Where to Begin: Structuring Your Healing Journey

The general order to follow during healing, ranked by urgency and effectiveness.

A Healing Journey often begins with overwhelm.

When you admit to yourself that something in your life, your mind, your patterns, or your mood cannot continue the way it has been, some kind of ‘cosmic relief’ downs upon you. But then, right after that, instead of clarity, you are met with a Gordian knot of everything that needs attention all at once.

Your habits. Your relationships. Your emotions. Your self-worth. Your anxiety. Your concentration. Your body. Your future. Your identity.

And suddenly healing doesn’t feel like something hopeful but more like standing at the bottom of a mountain with no map.

So you ask yourself: Where do I even start? How am I supposed to fix all of this? And perhaps the most discouraging thought of all: How long is this going to take?

For this reason, it is common that people try and approach healing by trying to attack everything they are dissatisfied with at once. They try to become a completely different person overnight, believing willpower will do the trick. But healing (unfortunately) cannot be rushed, forced, or conquered only through transformative insight and a decision. It’s not a trick or a hack.

Real healing is learning how to untangle your life one thread at a time instead of ripping the entire knot apart with panic and exhaustion.

If an intentional healing journey is part of your path in this life, then structure, direction and pace are crucial. Otherwise, the journey itself will be overwhelming, and, ultimately, ineffective.

Where to start

Healing begins with understanding what needs your attention first.

All of us try to do it, but it never works: changing everything at once. Sustainable healing requires prioritization and focusing on 1 healing goal per time. Only once that issue is resolved, you concentrate on another one. Transformation is complex and requires an enormous amount of energy and mental-emotional space. If you want an ROI, don’t scatter your energy in multiple directions.

The diagram below reflects a general order of urgency and effectiveness when approaching healing. Of course, healing is not linear, and there will always be overlap between different stages. Every tier also creates the foundation for the layer on top. When that foundation becomes stronger, the higher tiers become easier to resolve.

For example, overcoming an addiction does not only heal the addiction itself. It also cultivates resilience, radical honesty with yourself, discipline, self-awareness, emotional regulation, and faith in something transcendental. Valuable qualities that you carry with you into every future challenge.

Diagram 1: The Healing Journey Pyramid

Another example of this, is healing your blocks with regards to your personal presentation. As you begin treating yourself with more care and respect, your self-worth often strengthens naturally. Confidence grows. You love yourself more, so you treat yourself better. Social interactions become easier. Career opportunities begin to feel more accessible.

!!! It is important to acknowledge that healing cannot properly begin without a certain level of basic safety and stability. Access to reliable shelter, physical safety, rest, food, and enough income to cover essential needs is foundational. If you are currently in the position that your material and physical needs are not being met, I’m sending you power. Survival in this way requires immense courage and strength of character.

How long will each tier take to resolve?

It depends entirely on the issue, the complexity of everything underlying the problem, and the level of resistance surrounding it. Do not underestimate how deep you might need to go to resolve a challenge.

The first major thing you heal is the hardest. It’s like searching for something in complete darkness without knowing what you are even looking for. You have no clue what you’re doing. You are not yet proficient in reading and permanently modifying your internal landscape. Because of this, giving yourself at least 1-1.5 year to truly get over something significant is realistic. Yes, that long.

But that does not mean nothing is happening during that time. It won’t be a boring, passive, tranquil time. Things will be shifting dramatically, and you will look back at that time thinking ‘oh my god so much happened and wow how much I’ve grown, learned and experienced in such a short time’.

Even when your external life looks the same after the healing period (most likely not), and even if most of that growth is invisible to everyone else, your internal world will have transformed at an incredible speed. Your identity and your beliefs shift. Your awareness deepens. Your emotional patterns unravel. Your relationship with yourself changes. You begin responding differently to situations that once controlled you completely. Issues that used to consume you, now seem silly and unimportant.

It’s like you went on an adventurous internal quest with yourself. The reward at the end is the resolution of your issue and the depth, wisdom, character and lightness you acquired along the way.

When are you done with a tier and can move on to the next one?

You are ready to move on to the next tier when the issue no longer dominates your inner world. It requires no discipline from your side to maintain your new identity. Resolution does not mean perfection; it means you have developed enough stability, self-trust, and peace with the issue that it no longer controls your life, your thoughts, emotions and habits.

For example, in the case of a disorder such as Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder, progress may look like being able to function without depending on medication, maintaining a relatively structured life, concentrating well enough to work consistently, and generating enough internal motivation to navigate life without constant procrastination, overstimulation, or harmful coping habits just to feel ‘awake’. It means trusting yourself to handle life in a healthier and more sustainable way, without having to make a conscious effort to do so. Your default way of functioning has shifted to a new baseline, where your autopilot day-to-day functioning is one of a person that doesn’t have the issue.

This does not mean the issue can never resurface. Flare-ups can happen, especially when your responsibilities expand or life becomes more demanding. But once you have truly worked through a tier, you know how to recognize the imbalance and get back into alignment.

Can you have other goals next to your one healing goal?

When you are deeply focused on healing, especially during an intense phase of inner transformation, it can become very difficult to simultaneously chase (large) external ambitions with energy and focus.

A significant healing journey demands attention and a huge amount of emotional energy. It asks you to confront patterns, regulate everything that presents itself, process pent-up emotions, navigate the rollercoaster of identity change, rebuild your sense of self, and completely restructure the way you move through life. It’s like walking skinless. This is not a small thing; it is very vulnerable and demanding. It is invisible work, but work nonetheless.

Because of this, external goals such as rapid career advancement, constant productivity, or maintaining a highly ambitious or social lifestyle naturally take a backseat. Your energy is being redirected towards building a new you. And often, the new you that emerges is not very interested in the ambitions and pasttimes the previous you had. So investing heavily in some external goal, is not wisdom when you’re on this path.

Interestingly enough, the universe does have a way of rewarding inner work. It creates external shifts without you initiating or forcing them. As you heal, your standards change. Most importantly, your ‘energetic make-up’ changes. This influences everything: how you carry yourself, what you desire, what you tolerate, who and what’s attracted to you. And because of that, your outer life begins reorganizing itself automatically alongside your inner world.

You will be drawn toward healthier relationships, more aligned work, different environments, better opportunities, or lifestyles that feel more ‘nourishing’ and authentic to you. Some of these changes happen gradually, and sometimes they happen very suddenly. They may not always arrive in the exact form you originally hoped for, but they will always feel better than what you are used to.  

Healing has a way of changing your reality from the inside out;)

How do you heal a theme/ tier in your life?

The tool that enables deep healing and transformation is shamanic energy healing. It ‘pulls up’ all the buried parts in you that resist health and balance in any tier, so they can be seen, felt and released. No analysis or thinking required. That’s the beauty of this work. This blog goes more in-depth about how shamanic energy healing works by showcasing how it healed my eating disorder.

If you feel you’d like support with that process, you can reach out to me. I work as a shamanic energy healer and help people overcome deep patterns in a direct, experiential way.