Get out of your own way.
Who is going to heal you?
You can’t rely on anybody outside of yourself to heal you, nor should you. They can’t heal you. Only you can heal you, because to heal you have to be in the feeling of yourself as you are.
Every part of you heals itself
If your leg hurts, only you know the hurt in your leg, and that will limit how you use that leg for as long as it needs in order to heal itself. Every part of you heals itself all the time, all day, every day. It’s surviving. It’s recovering. Every part of you is doing its own thing.
There is no central you, the thinker, the intelligent one, the clever one, who is controlling any of that. It is just happening. Let it happen. Get out of the way.
Bringing thinking and ideas into the healing process of the living organism is why we become dependent on one another to go through natural processes that have been happening for every other species on the planet for millions of years. We are an animal as well, with the same intelligence and the same natural ability to heal itself, far beyond anything we can comprehend intellectually. We can’t duplicate it. We don’t know how the body heals itself. We only know that it does, and what is required for it to heal itself.
What is required is that you leave it alone. The very cream of self-help is to leave yourself to your own natural resources. One day we simply won’t heal, and we will die. Up until that point, we keep healing.
Thinking about your condition is not feeling it
Feeling is going on in the body before thinking comes into it. How it feels to be you is in the physical sensations throughout the body of you, and anything you think about that will change the feeling of it to fit with your thoughts about it. So thinking about yourself, or any part of yourself, prevents you from truly feeling it as it is.
Any thoughts you have about a condition you’re in colour your experience of that condition to fit with your dislike of it. That is what causes suffering: your beliefs, your ideas about how you should be compared with how you are.
You don’t suffer the feelings coming from within you. You suffer the way you’re thinking about yourself. Even pain is not suffering. It’s a relief to feel it when you really feel it, because as soon as you really feel that pain or that disturbance, it starts to process, and it starts to change. Try it. That is the natural meditation of the body: to be exactly as you are, not trying to help yourself.
You cannot improve on what you are
When you try to get rid of a distress, you are attacking it. Anything you try to fix, you are attacking. Every time you try to help yourself by changing or improving yourself, all you end up doing is disconnecting from the self that you are, overriding, suppressing and denying the condition you’re in. It continues underneath, even more damaged from your trying to fix it.
The essential problem is that you don’t like how it feels to be you, because you don’t understand that how it feels to be you is exactly what you need.
We are shown to believe that we shouldn’t be in pain, we shouldn’t be sad, we shouldn’t be distressed, we shouldn’t be frightened. Why not? They’re all part of being a human being. There is no way you can improve on what you are. At every second of your life you are exactly as you should be, determined by what you have been through up until this point. The improvement myth is what keeps the problem going, just in another form.
How to get out of your own way
Stop anything that is harmful to you. That is the first thing. You’ll find it hard at first, and the trick is this: when you do something that is harmful to you, come back to the feeling that is driving it, and really feel that. Don’t go into action out of it. Simply stay with it.
Over time that takes you deeper and deeper into yourself, and that is exactly what should be happening, because that’s where the healing happens. The distress that would become harm if you acted it out draws you deeper within when you go into it, and the harm dissipates. Its potential is taken away by feeling into the distress that you don’t want to feel.
Be quiet enough, meaning take things slow enough, that you notice how you feel. Don’t worry about how you feel and don’t obsess over it. Feel it from within as it’s occurring. You don’t have to think about feeling to feel it. You simply stop thinking so much about yourself and go deeper into the sensations of yourself, which exist of their own right and are sorting themselves out naturally.
At first you’ll still use things, because this is new to you. You may correct your diet, take supplements, visit a masseur. That’s okay. The reason behind it has to change.
The ultimate in self-help is to get out of your own way
Stop trying to fix yourself. Feel the distress in your body and leave it up to your body.
Feeling any disturbance as it is, and staying with it until it resolves, is what my meditation app, Undo, will guide you in doing for yourself.
About the author
Matthew Zoltan
Matthew Zoltan pioneered mind-body connection therapy in Australia in the late 1980s and is the creator of Natural Meditation. 39 years of direct work with the body. Founder of Quiet Retreats. Co-founder of the Undo app.