Louise Hay teachings; a dirty dish, and why healing has to soak

There's many Louise Hay teachings which I like to come back to again & again, but in one of them, she's talking about a dirty dish, it has food truly baked on, crusted hard from sitting too long (like what you see in a dishwasher tablet advert), and you can scrub at it all you like, but it just doesn't come clean. 

Why? Because it has to soak first.

So you fill it with water and leave it. Time in the water allows it soften, it's not being forced, and only once everything has loosened does it finally come away.

Healing is exactly the same.

I actually shared a little visual of this over on Instagram recently, you can watch it here.

Living in western society, so many of us want the quick fix, the magic pill, and one session that changes everything in real time. Now don't get me wrong, I understand the appeal of it because I spent years wanting it too, not understanding what needs to happen, just wanting it to be over and done with. But now I know - the deepest inner work and healing doesn't work like that. It works in layers, and as Louise Hay suggests, it soaks.

To let you in on the more personal side of me: I'm being reminded of this in my own life right now.

In case you're new here, for 23 years I've lived with what I was told was "non-allergic rhinitis". It's been a label I've worn, and it came with triple prescription - an antihistamine, an asthma tablet, and a steroid nasal spray. This only came after seeing more than one of the handful of the immunologists in the country, who pre-labelled me as 'an unknown cause' and the efficacy of these meds was about 20%.

Recently I've begun to understand it as something else entirely. It's sat on my peripheral for the last 6-12 months, and as I've started pulling that thread over the last few weeks, it's evolved and I've managed to connect it to something else... my endometriosis. Research increasingly points to links between these conditions - and I can see clearly that there are patterns in my body that no-one ever joined up in all those years of being treated in parts rather than as a whole.

But here's the real truth behind that 'it sat in my peripheral' nod - the first thread was placed in my hands 3 years ago, but I just wasn't ready to pull it.

At this time, my husband & I were on a homeopathy fertility programme, and my homeopath looked at my notes and saw it clear as day - she named me as a sensitive person, both emotionally (as the empath I am), and physically (in the non-allergic rhinitis). She understood the two were connected, the same sensitivity, simply manifesting itself in body and in feeling.

Now of course I took note of this, but I don't think I truly understood it. I thought I did, but it's only now, in this soaking phase, that her words have come back to me, (in red flashing lights tbh) with their true full meaning.

And it made me wonder - what if this was never only physical? In my role, I work with clients constantly to understand 'what was going on at the time when X began', so why didn't it apply to me?

It did.

What was happening in your life when this began?

And so the answer was sitting there, just waiting to be seen.

It started when I lost three grandparents just 2 months apart from each other. And 2 months after that, my fourth grandparent was diagnosed with lung cancer. There were more losses that surrounded me and my family at the time too, but this was the core of it. 

I was in college and seeing a counsellor for the duration. And I honestly thought I'd dealt with it when I had no more tears left to cry. But as we know, and as science keeps proving, the body keeps its own records.

What I'm coming to understand is that some of what I've carried in my body for over 2 decades may be rooted in that period. Grief that was felt but perhaps never fully processed, and as a young woman doing her best to keep going, not realising that 'getting through it' and 'healing from it' are two very different things.

In the dirty dish sense, there's no scrubbing this clean, and it's not for lack of trying. Treating the symptom, trying to prevent it from ruining days of my life, taking me out of work, and completely knackering my body up. The short term fixes haven't held, and I believe it's because the work was never on the surface.

It has to soak.

And so this what I want you to take from this, if you take anything at all:

Please know that if you're healing something, whether it's physical, emotional, or an entanglement of both. If it feels slow, repetitive, or like you're taking 2 steps back with every 1 step forward. 

You are not doing it wrong.

You are in the soaking phase.

Healing is never linear, nor quick. It's a layered, often patient, unglamorous process of letting things loosen off when the time is right. We cannot rush this process. Those crusted-on parts of us - the grief that we swept under the rug, the experiences that we 'got through' - they don't come away with force, they come away with softening, safety, time, and tending. With a willingness to ask the question that nobody asked us at the time.

What happened to you? And what might still be waiting to be healed?

Be patient with yourself, let it soak, because the clean water is coming.