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Have you ever seen a ghost?
If you’ve been one of the few who have, you know it can be a very uncomfortable, scary experience—but it’s also a little exhilarating. It’s the kind of experience that turns your reality inside out.
But there’s another kind of ghost that I know everyone has encountered.
The ghosts of our past.
Secrets, guilt, anxiety you’ve been hiding for years. Ghosts can be memories of relationships that made you feel small, and you still believe that. Maybe you have shame, believing that there’s something wrong with you because you’ve never felt seen, or worthy of love. Or maybe your ghost is the fear that you’ll be ridiculed or abandoned if you express your authentic self.
We’re so afraid of those ghosts and the emotion they carry that we’ll do whatever we can to block them, including sabotaging our lives.
When the ghosts of our past continue to haunt us, we cannot operate from our greatest power, purpose, and passion. The ghosts try to convince us that the life we’re living is good enough.
Some feelings are so painful we don’t believe we can get through them. The ego tries to keep us from facing those feelings, to protect us, but it really just keeps us stuck in survival mode, defensiveness, and looped in the narrative of our life’s stories.
But here’s the thing about healing. To do the things you are called to do, that you most want to do, some part of you knows that you have to face the ghosts in your darkness to do it.
We live in a world that is afraid of the dark. There’s a belief that the dark is bad and light is good. This comes partly from our primitive history and the risks of being attacked in the dark. But even today when we aren’t living in caves, there’s messaging to support this fear. The darkness has come to symbolize despair, wickedness, and even evil. And we’ve collectively agreed that that’s true.
And we’re equally afraid of the darkness within.
But the darkness is the place of birth, the incubator of creativity. What we see in the light did not start in the light. All creation begins in the dark.
It is in the darkness that our bodies heal, our minds restore, and our fantasies come to life.
Darkness offers a medicine, a profound healing. Its long been known to be an agent of power.
So, the problem isn’t the darkness itself; it’s what we’re hiding there. Emotions and thoughts we want to keep as far from our hearts and minds as possible.
And when we avoid the places within that need our attention, that want us to grow, there will be symptoms.
Anxiety, addiction, eating disorders, dis-ease—these are all symptoms. Symptoms that something is off. Symptoms we ignore.
I often remind clients (and myself) that we can’t pawn off our healing. There are no ghost hunters coming to excavate what’s hiding within us. We can choose special diets and use the crystals, soak in the sound baths, and all the tools and tricks to better manage our challenges, and we should. But ultimately, it’s an inside job.
When we take responsibility for our lives, we create our own freedom.
What I’ve realized is that most of us are as afraid of freedom as we are of our ghosts.
Taking responsibility for our lives requires trust. It makes sense that we’re afraid to trust. We’ve been hurt. But I think that we spend too much energy on trusting others, and we need more trust in ourselves.
When you trust yourself, whether it’s how you spend your money or your time, or how you care for your emotional needs, then there is little to worry about with others. Trusting yourself makes you strong and resilient. You’ll know you can withstand consequences of any decision that you make.
There is no relationship or experience that we cannot get through when we trust ourselves. It is only when we break our own trust that we suffer.
Practice quieting the noise and just be with your inner world. It takes time to get comfortable with this, but the good news is there’s absolutely nothing to do, and you can’t do it wrong. The more you practice, the more confident and connected you’ll feel.
Just trust yourself, go within, and listen.
This isn’t a time to judge or try to fix anything about yourself. Just sit and notice your feelings. Notice the stories that loop. Your discomforts. Your fears. This is time to be completely authentic with yourself. Sit with yourself like a parent would sit with a young child. Can you be compassionate to this person? Can you just listen? As you make friends with your inner world, with the dark, the parts that hurt begin to feel safe and trust you. Then the emotions or memory can loosen their grip and gently rise up and out.
This is you creating healthier relationships with yourself and others.
This is you reparenting, rewriting your story.
This is healing.
The ghosts inside of you don’t want to be there either, hiding in your dark spaces. They want your attention. They want to be freed.
You heal when you release the grip of the past and free the energy that bound you. You can reclaim the power that you’ve been giving away.
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