We often think healing should move fast – like everything else in life. But what if healing speaks a different language – one of stillness, depth and time?
The way we approach our healing journey has a lot to do with our relationship with time. It plays such an important role that it is worth looking deeper as it can provide valuable insights that can change our journey for good.
First, let’s take a closer look at how we relate to time in our society.
Time as Pressure
We live in a fast-paced world where deadlines, goals, and schedules structure and organize our lives. This keeps us motivated and moving forward.
But it can also create feelings of never having enough time or being behind, because there’s always a rush towards the next task or achievement.
Time as Measurement
In our society, time is measured linearly. This fosters a strong belief in continuous forward progress and predictable results.
We tend to think: If I take this action, then that will follow — like a simple equation: 1 + 1 = 2.
Time as a Resource
Our modern world is built around efficiency. We treat time as something to spend, save, invest, or waste.
When we apply this mindset to healing, it can create an internal atmosphere of stress, pressure, lack, frustration, and hopelessness – because healing works differently.
The Nature of Healing
When we soften into the nature of healing, we begin to see that healing has its own rhythm.
We can’t set deadlines for our healing.
We can’t plan it or force it — no matter how much we wish we could.
Healing isn’t a goal we can reach.
Healing is a process.
It’s not logical.
It’s not linear.
It’s not something to be controlled.
It moves more like a spiral — circling back, unfolding, pausing, deepening.
And it is deeply individual.
Healing work is:
feeling and processing emotions, cultivating safety, softness and self-trust, integrating past experiences, unlearning old patterns and beliefs, listening to the body, reconnecting with your inner world…
These are all things that ultimately escape the mechanics of our time concepts. Instead, healing asks for the opposite:
presence, trust, time, space, and surrender.
The Question
When healing doesn’t thrive in that kind of atmosphere, then why do we pressure ourselves with things like goals, limited time frames, and to-dos?
In my experience it is a mixture of two things:
1.The impact of growing up in a culture built around efficiency, progress, success, perfectionism, and achievement.
2.The deep longing to finally feel good — to be so-called “healed,” free of the struggles that make life harder.
And that is okay. It’s part of our humanness. But we can also try a different path.
And I invite all of us to explore it.
Allowing Our Own Timeline
I think what we truly need is to allow ourselves our very own timeline – to make space for the things that wait to unfold for us.
This can look like…
- Knowing that being on the healing journey is a continuum, not a race with an end goal. With every step on the journey, we move more and more in the direction we want.
- Stopping the comparison with other people’s lives and embracing our unique life path. Because we do not know why things unfold the way they do in our lives. Everyone faces their own unique challenges. Everyone walks their own path. Some things are simply beyond our understanding.
- Trusting our unique path, even if it doesn’t look like the one we imagined — even if it moves slower or takes unexpected turns.
- Releasing timelines rooted in pressure, fear, or the need to prove something — and softening into our own rhythm.
- Turning inward and asking ourselves questions like:
What do I need?
Is this right for me? - Treating ourselves like a human being that is inherently worthy — and therefore always worthy of love, understanding, and compassion.
A Quiet Return
To allow ourselves our own timeline is not a small thing. It’s a shift in everything — a quiet, powerful return to honoring ourselves.
We are allowed to step outside the time norms that don’t serve us. It’s okay to release the pressures and expectations that make us feel stressed or rushed. We have permission to ask ourselves what we truly need, to slow down, and to embrace a new perspective on our journey.
Healing doesn’t need to be rushed or measured. It’s about finding our own rhythm –
and trusting that, in our own time, we will unfold exactly as we are meant to.
- x Alma
An Invitation
Let these words settle. There is nothing to figure out right now. You can just notice what touches you, and hold it gently.
What would it feel like to give yourself the time you need and move in your own rhythm?
What would it mean to trust that your healing is already unfolding – exactly as it should?
