LETTERS FROM LOVE — With Special Guest Charity O'Reilly!

Who took those thorns from your heart?

Dear Lovelets,

A few years ago, I went off social media for a while, cancelled a whole bunch of public-facing activities, asked my family and a lot of my loved ones for lots of space, and took the time I needed to heal from some old trauma.

It doesn’t matter, for the purposes of this conversation, what that trauma was — only that it was so entrenched in my body and spirit that I thought it would be there forever. You may have experienced such deep pain in your life as well. If you haven’t, you very likely will. It is rare that anyone gets through an Earth School journey without collecting some pretty gnarly wounds. So rare, in fact, that it seems to me that trauma is an inescapable part of the Earth School curriculum. Not a bug, as they say, but a feature.

ANYWAY.

What I want to share about that time of healing was this: I was relentless about finding people who could help me get better (and Charity O’Reilly, our calming and soulful special guest this week, was definitely part of that healing team!) but I was also relentless about giving myself plenty of time and space in which to heal. There were relationships that I stepped back from, because I could not get well while also remaining in deep engagement with those folks. I told a lot of people, “I am healing from something. It’s private and difficult. I am taking time to be with myself. I cannot tell you when I will be back. I am giving myself all the time I need.”

Those who loved me in a healthy way stepped back gracefully and gave me all the time and space I needed. Those who loved me in an unhealthy way pushed and prodded and asked a bunch of follow-up questions and made demands. (The latter relationships all eventually ended, because I have reached a point in my life where, when boundaries don’t work, a story must come to an end.)

During that time, I wrote this message to myself on my bedroom mirror — or, rather, the Spirit of Unconditional Love wrote this message on my bedroom mirror, in my own handwriting:

TAKE ALL THE TIME YOU NEED.

NOTHING IS OWED.

YOU HAVE THE RIGHT TO A PRIVATE LIFE.

My dears, these messages may also pertain to you — and if they are useful, I encourage you to take them for yourself. If you are healing right now from something, you are allowed to take all the time you need. Nothing is, in fact, owed. And you have the right to a private life. Nobody but you and your own Spirit of Unconditional Love (what we call SOUL around here) is entitled to know what you are going through, or how you are going through it. You get to decide who comes on that journey with you, and who does not.

Our subject this week, dear hearts, is healing. And our guest is one of the most brilliant healers I have ever known. And love is here to help you through it. And we, your fellow Lovelets, are also here.

Let’s keep going.

Love,
Your Lizzy

Dear Love, what would you have me know about healing?

You are aces at it, baby. You love the healing journey. You are a constant explorer of new modalities, always up for the next level of self-investigation. You are an onion-peeler. You are a cave-diver of the heart, a reader of cards, a student of new teachers and a follower of wonder-workers, a taker of retreats, a reader of the latest science, a raiser of hands in rooms filled with people sitting in folding chairs telling the truth. My love, you are not afraid to heal, or to help people heal, and that is good, because there will be more of it coming, more of it needed.

But my ambitious soul, can you pause for a moment and consider all that you have already healed from?

Do you remember when you were in India, on the Eat Pray Love journey still crying every day over not one but TWO men, two exes, and you couldn’t even sit still in meditation for five minutes without your mind racing through a dreadful, hellscape inventory of all the ways that you were bad and wrong and a failure? You were lonely, frightened, electric with anxiety, heavy with despair. And you asked your friend Richard from Texas — whom you now understand to be your first sponsor, although neither of you used that kind of language about it at the time — “When will all this emotional pain end?”

And he said, “Do you want an exact date? Something you can mark on your calendar?” and you got so excited because you thought he might actually KNOW the exact date, and you said “YES!”

And that’s when he started laughing. And that’s when he introduced you to the phrase, “Rub another six months on it. The pain will eventually go away.”

You protested, “But I already rubbed two years on it!”

And he laughed again. “So rub another six months on it. And then another six months on it after that, and then another six months. Eventually that pain will go away.”

But you wanted it gone right then because it was unbearable. You wanted it over, immediately. You wanted to take a pill to make the hurt go away. You DID take pills to make the hurt go away, but those pills did not make the hurt go away.

It seemed impossible to you, dear love, that you would ever get over that pain — but when was the last time you thought about either of those two men over whom you suffered so intensely twenty years ago? Apart from mildly or even indifferently having their names come across the screen of your consciousness sometimes, seriously, when was the last time you thought about them? When was the last time you suffered over them? What happened? Where did it go? How did those thorns leave your heart?

For that matter, when was the last time you sobbed on the floor in unbearable grief over Rayya, sorrow wracking your body so hard you thought you would not survive it? Not that it’s bad or wrong to sob on the floor — no, no, it is vital and beautiful and important — but where did that grief go? Who took those thorns from your heart?

There are other traumas, too, private traumas that you thought would haunt you forever. Yes, of course, sometimes you still think about them, but you no longer feel like your body is being electrocuted by those memories. Where did it go? Who took those thorns from your heart?

“Time heals all wounds,” goes the old saying, but who is doing the actual healing? Not time itself — time itself is not that powerful.

We are doing it.

I am doing it.

Unconditional Love is doing it.

All the work you’ve done on healing is, of course, part of the healing. But only part of it. I want you to know that something is happening beyond the level that you can see or witness, and that “something” is also the thing that heals you. Yes, you work hard to get well. You always do, and you always will. But while you aren’t looking, working, studying, deep diving, sanding away at your suffering, practicing . . . I am also doing my work. While you are just walking in the woods, or talking to a friend, or eating a sandwich, or watching a cooking show, or paying your taxes, I am always working. Love is working. Love is healing you, helping you, taking it all away. And I never take a day off. I never take a moment off. My office hours are always. And most of the time, you don’t even know I’m there.

Here is how you can know this to be true. Although you have healed from so many things physical, mental, and spiritual, you cannot pinpoint the exact moment you healed from ANYTHING, can you? You can’t point to a date on a calendar, as Richard teased you, and say, “That’s the hour it ended.” Your human mind wishes that you could know such things, but Love heals you at a level far more subtle, far more gentle, far more invisible than anything the mind can understand.

It was more like this: one day, you noticed that the pain was gone. But it had been gone long before you noticed it was gone. But when did it go? Where did it go?

Who took those thorns out of your heart?

We did.

Give us your entire life, child. Give yourself over to Love, and trust that you will be healed. Go about your business, yes, of course. Be a hard worker, as you always are. Do your part, take care of yourself as well as a human mind is capable of taking care of anything — but know even in your hard work that you are not alone. There are forces of love that are with you through everything (and through everything’s aftermath) and those forces are more powerful than any modality of transformation that could ever be found here on earth.

We love you more than we could ever begin to express. Give us time, and we will take away everything that hurts.

And as for whatever you are suffering over right now, we see it. Rub another six months on it. Give us time. Be patient. We’ve got you. Do your laundry, wash your dishes, reply to your emails, pet your dog. One day you will look up and, magically, that pain, yes, even that pain, and even that pain, and even THAT pain will be gone.

Prompt

Some prompts are more universal than others, and we know that this is one of those — because if you’re subscribed to Letters From Love, you are either already healing or working on it. So this week, let’s reflect on that.

Let’s begin with this question: Dear Love, what would you have me know about healing?

SHE’S HERE, EVERYONE! A few days ago, my friend and yours, the one and only

Glennon Doyle

, joined Substack!

Her newsletter is called

Being Here with Glennon Doyle

and to mark the occasion I am going to attempt to host a Substack live for the first time, which should be entertaining — by which I mean not the content, but watching me try to figure out a new technological thing in real time in front of all of you nice people!

So! Tomorrow — Monday, April 28th, at 4:00 PT/7 ET — I will be welcoming Glennon live to my favorite social medium of all the social media, this sacred space of Substack, for a chat and I hope you will join us!