Healing Is Relationship

Healing Is Relationship

I used to think healing meant becoming someone different. Less triggered.

Less anxious. Less reactive.

More peaceful. More whole.

Lately, I’ve realized something else has been happening. My relationship to life itself has changed.

Everything feels… relational. Not just people. Everything. My relationship with grief. My relationship with my body. My relationship with silence. My relationship with work.

Even my relationship with the birds outside my window and my old dogs who are no longer here.

This past week grief found me again.

I was sitting beside my husky, Simba, when my Samoyed, Bobo, came to mind.

He died a few years ago from a collapsed lung. I held him while his heart stopped beating. I held him so he wouldn’t be alone.

I expected to feel sadness.

Instead, something else happened.

Bobo held up a mirror.

He showed me something about myself that I’d never quite seen.

For most of my life I thought my defining characteristic was resilience.

I don’t quit. I keep going. I survive.

But grief revealed something deeper.

I’m not driven by endurance. I’m guided by presence. A while ago, Gill said something during one of our quieter moments.

“You’re the love that stayed.”

At the time I appreciated it. This week I finally understood it. I’ve spent much of my life staying. With people. With dogs.

With relationships. Sometimes longer than I should have. Sometimes at great personal cost. Not because I believed I could save everyone.

But Because I know what it’s like to need love and not have someone stay.

Then last Monday, during EMDR, I found myself back in the garage. Back in the worst day of my life. Part of me wanted out. Everything in me wanted to leave that room. Instead, I quietly said to myself,

“ Stay.”

It was one word. But it changed everything. For the first time, I wasn’t staying for someone else. I was staying for me. That realization has stayed with me all week. I think that’s what grief has been trying to teach me.

Healing isn’t becoming someone new.

It’s changing the relationship you have with yourself. For years I’ve been a steward of the people and animals life placed in my care. Not their owner. Not their rescuer. Their steward.

Someone entrusted to accompany them for a while.

Maybe the next stage of healing is realizing that I’m one of those lives too.

Maybe the final person I’m learning to stay with…

…is myself.

presence doesn’t just heal relationships with others. It heals the relationship you have with yourself.

Presence is medicine.

And maybe the deepest relationship we’ll ever have the privilege of tending…

…is the one we have with ourselves.

—

Phoenix Field

Heal what we love. Lift what we touch.