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Until just the other day, I thought of the healing journey as something linear. It may be 3 steps forward, 12 steps back, a leap and jog, fall in a hole for a few months, climb out, baby steps...but it's all moving forward. Starting point...vague trail off. Through my own journey, I've come to realize that it's not linear at all. In fact, it's a circle. A circle with twists and turns. A Labyrinth, if you will.
I've never watched the 1986 film (Labyrinth), but of course as I sat down to write this, I did a quick search and came up with this brief synopsis from IMDb: "It's about a girl going into the fantasy world to work through her issues and fears about growing up." I guess I'm not the first person to see the analogy.
Before 2017, I wouldn't have been able to tell you what a labyrinth was. I did know that I was experiencing something that I didn't have words for and I didn't understand. I was fortunate enough to be able to attend a retreat hosted by Tina Swithin, (One Mom's Battle) and to connect with a group of women who had similar experiences of being married to, divorcing, and trying to co-parent with an abuser. It was the beginning of the real work of healing. I had been divorced for nine years.
The end of the retreat had us reflecting on the weekend and setting intentions for moving forward. We walked out to where a labyrinth had been laid out in a stone path around a giant pine tree. In the peacefulness of a cold November day in Washington, we each set out on the path towards the center. As I walked, I heard PINK in my headphones singing from her Beautiful Trauma album "I am heeeerrreeeee...I've already seen the bottom so there's nothing to fear..." I am here. It was a profoundly spiritual experience that I will never forget.
What struck me a few days ago is how much like a labyrinth the healing journey is. If we think about starting on the outside, we're winding around this tree--this thing that hurt us. We can see it the whole time and it looks like it's so close, but we just keep circling it, not understanding why the path has to be so convoluted. Eventually we get there and we can wrap our arms around the trunk and just breathe for a moment because finally, we're facing it and we're saying that it's not going to hurt us anymore. And we walk away, back around that same, twisty path, where you can still see the tree the whole time.
And here's where the labyrinth as a metaphor for the healing journey (as opposed to a linear one) clicked for me a few days ago. It's a circular journey. You don't get out of the labyrinth and walk away. Once you're in, you're in and you will spend the rest of your life moving in and away from that center. On the surface that sounds awful, but it really is the way this healing thing works. You can't unplant that tree once it's a giant redwood at the center of your labyrinth.
Life is cyclical and you are constantly in cycles of moving towards and away from the things that have caused you pain. But after that first time through, you're not as afraid of what's at the center, or worrying about the complexity of the path. You'll become so unconscious of your movement along the path that you'll glance up from varying perspectives and think "huh...I've never seen the tree from here". Or you'll be casually minding your own business and suddenly you smack right into the tree because you were too busy trying to pretend it didn't exist.
The point of this? I've been writing a lot about the healing journey and in my mind, I've been imagining a pathway of some kind--linear. But that's not accurate and I wanted to share that with you so that when you do some of the hard work and you're skipping along that twisted path, you're not too surprised when you smack right into that tree. Again.
Once you've gotten there, you'll remember that you've been there before, and that you know the way out. You may even find a few of us there again, for the umpteenth time ourselves. And we will remind you that it gets easier, and you'll get faster, and that we can walk the path together when we need to.
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