tyour sensitivity, sensuality or desires for connection. It can be a tender moment but it is also a beautiful shift where you start sensing the purity and beauty of your original needs and longings.

3. Touching the Wound

As the journey keeps unfolding, you may reach the original wound that led you to adopt those defensive layers. This allows you to release some core pain. For instance, for some people one wound may be the fundational pain of certain traits having been shamed or rejected, or of having felt emotionally disconnected from their caregivers, etc.

This is a very delicate moment. However, when we surrender to it, it may become what we call "soft pain" in Brennan healing: without resistance, the process may be fluid, moving and relieving. There may even be a sort of grace about it as sometimes the flow of energy is so fast that it doesn't register as pain at all.

It is important to note that you don't need to cognitively remember the events that formed the wound. What matters is that you experience the release of frozen energy through your body and energetic system — it could be through shaking, discharging the nervous system, or through tears or sensing a big flow of energy passing through you. This is quite a big moment in your process.

At the beginning of your healing journey, this stage usually requires being held by someone. This is because when the events of the wound originally happened, they were far too overwhelming for your system to integrate — and this leaves an intense fear in the system around going near them again. Working with an attuned practitioner brings a much needed extra layer of safety, allowing you to go deep and do some clearing at the very root of your defensive patterns.

4. Reaching your core Essence

As the wound releases, something magical happens : your Essence begins to emerge. The qualities, gifts and aliveness that were frozen in the wound — held there since the original experience — begin to thaw and flow again.

This movement comes with a renewed discovery of who you really are beneath all the conditioning and defences. Your core qualities become more accessible. Your creativity returns. A deeper sense of groundedness and presence becomes available. This is usually quite a blissful experience, filled with hope, joy, love and expansive feelings. You may also be surprised by who you discover yourself to be!

5. Creating & Expressing from Essence

Once you deeply embody who you are and what you long for, you are free to express this into the world, in the precise area of your life that once was uncomfortably out of alignment. By doing this, you are essentially integrating your healing with the outer aspects of your life, through your decisions, relationships, creative life, career, etc.

To live your life in alignment with your loving nature is the most fulfilling thing you can do, no matter where the path leads. It is precisely this flow of energy emanating from your divine core and freely expressing itself through your human dimension that creates coherency, serenity, joy and bliss in your life.

What next?

Healing is a lifelong journey which requires patience, love, and trust in the process. It is made not of one cycle but of many spirals, each taking you more deeply into yourself. Remember you are worthy of healing and transformation, and you are not alone. You are welcome to reach out if you would like some support on your journey.