Healing Backward. Living Forward.
The Origin Story That Shifts How You Heal, Create, and Grow
I have done years of therapy to heal from growing up with an alcoholic mother and a father prone to fits of rage.
I studied feminist theory in college to dismantle the sexism I had absorbed at home and in the culture around me — raised by a father who saw me primarily as an object of desire for men, and a future wife whose purpose was to care for a home and a husband.
I spent decades in bodywork to heal a stutter so severe it made me want to disappear.
And I have done nearly thirty years of psychedelic work — slowly, carefully, courageously — to find my way back from the low self-esteem, the shyness, the dissociation, the relentless feeling that I was never quite enough, and at the same time at risk of being too much. The madness of that.
I have done the work of returning. Of excavating. Of holding the younger me with a tenderness I didn’t know I had.
And it has helped tremendously. It genuinely has.
And yet. All this work also keeps me anchored to a story — that the original version of me is flawed, broken, damaged. And that my life’s work is to repair it.
What if that’s the wrong reference point entirely?
Many of us are doing this. Quietly, persistently, often heroically. We go back. To the childhood dinner table, to the classroom that humiliated us, to the parent who couldn’t see us, to the moment we first learned that something about us was wrong.
We do it in therapy, in ceremony, in bodywork, in breathwork, in the pages of journals we fill and fill and fill. We do it because we were told — and believed — that healing means returning to the source of the wound.
But what if version one was never the source?
Through the Lens of Expansive Living
What the Greatest Performers Know That the Rest of Us Forget
Watch the greatest athletes in the world and you will notice something. Serena Williams, in the middle of a match, is not thinking about the twelve-year-old version of herself who double-faulted on match point.
Michael Jordan, preparing for game seven, is not returning to the clumsy teenager who got cut from his high school team.
Simone Biles, standing at the edge of the mat, is not referencing the earliest version of her body learning to tumble. They are referencing the last best version of their performance. And the one they are about to create. The direction is always forward. The reference point is always the most refined version, not the most broken one.
We accept this completely when it comes to athletes. We celebrate it. We call it mastery.
And then we go home and spend years trying to repair version one of ourselves.
Version One Was Never the Master File
Think about your smartphone for a moment.
You are probably on version 15, 16, 17 of whatever device you’re holding right now. And that current version can do things that version one could never have dreamed of. The camera is sharper. The apps are richer. The whole experience is more fluid, more connected, more alive.
Here is what we don’t do. We don’t hold version 17 up against version one and say — see, this is the problem. This is where it all went wrong. If only version one had been better, version 17 wouldn’t have these limitations. We don’t go back to version one as our reference point. We don’t mourn it. We don’t try to repair it.
We keep building forward. Each version learning from the last. Each version more capable than the one before. The reference point is never where we started. It is always where we are going — and how we can improve on the latest version of ourselves, not spend our lives held hostage by the first one.
So why do we do the opposite with ourselves?
We treat version one — the first years of our life, the earliest wounds, the original damage — as the master file. The thing we have to get back to in order to get it right. As if the goal of a human life is to restore a corrupted original rather than to keep evolving into something more whole, more expressed, more alive.
And here is where it gets interesting. Because there is a flaw buried in that assumption. A quiet but consequential one.
The assumption is that version one — the moment of birth, the earliest years — is where we originated. That this is the starting point. The source.
But it isn’t.
The Origin Was Never Your Birthday
We live in a vibrational, conscious universe. Quantum physics is slowly catching up to what mystics, healers, and contemplatives have known through direct experience for thousands of years — that the most fundamental unit of reality is not matter. It is energy. Intelligent, alive, aware energy. And we humans, across cultures and centuries, have called it consciousness.
We come from that consciousness. Before we were born into individuation — into this specific body, this specific life, this specific name — we were part of something vastly larger. Like the spray that rises from the surface of an ocean. For a moment, those drops are distinct, separate, individual. They catch the light in their own way. They arc through the air in their own direction. And then they return. They were never truly separate from the water they came from. That spray — distinct, luminous, briefly individual — is us. Coming from the ocean. Living our arc. And made, always, of the same water.
The internal GPS is not pointing back to childhood. It has always been pointing back to source. To the ocean. To the energy and consciousness that you came from and that you still, in every moment, are made of.
A Word to the Skeptic — and the Healer
None of this is to minimize what happens at birth, and in those first tender years.
Coming out of the womb is not a small thing. It is, in its own way, like a spaceship entering the atmosphere of a new planet — a dramatic, irreversible, world-changing event. Those first years of landing on planet Earth matter enormously. The love or absence of love. The safety or the fear. The way you were seen or not seen. These things shape us. Profoundly. And the work of clearing what got blocked, wounded, or distorted in those years — that work is real, and it is sacred. I am still doing it. I expect I always will be.
But here is what I want to suggest. A reorientation. Not a dismissal.
Because we were born before we were born.
Before the womb. Before the birth canal. Before the first breath and the first cry and the first moment someone looked at you and decided what you were.
We came from somewhere. From something. From an ocean of intelligent, conscious, creative energy that is the actual origin story of every human being who has ever lived.
And that origin story — the one that predates your childhood, your parents, your wounds, your name — is more true to what you actually are than anything that happened in the first five years of your life on this planet. Not less important. More true.
So the reorientation I am offering is this. Not to stop healing. Not to bypass the work. But to change the reference point. To ask not only — how do I repair what broke in version one?
But also — how close am I, right now, to the source I came from? What is the next version of me that is trying to emerge? What would it look like to iterate forward from wholeness rather than backward from damage?
We are not broken originals. We are exquisite, complex, wondrous constellations of energy — ingeniously assembled, endlessly evolving — that have temporarily forgotten where we came from.
The Origin Is Not the Destination. It Is the Fuel.
But remembering is only half of it.
Serena didn’t just remember she was gifted. She showed up and played the next match. Jordan didn’t just reconnect to his love of the game. He went out and won the next championship. The origin is not the destination. It is the fuel.
We are here to do both. To remember the source we came from — that ocean of intelligent, conscious, creative energy — and to use that remembering as the launchpad for what we build next. The next version of ourselves. The next expression of what we are capable of. The next iteration of a species that is still, gloriously, figuring out what it can become.
We have a GPS built into us that never stops pointing toward our immense potential. Not toward who we were in version one. Toward who we are still becoming.
That is the experiment. That is the invitation. Not just to heal. Not just to remember. But to co-create — with full awareness of where we come from — the next most alive version of ourselves.
This matters especially for those of us who hold space for others. When you sit with a client, a student, a patient, a friend who is suffering — and you reach inside yourself for what they need — you are not accessing your wound. You are accessing your source. The intuition that arrives, the knowing of how to hold them, the sense of exactly what this moment is asking for — that is not your trauma speaking. That is consciousness moving through you. That is the ocean in the wave.
The healing work you have done matters. It clears the channel. But you were never broken at the source. And neither were they.
Try This
Find a quiet moment. Sit comfortably. Take a few slow breaths.
Then try on two different stories of origin. Not as a mental exercise — as a felt experience. Let each one land in your body before you move to the next.
Story One. Your life began at birth. The first years — the family you were born into, the love that was present or absent, the wounds that formed early — these are your origin. This is version one. The master file. Everything since has been shaped by what happened there, and healing means returning to repair what broke in those early years.
Sit with that for a moment. Notice what happens in your body. Does your chest tighten? Does your breath shorten? Notice what you believe about yourself from inside this story. About life. About what is possible. About how much energy it takes just to be here.
Now gently set that story down.
Story Two. You were born before you were born. Before the womb, before the family, before the name anyone gave you — you were part of an ocean of intelligent, conscious, creative energy.
You came into individuation the way spray rises from the surface of the ocean — distinct, luminous, briefly individual, and made entirely of the same water as the whole. That is your actual origin. That energy is still what you are made of, right now, in this moment.
Sit with that. Notice what happens in your body. Does something soften? Does your breath deepen? Notice what you believe about yourself from inside this story. About life. About what is possible. About who you are at your core.
Now ask yourself, from each of these stories in turn:
How do I feel about the rest of today?
How do I feel about this week, this year, my life?
What is my level of motivation? Of joy? Of creative desire?
What feels possible from here?
You don’t have to abandon the first story. The healing it points to is real. But notice — just notice — what becomes available when you add the second one. When you let the origin be larger than the wound.
That noticing is the beginning of the reorientation.
I’d Love to Hear From You
Which story of origin have you been living from? And what shifted, even slightly, when you tried on the other one? Share in the comments — I read every one.
Sending your way blessings of finding your way back to the ocean — and forward into the next most alive version of yourself.
Sending your way blessings of finding your way back to the ocean — and forward into the next most alive version of yourself.
Anna