The Obstacle Is the Doorway
The term toxic positivity has gotten popular in the last 5 years or so. Spiritual bypassing has gone from an obscure concept in transpersonal psychology to a constant accusation levied agains those who emphasize optimism and happiness.
This frustrates me a bit. I honestly think toxic negativity, and spiritual ignorance is a bigger problem—it’s where most of the human race is currently stuck. And yet it’s just taken for granted as normal.
I don’t disagree with the concept—of course pain is part of growth.
I fully support diving into the shadows, facing the darkness, and walking bravely into the labyrinth of pain and confusion deep in the recesses of your mind. Not only can you not escape your darkness—it will always affect you until you deal with it—but untangling your unconscious patterns is how you reclaim the energy bound up in them.
At the same time, when I see people mired in negativity and hopelessness and identifying with their suffering, I want to offer the possibility of hope, healing, and transformation. Because I’ve been there, and I know it’s possible to heal from the most overwhelming disconnection and self-loathing and pain.
I want to say, This is not who you are. And I know, because it’s not who I am.
I know I can heal, because I can feel the part of me inside that was never broken—that can’t be broken. And that is a spiritual feeling; I can’t describe it any other way.
I don’t see love and Light and spirituality and positivity as bypassing; I see it as a support in doing the work. I can’t fight the good fight if I don’t know what I’m fighting for.
The Light is what helps me find my way in the dark.
I love rainbows and unicorns because they encapsulate what I’ve worked so hard for: goodness, joy, un-ironic enthusiasm, the right to be myself, and the ability to wake up happy for no reason. They represent pure delight, like a child’s laughter.
I love positivity and good vibes the way a starving person loves food. I grew up in an environment that positioned suffering as noble, and deprivation as righteous. The negativity and pessimism was like an oppressive cloud that infected everything. Hope always beat in my heart, but to express it felt like opening myself to ridicule.
My nervous system jangles in empathetic resonance with the monumental amount of devastation and despair there is in this world. But I also know that it’s not who I am.
I am more than my pain, and more than the cruel way humans often treat each other. I am something transcendent, even while being in this world and being subject to all the meanness it treats as inevitable and all the trivialities it lifts up as essential.
My positivity is not avoidance of reality; it is allegiance to a deeper reality.
“The Light” is not a theoretical concept to me, it’s an ever-present, always-accessible inner knowingness that is inside me as a felt reality. It never dims or goes out. In the times in my life when I haven’t felt it, it’s because I learned to ignore or dismiss it as the world pressed in on me in ever louder ways as I got older. And because I was taught that spirituality was a delusion. The opiate of the masses.
Healing my authentic spiritual nature meant reclaiming my right to feel and name and know what is true for me on the deepest level I can access inside myself.
I know there is something magical and wondrous in each and every one of us. I feel it. I don’t know how or why, but my connection to magic and wonder has always been a part of me. That is what rainbows and unicorns and sparkly glitter dust mean to me: they represent that glowing ember of truth, of realness, of goodness, that is is always there, underneath everything.
And it’s always waiting for us to feel it, if we just pause long enough and let ourselves sense it. But it’s up to us to shift into gear with it. It’s not going anywhere, but it’s not going to come to you. You have to bring yourself to it.
When I feel it, I know it, and it is self-evidently Real.
When I can’t feel it, I remember, and that remembering is what I call faith. It’s not the faith of believing in what isn’t real. It is being faithful to what is most real, even when I can barely remember what it feels like as I am crushed under the weight of my own pain.
It is my calling to seek and follow this silent inner Light. Healing work is the closest I have found to a practice that routinely gives me these moments of recognition and the relief of remembering: ah yes, there it is again, the magic. It is real, I almost forgot again!
I believe healing feels magical to me because the essence of healing is to reconnect what was disconnected. Healing is an act of re-membering, a knitting back together of what was torn asunder in an act of violence or fear.
Healing is welcoming a shamed and hidden part of you back into your awareness. It is uncovering some untruth that had kept you from knowing and celebrating your full self. It is shedding some pattern that was keeping you small. It is some shift of perspective that finally lets you release an old hurt, and love again with your whole heart.
Healing is an act of Magic.
The moment of healing feels like a revelation; it’s an otherworldly occurrence that we sometimes call a “shift” or “transformation” or “opening”. Something changes, and we are suddenly on the other side of a gap that we didn’t know we could cross.
Believing it is possible to heal is an act of faith, because when you are in that gap, it feels impossible. You don’t know what you don’t know—and you don’t know what it’s like to be on the other side.
What the obstacle is the doorway means to me is approaching whatever Immovable Obstacle is sitting there in my life with the faith that magic is not only possible, but it’s actually this exact obstacle that has the potential to be the doorway to something sublime.
This framing helps give me the magic pixie dust of willingness.
- I’m willing to imagine that it might be possible to be on the other side of this.
- I’m open to the possibility that others have found their way through an obstacle like this, and maybe I could too.
- I have no idea how else to be with this, but I’m willing to see if it could be different.
- It’s always been this way, but maybe it doesn’t always have to be this way.
- I’m here showing up for this even though I feel skepticism and doubt, because something in me feels called in this direction, and I trust that.
Willingness is a baby step toward acting from love and not fear.
And that is what makes it the magic key to turning an obstacle into a doorway.
Another way of framing this is, you have to step beyond the ego to experience grace. And grace is what carries us over the gap. And it is our faith and willingness to trust the process that invites grace in.
In other words, when we choose love, love chooses us. Because love is always there; we’re the ones who left.
I have experienced this healing shift so many times in so many ways. Which is why, as much as I study psychology and love to learn about my brain and nervous system, healing will always be a spiritual practice to me.
Which brings us back to where we started: is spirituality a bypass, or is it a necessary part of healing? That’s a question we all have to answer for ourselves, but for me, spirituality is the essence, the purpose, and the path of healing. Healing starts with knowing that the potential for healing is there, even when you can’t see it yet. And that is what I call faith. I can’t separate them.
Having faith doesn’t make healing easy, though.
I feel this intrinsic inner connection to the Light, but I’ve still spent a lot of my life feeling around in the dark like everyone else.
I’ve been stuck in the middle of some huge-ass Dim Cave of Harsh Lessons for long, long, long stretches of time, feeling crushed by the weight of the darkness, straining my eyes to see some spark of Light telling me which way I’m supposed to go next.
I still have Immovable Obstacles in my life that I haven’t figured out how to shift; this post is meant to be an exploration of the healing process and the role and nature of faith, not any kind of expectation or pressure or “why don’t you just magically solve your problems”, cause that’s NOT how I roll at all. Planet Earth is hard mode y’all. 💚
Spirituality isn’t the easy path. It’s just the path. (For me.)
Healing is really fucking hard. But it’s worth the hard.
Creativity is really fucking hard. But it’s worth the hard.
And spirituality has also been really fucking hard, in the sense that even though I feel it now in a very abiding kind of way, that has taken me decades to get to. I have gone through huge cycles of despair and disconnection, disillusionment, and questioning. I do feel like my innate sense of it is a gift, but like any gift, you have to work to develop it.
But it’s worth it. Because all of these things (healing, spirituality, creativity) that together form my North Star, come together to make life itself a magical unfolding journey that has a sense of holiness to it.
It is a life of feeling my way forward every day, in trust and faith and patience that something magical is unfolding, even when I can’t see it yet. It has taught me patience, grace, and allowed me to develop a deep trust in the Universe.
How about you? I’d love to know how you think of healing and faith, and what magic pixie dust you’ve found in your journey. 🧚🏻♀️
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