Laura Hughes Therapies

Healing and Joy

There is a quote that can be widely found on the internet, it reads:

‘You’re not healing to be able to handle trauma, pain, anxiety and depression. You’re used to those. You’re healing to be able to handle joy and to accept happiness back into your life.’ *

The first time I saw this quote, it captured an idea that was newly emerging for me. I had spent nearly ten years as a counsellor, and was at the threshold of offering new services including reiki, creative therapy, and intuitive readings and artwork. For those nearly ten years, I had been helping people through their pain and fear so that they might be able to live with more of a sense of safety, security, authenticity and autonomy. And it might seem strange, but helping people to feel happier hadn’t really occurred to me as being part of the work. It seemed sort of implicit: absence of pain = more ability to be receptive to happiness.

In retrospect, I can recognise this as a blind-spot I was carrying: happiness can also require conscious work for us to be able to feel and embrace it. For many years, my personal life was dominated by my role as a carer for a close relative who was succumbing slowly to cancer. From this place of personal darkness, I was able to hold space for the darkness of others with some ease – I could meet my clients in the deepest of places because I was already living on a similar level myself beyond the therapy room. In contrast, happiness was not a part of my life: it was a luxury and I could not access it with my life as it was. And as such, I don’t think I understood it.

From Darkness to Light

Following the death of my relative, my outer world changed radically. I was no longer a carer, and I suddenly had more time, more space and less demands on me. However, I had a lot of healing to do. Even though my inner resources that had previously been consumed by that role were now freed up, it was not like I was suddenly able to embrace that new freedom. It took a lot of time and therapy before I was, slowly but surely, able to re-emerge from that dark place. But even then, I wasn’t exactly thriving.

There came a point in my healing journey when I began to think about what I actually liked doing, and whether my life looked the way I wanted it to. I hadn’t really had the space to ask myself these kinds of questions in a very long time: survival mode did not allow for it. But something in me was stirring, and beginning to want more from life. These stirrings led me on a path where I rekindled my love of art, and where I explored reiki and my re-emerging spirituality. I began to feel happy again!

Happiness and joy were very new to me (and still are really!) but I fully embraced them. This new side of my life felt so light-filled: such a contrast to the darkness I had lived through. It was hard not to turn away from that darkness which holds so much richness and depth (in spite of the pain), and fall into the realm of hedonistic spiritual-bypassing. But I did resist, and kept myself as grounded as I could.

Finding a Framework

I now had a much fuller and richer inner world, along with a variety of new services for supporting my clients. ‘How do I bring it all together?’ I wondered. My next step was finding a way to weave these two polarities of darkness and light into an integrated approach, rather than presenting them as separate or contrasting modalities.

Out of this search for integration came a deeply resonant framework, based on the myth of the ancient Greek goddess, Persephone. Persephone had been in my awareness for a little while: I’d encountered some astrology posts exploring her dual role as both the Maiden and Goddess of Spring, and the Queen of the Underworld. Then, one day, it all clicked: her story provided a way to honour both the depths of struggle and the possibilities of joy, giving shape and meaning to the work I now offer.

Embracing the Journey

Persephone’s story gave me a language for the journey both I, and my clients, are travelling. There are times when we are in the Underworld, facing grief, fear, or the weight of the past; times when we linger at the Threshold, uncertain, exploring what is possible; and times when we return to Spring, opening to joy, creativity, and new life. The beauty of life, and the healing journey, is that it is never a linear process. Arriving in ‘Spring’ is not the end of the road, nor the definition of success. We cycle through the seasons, sometimes within an hour, sometimes over weeks or months, moving between Underworld, Threshold, and Spring.

Learning to hold both shadow and sunlight, and to embrace them equally, has been a defining part of my life’s journey. I am so grateful to be able to hold these different layers of the human experience more fully, so that I can support my clients in healing through and beyond their trauma, and helping them step into their joy.

If you feel called to explore your own journey, whether you find yourself in the Underworld, lingering at the Threshold, or moving into Spring, you can begin wherever you find yourself right now, by starting here.

* (I feel like I originally saw the quote on an Instagram post by Dr Lalitaa Suglani some time ago, but it seems to have an unknown author when I tried to look it up. I was recently reminded of it again from a post by lovely reiki practitioner Carmel Mulvanny on Spirit Social.)