Are you in enough pain to justify healing? Have you suffered thoroughly, and who decides the tipping point? Maybe you don't need to suffer to justify healing, and maybe anyone's life is difficult enough to require some sort of recovery from pain and loss.

Your pain is valid. Just because you're not starving, homeless, or experiencing some other form of major trauma, does not mean you don't have room and reason to heal. When we judge and compare our circumstance and our past to another's, in order to invalidate our own experience, we excuse ourself from the responsibility to heal. 

"I'm not as bad as her." 

"I don't deserve to feel his way because others have it worse." 

"I need to be grateful, not unhappy."

We do not need to judge other people's experience in order to determine who is worthy of healing - we are all in need of healing and all worthy of growth. Furthermore, our pain does not have to be monumental in order to benefit greatly from a practice of self-care and a desire to uncover wounds. Healing, like love, is available to all of us. Regardless of how bad we let things get, or how a situation appears to others. Your experience matters, and the only person who needs to understand that is you. You don't get to look at someone else who has a messier life than yours and then opt yourself out of healing. You don't get to try to heal others, care for your elderly parents, raise your children, support your spouse, and all the while disregard yourself and your own desire to heal.

Simply, if you don't feel quite right, if something keeps coming up and presenting itself, you don't get to dismiss yourself. 

I'm here in Wisconsin Dells to give a presentation called, "Yoga for Healing" to a group of social workers and therapists who work with children in need of healing. These children have been through horrible life situations, including addiction, abuse, neglect, mental illness, and developmental disorders. I may not be able to relate directly to their experience, but I can relate to their pain, which is Universal. I can relate to never feeling like enough. I can relate to the fear that no one cares or loves me. I can relate to the chest-squeezing question, Why me? What did I do to deserve this?

Most importantly, what I hope to impart and retrieve from this conference is that we are all resilient - She did it! I can do it too! Stories of resiliency are inspiring and healing in themselves. It doesn't matter so much what we recovered from, but that we recovered at all. 

To inspire a person to change, "they" say you must hit rock bottom. This means a situation must be so bad that your current reality is worse than your fear of change. And our fear of change is real, strong, and paralyzing.

Women especially tend to think we need to heal everyone else, then we will get to ourselves. But it's actually the opposite - if we heal ourselves first, we are more capable and compassionate in order to affect others. One unhealthy person trying to save another simply creates more problems and toxicity. When we stop the comparison, we are able to connect with others and therefore heal. When we stop the judgement, about who is worthy of healing and who is not, we not only open healing up to every person, but we make it every person's responsibility to become their healthiest, best self. And isn't that what we want? Imagine a world where everyone focuses on healing themselves. Imagine a world where everyone takes responsibility for their own healing instead of telling others what to do. I imagine that world would be a much more compassionate, forgiving, humble, and sacred place.