You don’t need to be ready to heal emotionally in order to heal.

I often witness people who don’t feel ready to heal emotionally. They come up to the edge of taking action to free themselves from emotional pain, only to back away. Their mind has many stories as to why, but at the core it is often the same basic reason. They are afraid. It’s kind of crazy to think that people would be afraid of healing their emotions, but I never said that people were logical.

I’ll get into the fear of emotional healing later.

The inspiration for this post comes from a conversation I had the other day with woman we will call Kelly. I had spoken to her a few months about some jealousy issues that was poisoning the relationship with her partner. She had listened to a couple of the free sessions in the Self Mastery course and was encouraged at the possibility of change. She was going to sign up for the remaining sessions and do some individual session with me to focus on her specific beliefs and behaviors. Kelly didn’t sign up for the program and she didn’t schedule a session with me.

When I ran into here recently she brought up her lack of action. Her explanation to her self and me was that she was not ready to heal emotionally.

I could go in a lot of directions with this material but just want to focus on the sabotaging logic of the ego mind that is operating here. From a certain angle it is a factual truth that she doesn’t feel ready to heal emotionally. Notice I say “factual truth” and not a real truth. She doesn’t feel ready, but it is the lies in her belief system that are creating that feeling. In any case that is no reason not to engage the process.

Thinking and feeling that we are not ready for emotional healing is a factual truth that hides a self sabotaging lie. It’s not the feeling of not being ready that stops us. It is the hidden lie that keeps us from taking action. The hidden lie is that we need to be ready to heal emotionally in order to start.

We were not ready to learn to walk when we first began taking steps. When we began to learn to read, we weren’t ready to read. When people begin having sex they generally don’t feel confident and prepared. When parents have their first children, they don’t’ feel ready either. Not only do parents have no experience in being parents, but those kids don’t come with an instruction booklet that would give them the illusion of being prepared.

When we take on any endeavor worth doing in our life it is new until we have been doing it a while. In the beginning we are learning to do something and we stumble through it as best we can. We are never going to be ready to do something that we have no experience doing. But that doesn’t stop us.

When we endeavor to eliminate our emotional reactions and clean up the projections in our mind we are taking on a task that we have never done before. If you haven’t done much of it before then you probably are not very skilled at emotional healing. The next lie hidden in the decision making logic of the mind is that if you aren’t very good at emotionally healing then you shouldn’t start. Of course if we use this logic we will never do anything different in our life.

It is this kind of hidden belief that is buried into the meaning of these words. “I’m not ready for emotional healing.”

If we only do the things we are ready for we would only do the things we already know how to do. If this were the case we would never learn to walk, read, take up a hobby, have sex, or raise children.

The mind is a peculiar thing. It can propose the idea that we are not ready to heal emotionally. It can even make that idea appear to be factual. It is true that if we haven’t done something before that we are not skilled and proficient at it. This may be a fair assessment.

But then the mind does something amazing. It is so subtle that we don’t notice it unless we spend some time developing awareness. The mind tricks us into accepting the one idea of not being ready and assumes the decision is made. Without words it ends the investigation and stops all action on that one note. An unconscious decision has been made not to evaluate any other angles.

The ego mind fixates on one bit of information and uses that one fact to determine the whole stopping of our personal and emotional growth. It would be as if we went to the doctors with stomach pains and when the doctor found our temperature to be 98.6 degrees he sent us home.

All other desires, considerations for the health of our relationships, and future happiness are discarded with this fixation on one fact of not feeling ready. The mind invites us to go unconscious, stop evaluating different possibilities, and become unaware of all these other considerations.

This is the kind of unconscious logic and decision making of the ego mind that keeps us in loops of emotional suffering.

The path to freedom from this kind of self destructive logic is awareness and healthy skepticism. If we develop self awareness we will learn to see past these misdirection traps of words, and hidden decisions. A healthy skepticism and a process of questioning will pull apart the misguiding logic and free us from such an ego mind.

Being a skeptic is an opportunity for freedom from emotional suffering. If we are a skeptic we will question the logic that says if we don’t feel ready then we shouldn’t begin the process of emotional healing.

A skeptic will scrutinize this type of logic and realize that if they followed it they wouldn’t attempt or do much of anything in their life.

A skeptic will realize that you become ready to do something by doing it over and over again until you get good at it. You become ready to heal emotionally by doing things that don’t work out and then doing them again until they do. You don’t become ready to do anything by hesitating and waiting.

Many times you only become ready to do something after you have done it for a while. You will only really feel ready to ride a bike after riding long enough that you aren’t afraid to fall. You will feel more comfortable in raising children after yours are grown. You’ll feel more comfortable with sex after you have been practicing a while. The same is true for emotional change. You will only feel ready to heal emotionally after you practice working through some of the stories and beliefs in your mind.

The Catch 22 for Kelly is that if she waits until she is ready to take take action she won’t ever take action. If she starts when she feels ready she won’t ever heal emotionally.

In the Self Mastery Audio Course there are exercises that will help you to be a healthy skeptic of the self defeating logic in your mind. There are also exercises for emotional healing. If you are not yet ready to heal emotionally it would be a good time to start.