No matter how wounded the human being…

When I was 21 I was briefly locked up in a psychiatric hospital. I had become severely depressed. At least that is what I was told I was. Deep inside I knew my depression was the result of no longer being able to outrun the personal issues I had struggled with all of my life. Without anyone to confide in and nowhere to turn for help, I retreated inward as an act of desperate self-preservation.

At the time I considered life too unbearable to continue. So the answer as “professionals” saw it was to medicate me and slap a variety of labels on my condition. That only served to further distance me from a real solution to my underlying problem – self-acceptance and self-love.

While I cannot speak for everyone, I have learned many things about the variety of reasons we get lost in the limitations of our mind. With our lives moving at ever faster speeds we are often too quick to reach for a drug, or to give up on ourselves, or to isolate ourselves in an attempt to cope, or to want someone else to fix our broken lives.

For me, healing began in earnest when I stopped looking for answers to heal myself from someone or something outside me. As long as I continued to give my power to other people to fix my life, my life remained broken. Their support and advice was good, but in the end, to truly heal, I had to take the actions necessary to move myself past the pain, loneliness, and lack of self-respect. That required letting go, and letting that part of me I cannot see and cannot touch, take over.

While one size does not fit all when we speak about moving past depression and traumatic issues, I feel it is important to remember that our soul (the spirit/heart that we are) is the motivating power behind self-change. Soul houses self-love, self-respect, and determination, all of which are necessary to successfully get us through life’s hard spots. So while physical and emotional trials are very real, the same is true of our soul’s willpower to move us past them. Our soul is the higher, wiser part of us with the strength of character to overcome any challenge or change any negative habit.

For me, and countless others who have taken our power back from abuse, addiction, bad relationships, and other negative life situations, we want to be of encouragement. You are truly powerful to overcome anything in your life because your soul is whole, no matter how wounded your human being.