You don’t need to heal to be whole. You just need to stop chasing the one who needs healing.
Because what’s broken was never you... just your idea of you that you've been carrying, like a backpack of heavy rocks.
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There’s no pot of gold at the end of this rainbow. No finish line called “enlightened.” No future version of you finally worthy of peace.
That’s the quiet trick of the healing spiral... it keeps you orbiting a self that doesn’t exist.
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I’ve been there. Journaling with a clenched jaw. Meditating not to listen, but to escape. Reading wisdom like it was a checklist to transcend pain. Thinking: maybe this book, this retreat, this teacher… will fix me.
But I was never broken. Just misidentified.
I was fixated by the eclipse — a shadow passing across something that never stopped shining — and I believed the light had gone.
The rise of the false self looks like progress. But it's just like the moon covering the sun. The healing, the striving, the self-improvement.. all chasing the light... by standing in front of it. The source was never gone. image: Rick Fienberg aboard the cruise ship Paul Gauguin in the South Pacific near New Caledonia in November 2012.
One day, I stopped. Not long enough to call it quitting... but I was finally still. And in that stillness, I saw:
The part of me I was trying to fix wasn’t the problem. It was the doorway.
And the moment I let it be — without fixing, naming, or decoding — it rested quietly like a child no longer needing to be shushed. Still. Whole. Already home.
You can’t become your way into being. But being shapes all you ever become.
It’s not something you achieve. It’s what remains when you stop reaching.
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You’ve felt this too.
There are two of you — not in theory, but in experience. One moves, speaks, tries, worries, reaches. The other watches. Not passive. Just still. Unmoved by the noise. Unimpressed by the striving. Already full.
Most of us live as the one who pecks at the fruit. Rarely do we rest as the one who simply sees.
But that one… has never needed healing.
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Let me be clear:
Some wounds need tending. Some stories need to be witnessed. This isn’t a rejection of healing... It’s a release from the performance of it.
Healing, when it comes from love, is grace. But healing, when sold as salvation, becomes exile. A market built on the lie that you are not already enough will never show you the door marked “Stop.”
Because the answer doesn’t scale. It doesn’t sell. It doesn’t addict.
The answer is simple: Drop the habits that make you sick. Not just the food. The thoughts. The comparisons. The constant reaching.
Let go of the trying... And return to the rhythm beneath it all.
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Pause and reflect for a minute:
Where are you still trying to earn your way back to yourself?
What if there is no "back"... because you never left?
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Try this.
For today: Don’t fix. Don’t heal. Don’t become. Just observe. Gently. Closely. Without commentary.
Watch the urge to improve arise... and let it pass. Like weather. Like wind. Like yesterday’s name.
Wholeness will not arrive. It’s already here, underneath all the strategies meant to find it.
You were never separate. Only taught to chase the mirage.
With you, Zaheer
P.S. If you’ve been on this path long enough to feel tired of it — that’s not failure. That’s signal. Let the exhaustion mean something. You’re not quitting the path... You’re quitting the performance. P.P.S. If you missed my letter from last week, read it here: You were never here to matter... Only to be
