What is Healing?

What Is Emotional Healing?

The path starts here: one day, you wake up and realize something has to change, but you don’t know what needs to change or how to change it. Perhaps you’ve tried all the obvious answers already. Maybe you’ve sat across from a therapist for months, maybe years. Maybe you’ve read all the books, done the work, said all the affirmations…and yet something in you is still stuck.

You’ve thought about your childhood, and you have figured out where some of your patterns came from. You may even understand yourself better than ever. But you still get angry in the same situations anyway. You still shut down. You still hold onto grief that seems to have nowhere to go. You still feel anxious even when you know, intellectually, that you’re safe. Maybe you keep repeating the same relationship patterns, or you feel disconnected from people you love.

Many people feel that there is “something wrong with them,” and that they are somehow singularly resistant to change or intervention. They begin to lose hope. We are here to tell you: it is not a failure on your part that you haven’t gotten better. It’s often a sign that the healing you need doesn’t live in the place you’ve been looking.

Lasting Change Requires An Open Mind to Explore and Mind/Body/Spirit Integration

Deep, lasting change is not something that happens because you finally found the right words; that is usually just the beginning. Healing is a process of integration, bringing scattered, protected, or frozen parts of yourself back into relationship with the rest of you.

Emotional healing does not rely on a single technique or teacher, because people and their experiences are highly varied. Disillusionment, trauma, persistent sadness, feeling scattered & anxious, having a short fuse, chronic indecision, grief, and existential despair almost always co-arise with each other, and with pain in the body, difficult memories, and disconnection in the spirit.

This guide isn’t about selling you on one method. It’s about giving you an honest map of what alternative emotional healing can look like. If you’ve already tried the standard of care, which we recommend first, and you are looking to mend your soul, integrate mind/body/spirit, and get a fresh take on emotional healing, this guide is for you.

Note: We are not a mental health facility, and our guides are not clinical therapists. We work with those seeking alternative or complementary session work. If you are having serious symptoms like hallucinations or suicidal ideation, or are actively addicted to substances, etc., we recommend you seek professional care. We don’t diagnose or treat the condition; we treat you: your life force and spirit.

What Emotional Healing Actually Means

When skin is cut, is it the antibiotic or the bandage that heals? Of course not; it’s your amazing body. When injured, the body sends out a set of reactions, and a complex chain reaction occurs. Every moment, a wildly complex system is keeping you alive, fighting corrupted cells, and regulating your breathing, blood sugar, etc. Why would we assume this ends at the body? Holistic treatments for emotional healing honor our innate capacity for healing the mind, body, and spirit. The question is why does our healing get blocked through painful experiences?

Healing gets used interchangeably with “feeling better,” but they’re not the same thing. Feeling better can happen through distraction, numbing, or simply enough time passing that a wound scars over. None of those require healing; they just require survival, which your mind and body are quite good at.

Emotional healing is different. It’s the process of fully feeling, processing, and integrating an experience so its shadow no longer affects your subconscious mind and nervous system in the background. In his groundbreaking book, The Body Keeps The Score, Bessel van der Kolk describes how unresolved stress and survival instincts stay trapped in the body, leading to chronic tension, illness, and emotional numbness.

A wound that’s healed doesn’t disappear; it is something that you carry differently. Most importantly, it stops making decisions for you without your permission. It can become a source of tremendous wisdom and strength.

One observation has become clear to us over the decades: being with the body brings clarity or relief, or both. We don’t know why exactly. Often in meditation, we are asked to “be with our breath” because the breath is in the body, and the body exists NOW. It speaks its own language, and tuning into that wisdom allows for insight and relief.

Catrina: Case Study

Let’s take the example of Catrina. Catrina had contacted us after the worst year of her life. She had been fired from a job of 16 years without cause, her beloved dog got run over, her dad had passed away, and she had fallen down the stairs, cracking her tailbone. The tailbone had healed; doctors were no longer sure why it was causing her crippling pain, and suggested it was “in her head.” She had tried all the typical avenues of healing: physical therapy for her tailbone, talk therapy for her grief. And they both helped…but not totally. She still suffered from pain that couldn’t be explained; she still couldn’t let go of the feeling that life was “crushing her.” She had fear of reinjuring her tailbone, fear of loving another pet.

We used deep meditation techniques to invite Catrina to deeply feel into the “scary area”: her tailbone. As she sat and breathed, as she bravely opened herself to the possibility of feeling into a painful area, she had a massive emotional release. It almost seemed as if her nervous system had associated ALL pain in her life with the tailbone break. As if her nervous system had decided: grief and hardship will literally BREAK you, as the stairs had. See how Trauma can imprint itself on the mind-body.

This emotional release was the beginning of real change for Catrina. She reported that her tailbone pain was somehow “holding” the pain of the last few years. Breathwork helped to further move the stagnant, fear-based energy, and the coaching outdoors brought renewed hope and a sense of “I can do this.” That feeling: I can do this, is the force of healing. Healing moves us forward, courageously.

This story matters because a lot of people arrive at “what is healing” already exhausted by approaches that treated symptoms without addressing what was underneath them. For wounds that formed before language, or wounds that were too overwhelming to process at the time they happened, rationally originated insights alone often aren’t enough to move them. You can understand exactly why you feel a certain way and still feel that way. That gap between knowing and feeling different is usually where people get stuck, and it’s usually the moment they start asking a bigger question than “what’s wrong with me.”

The Body-Mind Connection: Why the Body is the Forgotten Link

Trauma and chronic emotional pain aren’t only stored as memories, they’re stored physiologically. When something overwhelming happens and isn’t fully processed in the moment, the nervous system can get stuck in an activated or shut-down state, long after the danger has passed. This isn’t a metaphor. It shows up as chronic tension, disrupted sleep, digestive issues, a startle response that’s always slightly too high, or a sense of being anxious for no reason you can name, or, for Catrina, chronic, mysterious tailbone pain.

This is why someone can spend years understanding their pain intellectually and still feel it in their body every day. The nervous system doesn’t respond to being explained to. It responds to being felt, moved through, and completed: the fight, flight, or freeze response that got interrupted needs a way to finish, not just be discussed.

This is also why body-based approaches, somatic work, breathwork, movement, time in nature, work that bypasses the analytical mind entirely often reach places that conversation can’t. It’s not that talking is wrong. It’s that talking is one tool, built for one part of the system, and healing sometimes requires tools built for the rest of it.

Inner Work and Emotional Healing

Deep inner work can take many forms. To access the inner child requires a softening of the daily, egoic mind. Using meditation to calm the mind and awaken awareness, then visualization, can be helpful here. For many, memory work is especially helpful. We can recall painful core memories from childhood, feel into the associated feeling, and “reframe” the memory as something we’d like going forward.

Case Study: Amanda

Take Amanda. Amanda discovered that she resented her dad for being a “workaholic” during her formative years. She felt grief at the time they lost together, and anger that he chose work over her. Intellectually, she knew her dad had his limits and reasons, and was doing the best he could, but her inner child felt rejected and wounded. After an emotional release session where Amanda explored and released pent-up feelings toward her dad, we did a memory work session where Amanda reimagined her relationship with her father as she wished it had been.

In a relaxed state, she began to reimagine the childhood she wished she had had. She imagined him reading to her before bed, his body next to hers to cuddle. She imagined him kissing her head and tucking her in. Finally, we ended Amanda’s retreat with a session on moving forward. The question was: could she now give to others what she felt she didn’t receive? Amanda felt that her calling was in working with kids, to help them feel seen. Deep inner work looks different for every client, and the work often needs to be paired with emotional release first, we can’t be expected to reimagine a new past and future when drenched in pain. Always honor the painful parts, because they point to healing and growth!

Spirituality and Emotional Healing

The body and mind/emotions are clearly linked. But what does this have to do with our spirituality? When our lives lack purpose, we begin to walk the spiritual path. In the story above, when Amanda healed her inner child, she began to feel that she could give.

Often people invite spirit or awareness into their healing process. For some, a higher power has healed and clarified their path; for others, their ancestors, or their own abiding awareness and resultant insight has brought them relief. All spirituality has in common the concept of purpose. Many people have been unable to heal without spirituality. Look at the wildly successful 12-step program for substance abuse. The twelve steps are intertwined deeply with a “higher power.”

In this case, spirituality isn’t only about purpose, it’s about surrender. The act of surrender instantly changes one’s bearing from “in control,” or of the ego, to humble. It takes the mind from a state of “been there, done that” to an open and receptive state of mind. This receptive state is deeply conducive to spiritual growth, because to grow, we must learn, and to learn we have to be open to seeing ourselves clearly, all of us.

A few great thinkers and their definitions of spirituality:

Rumi: Moving beyond the ego and discovering union with the Divine/Love.

Carl Jung: Encountering the deeper Self and integrating the unconscious into a whole person.

Alan Watts: Realizing that we are not separate from life; awakening to our fundamental connectedness.

Eckhart Tolle: Awakening from identification with thought and becoming fully present to Being.

Thich Nhat Hanh: Waking up to the present moment and recognizing our interconnectedness with all life.

Ram Dass: Moving beyond the ego toward awareness, compassion, and loving presence.

Joseph Campbell: Following the inner journey that connects us with meaning, mystery, and the sacred.

David Whyte: Entering into a deeper relationship with existence through attention, wonder, and belonging.

Lao Tzu: Living in harmony with the underlying flow of reality rather than forcing our way through life.

William James: Spirituality as the lived experience of connection with something larger than the individual self.

Thinking about what spirituality means for you, and how it relates to your inner life, your healing, and what responsibility you have towards others can help you access healing energy and inspiration.

Practices That Can Support Emotional Healing

Many practices can help heal, such as meditation, mindfulness, breathwork, nature-based or shamanic practices, body awareness, memory work, etc. Meditation and mindfulness have been used for hundreds of years to calm the mind, ground you, and help you step into awareness and out of entrenched patterns. Why is this so important for emotional healing? Because many times our thoughts are engulfed with limiting beliefs and dysfunctional processes that often go unnoticed. It can take one small thought to sour a mood. Then, we often react to the soured mood as if that mood exists in a vacuum, as if we are its victim, and this sets off a chain reaction of negativity. The ability to catch unhelpful thoughts is the very first step to any real change, since you can’t change what you cannot identify.

Breathwork is another deeply transformative modality. The ancient yogis believed breath is life; prana is the invisible but detectable life force surging through you. When scared, we hold our breath or hyperventilate. When angry, we usually also tighten and chest-breathe. Like our thoughts, our breath patterns are patterns of “holding.” They clench down to protect you. By breaking up the pattern of our breath, by bringing breath into deeper parts of our lungs, by breathing deep into your holding patterns, deep, subconscious tensions can be accessed, and those blockages released. This gives you the opportunity to release those long-pent-up feelings and choose to let them go.

Memory and dream work serve to help us access our deepest subconscious and bring it to the conscious mind. Memory work in particular plays off the idea that the brain is neuroplastic. If you could find a way to convince your mind that your childhood was a safe, fulfilling, and loving environment, wouldn’t that be amazing? Some healers think we can change our memories, in the sense that we can change how we respond to memories, and influence our nervous systems to accept OUR version of what happened (and, after working through any forgiveness, you get free rein to imagine a different past). Mental practice and visualization physically alter the brain’s motor maps just as actual physical practice does. In her book, The Brain That Changes Itself, psychiatrist and researcher Dr. Norman Doidge describes how imagination can help patients unlearn chronic or phantom limb pain. This is just one example of how mental practice and focused imagination can create tangible, physical shifts in the body.

Just as our minds possess the capacity to heal and reshape themselves from within, the natural world offers a refuge where that inner work can truly take root. Not only does looking at green plants create a greater sense of well-being almost instantly, but nature can also be a fountain of healing and a spiritual medium. Sedona is surrounded by wilderness. The rocks are bare and exposed. You can touch Mother Earth’s structure directly. You can access the eons it took to form those layers and layers of sediment. Nature can be a powerful tool, whether it’s for you to feel relaxed and inspired, or if you feel a deeply spiritual connection.

Healing After Difficult Experiences Such As Trauma & Grief

Many seek emotional healing after a difficult life experience, such as the loss of a loved one, partnership, marriage, or job. Many feel at a crossroads: maybe they are changing jobs, or their kids are growing up, and they are feeling lost. For those choosing a healing retreat, we find the majority of our clients have faced deep challenges. Very often they feel the need to get away from their current environment to get a fresh perspective.

For major life upheavals and transitions, there is much to be said for seeking a new, stimulating experience. Meeting new people in new, beautiful places, that alone can be healing and expansive. Tough experiences often cause the energetic body to contract. Our dreams may contract; we may feel small, think small, feel trapped.

The healing process can be encouraged by a change of scenery and an influx of new perspectives. When you leave behind what is bothering you and come to a new place with positive intent, you create the initial conditions that give you the best chance at lasting change.

Grief in particular can be lasting, even life-long. The journey with your grief is not to forget the pain, but to process it so it is, at first, bearable, then slowly, hopefully, something that brings in new things to love. Your loss can never be replaced, but your life is still worth living, and you can learn to use that loss as a new starting point.

What an Emotional Healing Journey Can Look Like

What can the emotional healing journey look like? The only thing we can say definitively is that healing looks different for everyone. There isn’t one timeline, one modality, one practice that works for everyone. Most likely, you will benefit from many different healing modalities as your healing progresses. What resonates with you today probably won’t tomorrow. The very act of reaching out and trying new things can start the process of deep inner renewal, finding inner peace, and restoring wholeness. What is your healing story? How did you turn your deepest pain into something new and inspiring?

Without a firm belief that you can heal, you likely won’t. While our life force wants to heal, like the cut analogy at the beginning, the truth is that analogy only goes so far, because the mind runs primarily off of thoughts and beliefs. If you believe you are stuck forever, you might be. The very first step is to find that place in you that believes in possibility, change, hope, no matter how small. Cultivate that mindset, and begin your path at the beginning.

Our Sedona Healing Retreats are so exciting because they blend many different modalities and practitioners in world-class beauty. You get a custom itinerary, built just for you and what you are going through. Try out many modalities and listen to many teachers, all wrapped up in one diverse but cohesive experience. Already planning a Sedona Retreat? Read more on our detailed retreat guide.

Read more articles on emotional, somatic, and mind-body healing.