This quote is from a young lady who was dying of cancer but she was living more than what most people are living today.  You could see that her soul was at rest.  It was moving to see and experience the peace and understanding she had about living.

 

I have recently claimed that I am on a spiritual journey to understanding healing.  I am asking the Lord to heal me mentally and spiritually.  I claim healing of my mind, my body, and my spirit.  I believe that the Lord will do it because he said that he will do what we ask when we ask with the right motives.  I pray that my motives are pure and that my words will help someone.  I pray that the Lord give me insight and understanding while on this journey so that I can help others.  I pray that people find these words and these blogs helpful through their healing journey.

 

I won’t deny how I feel with toxic positivity or with false motivation that leads to naught.  I want to know.  My journey is to discover why I feel the way I do, but more importantly, why I feel.

 

Here are my thoughts:

When we don’t feel the best, we often search for why.  We begin to retrace our steps on what we ate, how much water we drank, or what has been a recent stressful trigger.  Having that headache or that overwhelming feeling of fatigue towards the end of the workday might be a familiar wall that we hit.  Sometimes our sickness is a habit because we have normalized not feeling well.  Sometimes we may expect it at a certain time of the day and so it happens because we look for it to happen.

 

Who can diagnose these common ailments that plague our existence?

 

We avoid doctors and we explain away the pain.  Our society has trained us to not pay attention to those common signals of distress.  There is something wrong.  No, everything is not Okay!  One of the first explorations of me trying to understand why we ignore taking care of ourselves will involve looking at our culture.  What is our society doing to us?

 

What is causing us to live through the pain?

 

I think that we are so presently involved in activities that secure our future financial success that we avoid participating in our soul nurturing experiences.   We don’t think about how the stress that we cause our younger selves to endure leaves little room to nurture our spirits and our souls.   The stress of life; that striving, that pushing, and that grind that we perform due to a false notion of being successful in the future, causes us to ignore the nurturing soul work that must be done when we are younger.  We often normalize the trauma of our youth and push through it. We do not address our pain and we continue to ignore the soul work that we need to keep growing. We forget about our commitments to family, health, faith, creativity, imagination, exploration, dreams, and growth.

 

I hear the topic of feeling stuck as a big concern in our society.  Our culture has delivered to us an economic and industrial system of false security from which we traded our freedom to have. I find it funny because we should feel stuck when we are not growing.  I find it funny because we live in a burn out culture that looks at rest and play time as extracurriculars instead of essential needs. I laugh because, as toddlers, our bodies craved nap time and snacks.  We enjoyed the simple pleasures of playtime and making messes.  We often looked for hugs from Mommy and noonday walks where the sun warmed our cheeks.  These things, I suggest, are the soul-nurturing activities that we must experience as adults.

 

We avoid what is going to make us feel better.  We avoid the actions and the lifestyle that we need to have so that we can instead meet the achievements that our culture tells us we need to meet.  Therefore, we don’t get enough sleep or drink enough water. We don’t eat the right foods or exercise enough.  We don’t value quality family time or community engagement. We don’t make healthy habits like these that are prerequisites for our happy lives and our happy selves.  Even more important than these soul-filling things are the spiritual activities that we should do for better living.  We don’t read about what will keep us healthy and happy.  We don’t read our bible or take care of our spiritual nature.  We don’t create, laugh, have fun, take breaks, or take time for ourselves. Additionally, I know some of us try to make habits of self-care practices but have not reflected on whether our  ideas of care are helping us in our lives.

 

I say all this because it is time for us to start caring about our care in all aspects of life.  We must care for our bodies, which are our temples.  We, as Christian believers, must understand the dynamic between our spiritual bodies and our natural bodies.  Although we are encouraged by the apostle Paul to pay closer attention to our spiritual nature, we have neglected the basic needs of our natural bodies.  We don’t understand that to function and feel healthy, we must sleep 8 to 10 hours a night.  We must trust in the Lord to provide for us or we will take on too much stress and get those tension headaches and those nervous tummy reactions.  We must nurture and care for our relationships to receive those chemical reactions that give us a sense of belonging and safety.  There is a balance to this thing we call life.  There is a balance to living.

 

Hence, my purpose here today is to express to my readers the importance of taking better care of ourselves, while also understanding all that it involves.  I am at the point in my journey where I know that someone lied.  I do read my bible and I have ventured out to read more books about healing so that I can understand this body that we experience this life in.  I ask the Lord to guide me on my journey of discovery and to help me do what he needs me to do through the process of snack time and making messes.

 

I do not want to die because of lack of knowledge. I invite you to go on this research journey with me.

 

Be blessed always

-Tamorra

 

I continue to promote and encourage people to seek after the Lord for encouragement, hope, motivation, and food for your soul.  He said that if you really do thirst or if we are too heavy with the burdens of this world, then we can turn to him.  Let us turn to him so that he can restore our souls.

 

 

Here are some more posts about my story: