Healing

Losing spouses is one of the most painful events that could happen to a human. We are struck so hard to our core, the foundation of our lives is shaken and falling. The pain wreaks havoc…we couldn't sleep, then once we slept we couldn't get up…we couldn't eat, then once we ate we threw up….we couldn't talk, then once we talked we wept….
The pain is so unbearable we desperately seek to heal. When you put your hands in fire, your instinct is to quickly withdraw them back. So the direct response to pain, physical or psychological, is to avoid it…to bury yourselves in doing things, in hope that, over time, the pain will go away. Well, for some, it does, but for many it doesn’t. The pain creeps back once a while and eats you fresh just at the time you think you are healed.
When you have physical wounds, you apply gauze pads, but you don’t press it too hard because you want spaces that let blood circulate and allow medicine flowing into the wound for healing. It is called “giving spaces”. Healing psychological pain is the same. You allow spaces. What are spaces? Your openness and willingness to experience the pain. Your courage to stare at the pain and say “is that all you get?” Your endurance to live the life at your own term in your own way, pain or not.
Don’t avoid the pain. Don’t leave the wound untended. Because healing only happens at the place of pain. Meanwhile, don’t press it too hard in hope to press it away, because pressure may numb the pain but never heals it. Give spaces. Allow the fresh air to flow into life. When you allow the wound to heal, and you realize that it will, though slowly. You will be whole again. You will be left with scars but not holes in your heart, and that is OK because scars never make ugly bodies, they only make beautiful souls.