Getting High on Recovery

A manifesto is a public declaration or a call to arms. It’s time that you issue a healing manifesto, a declaration that healing is not only possible, but it is in your nature.

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Your Healing Manifesto

We declare that there is no future in the past, no hope in living from yesterday. We are awake and today we live our lives.

We come from all walks. Man and woman, tall and short, educated and life-educated, wealthy and under-resourced, bold and quiet, known and invisible, believer and atheist and uncertain, confident and confused, Liberal and liberal, Conservative and conservative.

We are not in search of something elusive or exclusive, we are co-collaborators and co-conspirators. We conspire against fear, and jealousy, and hatred, and stigma.

We live today, our lives are not lived tomorrow and certainly not yesterday. We live today and we believe that healing is in our nature.

We don’t own healing as if it were a possession to be hoarded. Healing is like nature, owned by no one and designed to be shared and spread freely.

We take a stand. Against racism. Against abuse. Against bullying. Against homophobia. Against mental illness. Against trauma. We stand together and gain strength from our brothers and sisters who walk with us in this too-often silent march.

We seek the light. We have found life in the light, in joy, and in hope. We refuse negativity and complaining for they exhaust our energy.

We leave behind exhausting people, porcupines who delight in making attacks and sticking it to other people.

We are capable. Of love. Of healing. Of forgiveness. Of value and valuing ourselves, and the people in our lives.

We claim life. Despite our pain, trauma, disease and dis/ease, disorders or disability. Our past is more like roads that lead to a better life rather than train tracks that lead only in one direction.

We’ve all been on the receiving end of diagnoses, prognoses, medications and treatments. And then we have gotten up off of the chair, off the table and off the mat. We have lived to face another day. We are more than survivors. We are resilience.

We don’t pretend that healing is not work. Healing is our work and our work is our healing. Our work is our relationships, our creativity, our silence, our voice, our vocations.

We will not be written off as weak or failures. We are strong and we have already overcome. We are resilient.

We pour our anger, our pain, our fear into our healing. Because we choose to be better and taller, not bitter or smaller.

We are no better and no worse than anyone else. We do not posess healing as if it is something to be hoarded. We grow stronger as we share, as we talk, as we write and as we give.

We celebrate our gifts. Our scars. Our hope. Our many, many, many small steps that lead to change, to progress and to healing.

We never give up and we will never go quietly.

We are more.

We are more free than we realize.

We are more beautiful than we know.

We are more capable than we care to admit.

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If you resonated with this piece, you will also like Your Past is Not a Problem, but a Perspective and To Heal, You Must Become the Art.

I write articles about wellness, leadership, parenting and personal growth. My hope is to deliver the best content I can to inspire, to inform and to entertain. Sign up for my blog if you want to receive the latest and best of my writing.

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Keep it Real

Photo by Scott Swigart