Why healing isn’t always hard work
We’ve been quietly conditioned to treat healing like a job. A serious task that demands effort, silence, composure, and a steady gaze into the deep. As if becoming whole is something we must earn by sitting still long enough, diving into our shadows, doing the “work.”
And yes, sometimes it is that way. But beneath that earnest striving lies a quieter, more disarming truth: some of the deepest shifts don’t arrive through discipline. They arrive sideways—through the back door of our awareness—wrapped in play, in laughter, in the offbeat timing of life’s unexpected grace. Some of the most healing moments I’ve ever known didn’t look like healing at all. They didn’t involve a breakthrough in meditation or a profound insight during a breathwork session. They happened mid-laugh, mid-chaos, mid-eye-roll. They arrived when I was deeply human and wildly unprepared—when I was awkward, disruptive, belly-laughing at something ridiculous, completely out of character, and completely, accidentally free. And somehow, those were the moments that peeled something back I hadn’t realized was hiding.
Why do we trust depth only when it wears a somber face?
Why do we feel more “worthy” when healing is hard? Maybe we’ve confused reverence with rigidity. Maybe we’ve mistaken seriousness for sincerity. Or maybe we’ve just been taught to believe that the sacred must look a certain way—that it has to be still and hushed, lit by candles and underscored with ambient music. That it must be earned through discomfort, through peeling back layers like wallpaper until we reach something raw.
And yes, there are seasons when discomfort is the teacher. There are times when healing requires us to sit in the fire, to feel the sting of the thing we’ve been avoiding. Growth often comes with grit. But that’s not the only way it shows up. Sometimes we’re so busy bracing for the hurt, waiting for the moment it cracks us open, that we miss the moments that come soft and unnoticed.
The ones that sneak in sideways—when joy bubbles up uninvited, when a spontaneous giggle cuts through the stillness, when we’re caught off guard by beauty, or love, or a sudden exhale we didn’t know we were holding. We overlook those moments because they don’t feel like work.
They feel like cheating.
But what if they’re not distractions from healing?
What if they are healing?
What if ease isn’t the opposite of depth, but a form of it?
What if the moments where we let go—let ourselves be silly, be light, be in motion—are the moments when something inside actually softens? When the grip of control loosens and presence sneaks in, not because we demanded it, but because we forgot to try. Maybe the ease, the play, the unguarded giggle, is not the interruption. Maybe it’s the invitation. Proof that we don’t always need to be hurting to be healing. That we don’t have to be in control to be okay. That sometimes the softest steps lead us furthest.
So let yourself be surprised. Let the giggle interrupt the silence. Let joy leak in where the edges were too tight.
Let the lightness catch you off guard and the unplanned moments hold you, just long enough for something inside to finally exhale.
This too, is the work. This too, is the path. The soft path.
With so so much love and appreciation,
Meghan