Lately I’ve been thinking about the difference between relief and healing.  For most of my life, I don’t think I realized there was one.

When something hurt, I wanted relief.

Relief from grief.
Relief from heartbreak.
Relief from uncertainty.
Relief from whatever uncomfortable emotion was sitting heavy in my chest.

And honestly, that makes sense. Nobody wakes up and thinks, “I’d really like to sit with my pain today.”

I’ve looked for relief in a lot of places.

Travel.
Relationships.
Being busy.
Self-help books.
Spirituality.
Plant medicine. Alcohol.
Even convincing myself I was “over it” before I actually was.

Some of those things helped.

Some of them helped a lot.

But what I’ve learned is that the things that help us aren’t always the things that heal us.

Plant Medicine Experience

A few years ago I sat with plant medicine.

The experience was profound.

I saw things differently. I felt things differently. It cracked open parts of me that had been buried for years.

But the ceremony wasn’t the healing.  

It was the invitation.

The healing happened afterward.

In the months and years that followed.

In the boundaries I struggled to set.

In the relationships that triggered me.

In the grief I finally allowed myself to feel.

In the moments I wanted to run and chose to stay with myself instead.

That’s the part nobody really talks about.

The integration.

The ordinary Tuesday after the breakthrough.

The moment when life hands you the exact same lesson again and asks,

“Okay, now what?”

I’ve come to feel this way about a lot of healing modalities.

Therapy.
Breathwork.
Energy work.
Plant medicine.
Coaching.
Retreats.

I think they can all be incredibly helpful.

But none of them can do the work for us.

They can open a door.

They can shine a flashlight into a dark corner.

They can help us see what we’ve been avoiding.

But eventually we have to decide what we’re going to do with what we’ve seen.

For me, healing has looked a lot less dramatic than I expected.

It’s looked like saying no.

Pausing before reacting.

Going for a walk instead of spiraling.

Letting myself cry.

Taking accountability.

Having difficult conversations.

Choosing differently even when the old pattern feels more familiar.

None of those things make for a particularly exciting story.

But they’ve changed my life far more than any breakthrough ever has.

These days I’m less interested in finding the thing that’s going to heal me.

I’m more interested in becoming the kind of person who’s willing to do the work after the insight arrives.

Because relief feels good.

But healing asks something of us.

And I’ve learned they’re not the same thing.