In therapy and spirituality alike, we are often encouraged to look deeper, ask more questions, and trace reactions back to their origin. The work becomes a practice of constant learning and healing — unpacking patterns, examining wounds, refining awareness. But somewhere along the way, as we go deeper into it, the process itself can become another identity to uphold. We begin to monitor our growth the way we once monitored our pain.
When every experience is analyzed, joy starts to feel like a case study. A simple emotion becomes something to decode. A conflict becomes something to dissect. Even silence becomes a technique rather than a resting place. The nervous system never fully settles because it is always “working on something.”
There is a paradox here.
Therapy teaches reflection, and spirituality invites inquiry. But both ultimately point toward presence — toward a state where not everything needs to be solved. Insight does not arise only from questioning; it also emerges from pausing. Not all wisdom is extracted through effort. Some of it rises when we stop searching.
And in all this focus on the subconscious — the unseen, the ancestral, the karmic — we sometimes forget the body.
While we trace imprints and untangle memory, we tend to the body mainly as a container for trauma or a doorway to deeper access. But the body is also a living vessel, a sensory instrument. Flesh that was given to experience life in this 3D reality — through touch, taste, sound, movement, scent, and breath. Through warmth on skin. Music in the chest. Food on the tongue. Feet on the ground.
Our senses are not distractions from healing. They are regulators. They calm the nervous system. They anchor us in the present. They remind us we are alive. These are not lower forms of awareness. They are embodiment.
To care for the body only as a means for psychological healing, while neglecting the lived physical experience, creates another imbalance — almost unfair to the life we came here to inhabit.
The integration of the body in our growth is profoundly underestimated. Elevation is not achieved by transcending the flesh, but by inhabiting it fully. Wholeness is not escape; it is inclusion.
We are not here only to heal so that we do not repeat another lifetime. We are also here to experience wisdom in flesh. To feel insight in the nervous system. To let awareness breathe through muscle and bone.
Growth is not only excavation. It is inhabitation.
There are seasons for inquiry, and there are seasons for simply being. Moments to trace a wound to its origin — and moments to let the body lead without explanation. Therapy at its most mature helps us trust that we do not need to be perpetually fixing ourselves. Spirituality, at its most grounded, reminds us that what we seek is not elsewhere — it is already here.
And perhaps, if we move through this process more freely — a little lighter — like Mario with three lives, we begin to live for living, not just for healing.
Sometimes the most profound healing is not another breakthrough.
It is fully inhabiting the body we are in — and the life that is already happening.