“Are you okay…?”⁣
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“No, I’m not,” I responded, “and I’m fine.”⁣⁣

Healing is hard, my friends.⁣

⁣Years after the losses and traumas, it’s still hard.⁣
⁣
Because healing asks you to meet yourself, your old wounding, your heartache, and your fears in a way that most will spend their entire lives avoiding with everything in them. It asks you to welcome that younger you with open, loving arms and listen to everything they have to say. It forces you to face into the places where you let yourself down, where you tolerated the intolerable, where you lost yourself and your voice.⁣
⁣
My life is good right now.⁣
So very, very good.⁣
⁣
And yet, the healing work still takes me out at the knees sometimes. It still guts me in ways I’m not sure I could ever accurately describe. Meeting the parts of yourself that you abandoned or ignored, that you allowed to be abused or mistreated, that were left with the deepest of scars… it can leave you so very ‘not okay’, so very much in pain, and so deeply affected as you process all that was never felt, shared, or acknowledged.⁣
⁣
But even then, you’re still fine and okay. Life is still good and beautiful. You’re still moving forward as you sort through all that’s old and ready to be released.⁣⁣

We don’t talk enough about how hard healing is. How messy and confusing it can be, because to process out what’s old and ready to be released, we must exist inside a state of cognitive dissonance that’s hard to make sense of.⁣

⁣We must know who we are and who we’re becoming well enough to separate out what’s real and true right now from what is old and hard and rooted in fear.⁣
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Healing is not for the faint of heart⁣.

But you, my friend, can heal from anything. Truly. If you make the choice to weather that period of messy duality. To face and feel what’s old and ready to be released, so that you can finally move forward without it.⁣ @StephenieZ (Click to Tweet!)

Stephenie Zamora is an author and life coach, business and marketing strategist, and founder of CallOfTheVoid.tv., where she merges the worlds of personal development, energy healing, intuitive coaching, writing, and mixed media art to help individuals rise up and come back from the darkest, hardest chapters of life. She guides her clients through the challenging process of re-orienting to their lives, relationships, and work in a way that’s fully aligned with who they’ve become in the aftermath of loss, trauma, depression, and big life changes. After struggling with PTSD, grief, and anxiety from a sudden and traumatic loss, she navigated her own difficult healing journey, and has set out to help others find the purpose of their own path using The Hero’s Journey as a framework. She is also the founder of Stephenie Zamora Media, the author of Awesome Life Tips®, creator of Journey Mapping Sessions™, and is currently working on a second book, Unravel. Her work has been featured on The Huffington Post, Yahoo Shine, Elite Daily, Positively Positive, and many other publications over the years. Connect with her on Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, or at www.CallOfTheVoid.tv.