My work seems to alternate between yelling at people in power and helping us all heal. I guess I like working top-down and bottom-up.
This one is a healing post. And chock-full.
In each video, I aim to give away the farm on healing. In that spirit, I have two new offerings. Both also free.
-Additional ‘Ask Me Anything’ livestream every Thursday at 5 pm PST on TikTok (starting March 20th). (@drmegroekle)
-Two 30-minute one-on-one sessions (in a row) every Friday at 11 am PST on Substack (starting March 21st)
To sign up for a Friday session, direct message me on Substack. Let me know what you want to talk about. You must be okay with your name and face being seen and the session being recorded.
I know it’s vulnerable. But there’s nothing to be ashamed of in healing. Let’s do anti-therapy together—no secrets, just authenticity about what we experience—what we’re all healing.
Here are the shared beliefs from the video above and how I see them as untrue (though there are countless ways to debunk them).
* Bad/wrong: Being morally bad/wrong implies an external authority with a moral code. This is insanity; there’s no such thing. There’s only what’s true or not. Imagine you’re 3 years old, and you don’t want to share your ice cream, but a parent tells you you should share. They’re implying that what you want is wrong in some way—so you override your natural response. The whole time, you just want the ice cream.
* Not worthy/not good enough: Also insanity. Everything has inherent value. Full stop. In the colonizer’s world, worth is extracted—people and things are taken out of context, and worth is measured by service to the machine. It’s the same for ‘not good enough’—what’s good is what serves the authority, not what we want. Let yourself be the authority on what’s good, or of worth, to you.
* Not loveable. The awareness that we ultimately are is already loving. When an infant looks at herself, she’s in love. When she looks at a parent, she loves. When the parent looks back (without a story), it’s love. Pure awareness finds everything lovable. Awareness loves. However, this doesn’t mean our body wants to be around these people; there are many people I love I have no interest in being around.
* Don’t belong/weird. Years ago, I wrote a short essay called ‘Giraffe on a Farm.’ Imagine you’re a giraffe who grew up on a farm. You eat from the trough like the other farm animals—who tell you you should be grateful to live in such a nice place, with your food delivered and all. But you belong on the safari; it hurts your neck to eat from the trough. Moral of the story—we’re just in the wrong environment. Our problem isn’t being a giraffe.
* Broken, I’ve got problems. We don’t break. It’s not true. Point to your brokenness. You’ve got complex trauma? Chronic pain? Neuro-spicy/divergent? Differently abled? Still, where is the brokenness? You operate differently than most. Ok. Doesn’t mean you’re broken. And problems? Point to them. There aren’t any. You’re not a problem to solve. You’re a divine being to honor.
* Sick. All sickness is the body healing itself. It is the healing. I can’t tell you how many I’ve laughed with a client about getting sick ‘right on time.’ They’d been overworking themselves (me too, this was my pattern); the sickness got them to lay down for a week and recover. Or it helped us pay attention to an area of the body we’d neglected. Or get us out of going to an event we didn’t want to go to. It serves, 100% of the time.
* Stupid/dumb. I was disheartened in my first graduate school class—an intellectual assessment class, and I hated it. Those godawful tests only measure how indoctrinated people are. I say stop testing. Who cares? Give us the opportunity to show how creative and intelligent we are when focused on something exciting and fulfilling.
* Incapable/unable. See #7.
* Gross/disgusting. I’ve had several clients say this about their sensual desires. Food. Sex. Etc. But it’s like the ice cream. We want what we want, and we like what we like. The conditioning around our sensuality is violent; we’ve been taught control of ourselves and others. We need to strip away the fear conditioning to see desire as just desire. It doesn’t have inherent meaning. Before any conditioned story, it’s simply a movement of sensation, a movement toward someone or something. The key is to know if it’s a true desire versus a desire mixed with conditioning, which leads to trouble.
* Useless/purposeless. No one is useless, just as no one is worthless. Every body can enjoy their inherent purpose if given the freedom to find it. Of note—what we feel like doing is usually radically different than the options our insane society offers.
* Too slow, too fast, etc. Any observation of the animal queendom (and we should say queendom; females generally run the show) illustrates how every pace, every weight, every length, every rhythm, and every weird quirk exists in nature. Comparisons and measures make no (literal) sense; we can see, diversity is reality. It’s possibly the most obvious thing about this world.
* Ugly. This one is wild to me. If you’re a dog or cat lover, have you ever seen an ugly dog or cat? I haven’t. The dogs who win the ugliest dog competitions are the most adorable! We’re different. No one is ugly; we’re different shades and shapes of beauty.
* Too masculine, too feminine. This one is also bonkers. We need to give ourselves all the room in the world to explore this spectrum. What if there was not one social condition on being masculine or feminine, a man or a woman? What if gender expression was utterly free? How would you express yourself?
Lastly, here’s a healing tip, utilizing relationship strain to find our root stories.
Wishing you easy healing. May your radio pick up all the magical stations and none of the noisy ones!
* cover image by Natalie Sierra
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