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Your Right to Heal and Be Whole
Nine healing rights you may not know you have.
Posted September 3, 2022 Reviewed by Vanessa Lancaster
What do you believe about yourself at your core? Do you believe you can heal and be whole?
Here are nine individual rights that, if we believe enough, we can feel how we want more often: healed and whole.
You have the fundamental right:
1. To exist and take up space. You have the fundamental right to be here–for no other reason than the fact that you are already here.
You may have been made to feel small or non-existent at some point which may have led you to feel the need to stay small or puff yourself up to overcompensate. You may have believed you needed to do this to be loved, but your worth cannot be diminished. It is never less than another’s. You have the right to take a full breath at any moment.
2. To have needs and wants. Needs and wants may be emotional, physical, or spiritual. You may have learned that you can have needs but not wants, or perhaps that you should not have either. You may have learned you can have needs and wants with conditions in place. You have the right to both, and you get to define what they are. You can have respect, love, work, play, and fulfillment. You can live with deep integrity in how you care for yourself with boundaries, nourishment, and kindness.
3. To be separate and also belong. You have the right to join, participate, separate, rest, and be still and silent. It is your right to be apart from others, individuate as a person and express your uniqueness. Right now, you belong exactly where you are without needing to contort yourself to fit in. You have the right to healthy communication that helps you connect and disconnect as you want or need to. You are connected even when alone.
4. To not know and make mistakes. You have the right to learn and grow. You have the right not to have an answer, not to anticipate all the things that may go wrong, or to become obsessed with preventing them. You have the right to be unsure, change your mind, and have your answer for yourself. You have the right to be imperfect, make mistakes, and still enjoy life.
It is okay to fail. You have the right to try new things without knowing what will happen. You may leave problems unresolved. You can adapt and change and mature throughout your lifespan. You have the right to be different than you were a minute ago, to stretch yourself, and awaken to something new. You also have the right to transform.
5. To be ordinary. You have the right to be “as is.” You also have the right not to stand out, achieve, or be more extraordinary than you are. You have value without needing to “arrive” anywhere personally or professionally to feel special.
You are a paradox: broken and whole simultaneously, a sinner and a saint, wounded and healed, ordinary and extraordinary. You can stop striving and embrace yourself without more self-improvement. You have the right to grow organically without becoming the best. You have the right to stop achieving and lie fallow.
6. To love and be loved how you want. You have the right to unconditional tenderness for yourself. Your inherent worth entitles you to dignity and intimacy. You have the right to love who you want and how you want and continue growing this way. You have the right to be kind to yourself, express compassion and gentleness, and relax. You can move through life with an open heart, giving and receiving support. You have the right to infinite intimacy with this moment, which is enlightenment.
7. To find your path and tell your story. You have the right to follow your heart to live authentically. You are your authority. It's okay to complain, to hold a different opinion, and to speak it aloud. You do not have to go along with the status quo or anyone else’s insistence about how things are or who you are. Find wisdom from your own lived experience and trust it.
8. To live with contentment and ease. You have the right to deep relaxation and gratitude and to live with more simplicity and less effort. You have the right to experience the full spectrum of emotion–grief, pain, anger, loss–and still, connect with inner peace and joy. You have the right to equanimity and contentment at any moment despite your circumstances or feelings.
9. To connect with beauty and freedom. You have the right to experience nourishment and joy, to find the ordinary extraordinary at any moment you choose. You have the right to see the sacred in everything, live creatively, and experience pleasure daily. You have the right to drop any façade or pretense and live freely.
Live creatively and release prefabricated ideas and constructs about yourself, the world, or your God. You have the right to assume the best about yourself and connect with beauty. This is part of awakening.
