The following piece was started as I restarted my blog about part of my breast cancer story.  Then recently I unexpectedly lost one of my dogs.  This lead to adding more about grief. I am sure there will be more in future, but this is a good start to the ideas of healing and grief. 

Healing – what is it?

It is physical, emotional, years in the making! It ebbs & flows. 

The definition of healing is: vb., to make free from injury or disease: to make sound or whole.

So then my question is how does one make you free from your emotional injury? How do you become whole again? Is it the same wholeness as before? Or a changed wholeness? What has changed? Is it “better”? Or just changed?

Hmm, let’s look at the word disease. The definition of disease is: a disordered or incorrectly functioning organ, part, structure, or system of the body resulting from the effect of genetic or developmental errors, infection, poisons, nutritional deficiency or imbalance, toxicity, or unfavorable environmental factors; illness; sickness; ailment. 

Sometimes healing is physical as in healing from a disease, but sometimes healing is from emotional pain like grief. At its essence grief is emotional pain in the form of sorrow, sadness and/or suffering. This can come from many different hardships.

The definition of grief is: n., suffering hardships; n., emotional pain, generally arising from misfortune, significant personal loss, bereavement, misconduct of oneself or others etc.; sorrow, sadness. 

Personal loss, this feels like many different things wrapped up into one. Grief at the loss of people, animals, life changes, the lost ideas of what you thought life would be and more. How do we unpack these losses if we have put them in a box on the shelf? If we take the box down and open it, what will happen?