Where Does ‘Healing’ Fit into Awakening?
The Paradox of Modern Suffering
Every seeker starts in the same place: something hurts.
Maybe it’s a grief you can’t name, a restlessness you can’t shake, or an old wound that still sucker-punches you on an otherwise ordinary Tuesday afternoon. At some point, the ache becomes loud enough that you stop pretending it’s nothing.
That’s when the stories begin—the explanations, the meaning-making, the internal courtroom drama where you play every role: judge, jury, witness, defendant. The original wound may not have been your fault, but the prison you end up living in is often built slowly, unintentionally, with your own hands.
We repeat old narratives, reinforce old fears, and then wonder why the cage keeps getting smaller.
Eventually, the usual distractions stop working. Coping strategies lose their shine. And instinctively—or desperately—we begin to search. For relief. For tools. For a map.
What’s striking about this moment in history is not that people are suffering. Humans have always suffered. What’s striking is who is suffering, and how.
The people I see struggling most are not disengaged or resistant to growth. They are thoughtful, curious, earnest. Often highly educated. Many are already in therapy. Many meditate. Many read widely, listen to podcasts, attend retreats, journal, track their nervous systems, work with their parts, and can name their attachment style on a first date.
These are people who are trying—sometimes heroically—to understand themselves and live well.
And yet, they feel anxious, depleted, and quietly discouraged. They describe a sense of being stuck despite doing “all the right things.” They are not flailing at the margins of mental health; they are squarely in the middle of contemporary self-improvement culture. If anything, they are overrepresented among those who have taken personal growth most seriously.
This is why I’ve come to think of what I’m witnessing—not just in my clients, but in myself—as a kind of suffering epidemic. Not an epidemic of pathology, but of effort that doesn’t resolve. Of insight that doesn’t land. Of work that never quite seems to end.
When Effort Doesn’t Work
In this way, modern psychological and spiritual suffering mirrors another phenomenon we’ve spent decades misunderstanding: obesity.
For years, weight gain was framed as a failure of willpower. Eat less. Try harder. Find a better diet. But when an entire population struggles with the same issue despite following increasingly sophisticated advice, the problem isn’t individual weakness—it’s a systems-level misunderstanding.
We have unprecedented access to therapy, mindfulness, neuroscience, trauma-informed care, and spiritual teachings. Entire industries are built around helping us feel better. And yet, rates of anxiety, depression, burnout, addiction, and despair continue to climb. If more tools automatically led to less suffering, we would be seeing the opposite trend.
Instead, suffering has become more reflexive and more internalized. People scan themselves for what’s wrong. They assume the problem is something about them—their trauma, their patterns, their insufficient healing. And when the work doesn’t work, the conclusion is rarely “this model is incomplete.” It’s “I must be doing it wrong.”
People don’t usually say, “I’ve failed at healing.” They say things like:
- “I feel like I should be further along by now.”
- “I know better, so why do I still react like this?”
- “What’s wrong with me?”
What makes this moment especially painful is that suffering no longer looks like obvious collapse. It often looks like high-functioning struggle. People go to work. They show up for relationships. They do the exercises their therapists give them. They meditate in the mornings and scroll at night.
From the outside, things look mostly fine. From the inside, there’s a persistent sense of effort without arrival. This is where quiet defeat sets in.
“Doing the Work”
“She’s not really doing her work.”
“I want to do the work, but I feel stuck.”
We all gesture toward some shared understanding of what the work is, even though the definition remains remarkably vague. In some circles, simply entering therapy counts. In others, if it isn’t trauma-focused, somatic, or paired with a serious spiritual practice, it apparently doesn’t qualify.
Early in my career as a psychotherapist, what felt most unclear wasn’t just what the work was—it was where it ended. What does a “complete” course of treatment even mean?
The old medical model suggested a tidy sequence: symptoms → cure. But most therapists I know would laugh out loud at the idea of a cure for being human. When psychology pivoted toward ideas like self-actualization, the goal became loftier but no less elusive. Even the most skilled, insightful clinicians rarely claim they’ve arrived.
Still, humans tend not to commit to any path unless we know what we’re working toward. When the endpoint remains fuzzy, effort doesn’t disappear—it intensifies. We keep adding tools, hoping clarity will eventually emerge.
Somewhere along the way, doing the work stopped being a path and became a requirement—one no one could quite explain, and no one could ever quite finish.
The Order-of-Operations Misunderstanding
At the heart of this exhaustion is a belief so familiar we rarely question it: that there is a correct sequence for becoming okay.
First this, then that.
Fix the problem, and relief will follow.
This way of thinking feels responsible. It’s how we’re trained to solve problems. Identify what’s wrong. Apply the appropriate intervention. Move forward.
In therapy, this logic shows up everywhere—stabilization, readiness, stages of treatment. Often, this framework is genuinely helpful. It makes the work feel intelligible and safe.
But beneath the surface, another belief quietly takes hold: that freedom itself follows an order of operations.
That if we do the right work, in the right order, we will eventually arrive at peace.
Over time, I began to notice how often this assumption quietly structured people’s lives:
Once I’m regulated enough. Once my trauma is resolved. Once my patterns are healed. Then I can relax.
The problem is that human lives rarely cooperate with this sequencing. Insight often arises in the middle of chaos. Peace can appear in moments of grief. And plenty of people with stable, well-resourced lives remain chronically dissatisfied.
Clinically, I see people become ensnared in what I’ve come to think of as an order-of-operations delusion—the idea that there is a correct developmental sequence they must complete before peace is permitted to arrive.
Healing and Awakening
The same logic–I’m not there yet– quietly shapes contemporary spirituality.
For many modern seekers, awakening becomes the new finish line—something to reach after enough meditation, enough trauma work, enough integration. Different vocabulary. Same algorithm.
In nondual traditions, however, the core insight is radically simple: all experience—thoughts, emotions, sensations, circumstances—arises within awareness. Awakening is not an achievement; it’s the recognition of what is already here.
And yet, from the vantage point of early therapy or early spiritual practice, life often feels like chaos. It makes sense that people reach first for healing. Personal work often does open access to awareness. Over time, if you allow yourself, you can discover you are both: the messy, ever-changing human and the boundless awareness that doesn’t need any healing.
The trouble begins when this recognition is placed at the end of a sequence.
From a nondual perspective, liberation does not come from arranging the content of experience correctly. Peace is not produced by fixing our lives; it’s what remains when we stop mistaking fixing for freedom.
A Different Orientation
Understanding that you don’t need to heal to awaken doesn’t end pain. It doesn’t nullify the 10,000 sorrows of life. But it does something hugely important: it loosens the grip of self-blame.
It allows us to question whether the problem has been misidentified—whether the game we’re playing is actually the one we meant to enter.
If you recognize yourself here, the relief I want you to feel is simple and specific:
- You are not broken.
- You are not failing at the work.
- And you are not alone.
TH: So from what I've learned, it's up for discussion. It's really hard to diagnose …people are trying to discern it, they're trying to suss out the differences.