Healing Isn’t Clinical

Healing isn’t clinical, but is spiritual in nature. What about healing is spiritual exactly? Well, everything.

All real healing is rooted in spiritual practice and philosophy, not in the clinical therapy space, which often borrows from these sources while stripping away the essence that gives them depth. Protocols may offer structure and repeatable steps you can lay out in a textbook and easily study in labs, but true healing requires presence, not performance.

Trauma, including unprocessed and overwhelming emotions, disrupts the flow of life force. It creates barriers around the spiritual heart (our true self), leaving behind layers of defense, protection, and compensation. These energetic blocks trap our vitality and keep us circling the same old patterns. Every part of us is meant to move in cycles, including the nervous system. When something is incomplete, it stays stuck.

But everything must be observed.

Anxiety, depression, and many of our struggles often stem from a deep fear of fully engaging with life. To live fully is to feel deeply—and that can be overwhelming. Most of us didn’t receive the early attunement needed to meet life’s wild, unpredictable spectrum with openness and resilience. In fact, we had to turn away from that just to survive. Some of us experienced things that were too much to bear, shaking our sense of safety and leaving lasting imprints of the past in the present.

Healing doesn’t erase those wounds—it teaches us to hold them with tenderness, to give ourselves the care we may not have received when we needed it most.

Healing is the process of feeling in compassionate presence.

It is opening to life. And because wisdom is always a paradox, to fully live is also to let parts of the past complete so they can die off.

Healing doesn’t mean life becomes easy or pain-free. It means you can meet life, joy, loss, love, uncertainty, with an open heart and an open mind.

Feeling is being. And to be with your inner experience is the heart of presence. True presence, whether in Christian mysticism, Theravada Buddhism, Sufism, or indigenous traditions , is inherently spiritual. It requires a compassionate witnessing of your inner world. That kind of loving presence is what allows us to sit with the messy, painful, and beautiful sensations of being alive.

The antidote to trauma is loving presence.

It is the will to be. This is what mystics call God—or if that word doesn’t resonate, think of it as Source, Spirit, the eternal. It’s the force that exists beyond space and time and lives within the heart. The name doesn’t matter as God has no real name.

To heal is to come home to this source, or said otherwise, to remember your connection to all things. Not the God of dogma or doctrine, but the presence that all spiritual traditions have tried to name in their own way. It’s the love beneath all names.

This divine presence lives in the spiritual heart, your authentic self. It holds an infinite reservoir of love and will. It is the essence that brought you here and gives you everything you need to heal. It has a purpose to unfold that will inherently feel aligned for you.

Healing is about peeling back the layers that cover that heart so the purpose and self can unfold naturally. It’s a sacred return to the core of who you are. It is grounded in the body, not above it. That’s why escapist forms of spirituality miss the mark. Real spirituality is not about escapism, it’s about arriving fully in your life.

Mysticism has always understood this. Long before therapy, neuroscience, or modern trauma theory, mystics cultivated the art of presence, surrender, resilience, and expanded awareness. Today’s trauma healing methods like EMDR, Somatics, Brainspotting, ACT, etc. are echoes of what mystics have practiced for centuries: be with your inner experience, feel it fully, and let it move through you.

Everything is cyclical in nature. What is felt can be released.

In fact, many therapists are now having to unlearn what they were taught to understand these more spiritually aligned approaches. But the mystics—Christian Desert Mothers and Fathers, Sufis, Tantric yogis, Alchemists—they’ve been here all along, nodding in validation.

Healing is a transpersonal experience. From the ancient temples of Asclepius in Greece and Rome to the healing practices of Indigenous peoples, the focus has always been on inner insight—contact with something greater within. This insight doesn’t come from any one specific modality. It comes from having these experiences that connect you to all things so you can get a taste of what must be remembered.

This is why psychedelics can be so powerful for some. They help us access transpersonal states that loosen identity and reconnect us with this essence. But you don’t need psychedelics. With contemplative practice, you can reach those states on your own—by gently shedding the layers of fear, defense, and compensation that hide the heart.

It’s within us.

That’s what it means to be a mystic. Not trendy divination. Not bypass. But direct experience of the sacred through inner stillness, contemplation, and the willingness to not know.

The unknowing is presence.

It’s what happens when we let go of the past but don’t yet grasp what’s next. That’s where healing happens.

From there, we begin to see that so-called “mental illness” is often a disharmony of the inner world—a fragmentation of soul, self, and meaning. Internal Family Systems didn’t invent the concept of inner parts; it just distorted it. These are ancient, very spiritual and esoteric ideas. We are multidimensional beings—past, present, future. Lower, middle, and higher consciousness. Parts of us split off in moments of time, but they are fluid, not fixed. As consciousness evolves, these parts shift too.

Healing is the reintegration of what was lost.

Through heart-mind coherence, compassionate presence, and wisdom, we can reclaim our inner wholeness. We return to the rhythm of life.

Healing is not clinical. It is not learned in graduate school textbooks.

It is sacred.

It is cyclical.

It is spiritual in nature.

The temple door is narrow but the way is in the mysteries of the heart.

For everything & always,
The Cyclical Seed / Susan Reis