Permission To Dance Badly And Call It Healing

Healing can sound big and dramatic, but for me it often starts with something small: a pause, a breath, and the courage to stop rushing past the parts of my story that still sting. After last week’s heavy conversation, I wanted to offer a gentler follow-up that still stays honest about death, grief, and the weight we carry, while pointing toward relief. A bookstore moment brought it all into focus for me: the phrase “Healing Is The New High” from Vex King. I didn’t even know what was inside the book yet, but the title felt like a promise I needed to keep close.

Life today can feel like a cassette tape on fast forward, too much noise and too many thoughts at once. Mental health conversations are finally everywhere, and that’s good, but I also ask a harder question: are we creating real understanding, or just joining another trend? I keep it simple. Mental well-being is how we navigate everyday stress, emotions, relationships, and even economic pressure. Being mentally whole doesn’t mean life is always pleasant; it means we learn to face both joy and difficulty without losing ourselves in either.

From there, I get practical about inner healing as an investment in yourself and the kind of world you want to build. I share two tools that help me: play and journaling. Drawing from Brené Brown, I define play as joy without obligation or outcome and I talk about singing loudly, dancing off beat, and creating small moments of freedom. Then I move into journaling as a self care practice for emotional wellbeing, a place to tell the truth, pray, and track your growth. I also leave you with prompts you can take into your week, because sometimes the question is where healing begins. If this supports you, subscribe, share it with a friend, leave a review, and join the WhatsApp group linked in the show notes.

Transcript

Lighter Follow Up On Death

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Hey mindful partners, how do you do? After last week's heavy episode, I thought it will be nice to follow up with an episode with death still, but Aerie and well, healing. If the last episode stared uncomfortable emotions but made you sit with a heavy, I have done my job. I want to apologize for making an episode that was that heavy, but uh that won't sit well with the objective of telling healing stories. Yet, I am apologizing and hoping this episode takes some of the sting out. I also promise to keep it short. So, recently I walked into a bookstore and saw a title that stopped me in my tracks. Healing is the New High by Vex King. I had never heard of the author before. I didn't know what the book contained, but the title spoke to something inside me so deeply that I knew I was taking it home. Not necessarily to read immediately, but to keep those words close. Healing is the new high. To let that title stare at me on the days when my mind felt like it was spinning too fast, to remind me that after all the work, the

ealing Is The New High

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reflection, the difficult stories, there's something on the other side of survival. And that something feels a lot like freedom and relief. Because sometimes the world today feels like an old cassette tape on fast forward or rewind. If you grew up around cassette tapes, you might remember the sound. That rapid spinning noise when the tape moves too fast to hear the music clearly. That is sometimes how I feel about life. Too fast, too noisy, too many thoughts springing at once. And in the middle of that noise, we are all trying to keep up. Mental health conversations are everywhere today, and that's a good thing. This one's taboo subject is finally being discussed openly. But sometimes I truly wonder: are we creating space for understanding, or are we simply participating in another fast-moving conversation the world has decided to trend? Mental health, mental well-being at its core is not a complicated concept,

hen Mental Health Becomes A Trend

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at least in my opinion. It simply refers to how we navigate the everyday stresses of life, and we all have that in it. How we manage our emotional, social, and even economic realities in the face of daily challenges. Being mentally whole does not mean every day will be beautiful. It does not mean life will always be easy. In fact, the idea that life should always be pleasant ignores the very nature of existence. There is night and there is day, there is heat and there is cold and everything in between. All of this makes life interesting. I'm trying hard not to say debiti la diet, but that's basically what it is. Mental well-being then becomes the ability to navigate both with awareness. The good moments bring joy and energy. The difficult moments bring yeah, heavy emotions. But the real work is learning how to face both without losing ourselves in either. Why do we avoid difficult stories? The truth is that most of us find it easier to sit with the good parts of life. Joy is familiar, pleasure is satisfying. But the difficult stories, those are harder to face. They bring this comfort, they ask questions we may not feel ready to answer, and so we often try to move past them quickly. But there's something important to understand when we're trying to move past them quickly. The sum of a person's life is often found in the stories that they survived. And it is especially in the difficult stories that you

top Rushing Past Hard Stories

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survived. To dismiss the stories is to dismiss the strengths that carried you through them. But you navigated those difficult stories to help you become who and what you have become today. So, may I invite you to do something that might feel uncomfortable at first? Yeah, sit with your stories. Not to relieve the pain endlessly, but to acknowledge that those experiences, painful as they are or where, taught you. Sometimes the answers we need are already present inside the stories we are trying the hardest to avoid. Pause. Reflect. Allow your inner wisdom to guide you. In this book, Healing is a New High, Vex King describes inner healing as an investment. Of course, eventually I read it, an investment not only in ourselves, but in the kind of world we want to create. Now, I know the world investment may immediately make us think of money, at least it did me, but healing investments are not always financial. And for a person who is a mindful coach, and you know, of course, I want to make money, saying it's not always financial might be shooting myself in the leg, but it is true. Often, healing investments are simple acts of care. Small practices to remind us that we matter. I'll share some of mine with you. One of the tools that has helped me navigate difficult seizing is something very simple. And if you've been following Mindfully with Timish on Instagram

ealing As A Real Investment

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and even Facebook, um, on my personal page, you will know this. It is play. Yes, play. Whatever that means for you, find play. Of course, you know I'm going to draw from someone, and that someone is almost always Brene Brown, who defines play as an activity done purely for the joy of it, without obligation or outcome. It's a moment of freedom, and for me, play can look like singing loudly at the top of my voice. I love that actually. Dancing to music even when no one sees me, or even when people are looking, I just dance and I never dance off bit. Or watching an image slowly come to life in a paint by number kit. These small moments reconnect me with something deeper. When I began paying attention to these things,

lay As A Serious Practice

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I realized something interesting. Many of these activities that bring me peace today are things I loved as a child. Before life became complicated, before some of my stories changed, those were the moments where I felt most like myself. So I began returning to them, not as nostalgia, but as a way of reconnecting with the parts of myself that always knew how to breathe. Another powerful tool for me is journaling. I write everywhere on my phone, everywhere. There's paper around me, everywhere. It may sound simple and even cliched, but writing does give me a space to speak honestly first to myself and then to express frustration, to describe anger, to celebrate joy, to document the full range of my experience, to pray, to write my own psalms. And sometimes when I read those pages later, I find myself smiling and saying, Tsumishi, you did that. Those moments remind me that I matter to myself and sometimes to the world. So, even if the world is so noisy, even in the middle of this noisy world, in the middle of your difficult stories, may I invite you to pause, sit gently with your story, and perhaps find your own version of play. Because sometimes healing is not dramatic, sometimes healing looks like singing loudly in your room, dancing to a song no one hears, writing a sentence in a journal that reminds you that you matter, and if you ask me,

ournaling To Tell The Truth

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that kind of healing is the real high. Remember, I said I was going to keep it short. If you're someone who likes to sit with your thoughts for a moment, yeah, here are some questions you might take into your journal this week. The first, what is one difficult story from my life that I have been trying to rush past? And what strength did that story reveal about me? When was the last time? That's the second question. When was the last time I felt truly playful or free, even if only for a few minutes? And what was I doing in that moment? In answering the second question, remember the definition by Bernie Brown. Play is an activity done purely for the joy of it without obligation or outcome. And the third question: what is one small act of care I can offer myself this week that reminds me my healing matters. Remember, you do not have to answer all this question at once. Take your time, get a journal, find play. Sometimes the question itself is where healing begins. So breathe, hold space for yourself, and just be. Alright, if this episode resonated with you in

ournal Prompts And Closing Requests

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any way again, follow, please share, give us a like. Uh that gives us a little bit more visibility, and truly, I would appreciate it. Then if you think this it supports your journey, join the WhatsApp group. The link is in the show notes, and you and I can continue and maybe we can help each other gain more clarity in this world that we're trying to understand. A huge thank you to my assistant Toby Ogenshi for making things easier here and on socials. So, love yourself, love your neighbor, love your country. Above all of this, love God. He is the essence of your being. I am Ulu Watsumishi. Stay mindful.