YogiWrites

The Day I Threw My Vision Board in the Trash

Picture this: me, sitting cross-legged on my bedroom floor at 2 AM, surrounded by glossy magazine cutouts and dried glue sticks, creating what I was convinced would be my ticket to enlightenment. “Six months to transform your life!” the YouTube guru had promised. “Manifest your healing in 90 days!”

I had trauma to heal, weight to lose, and a heart that felt like it had been through a blender. Naturally, I wanted it all fixed by Diwali.

Three months later, I was still crying in traffic jams and eating my feelings with extra masala. The vision board mocked me from the wall—a collage of impossibly happy people doing yoga poses I couldn’t pronounce, next to my very real, very messy life.

That’s when I realized something profound: I wasn’t failing at healing. I was failing at timelines.

The Pressure Cooker Theory of Human Hearts

When Fast Food Culture Meets Deep Wounds

We live in a culture that worships speed. We want instant chai, express deliveries, and two-minute noodles. So naturally, when it comes to healing, we expect the same efficiency.

“How long will it take?” my friend Priya asked me recently, after her therapist suggested she might have some childhood patterns to work through. She was already planning her “post-healing” life, complete with the perfect relationship and unshakeable confidence.

I wanted to laugh, but I remembered asking the same question two years ago.

“How long does it take for a mango tree to bear fruit?” I asked her instead.

“Sandeep, don’t go all philosophical on me,” she rolled her eyes. “I need practical answers.”

But here’s the thing—there are no practical answers when it comes to the timeline of healing. Not the kind we want, anyway.

The Myth of Linear Progress

We’ve been sold this beautiful lie that healing looks like a neat upward graph. Day 1: broken. Day 30: better. Day 90: transformed. Day 180: enlightened guru selling courses online.

Real healing? It looks more like the Mumbai local train map—stops, starts, wrong turns, and occasionally ending up at a station you didn’t even know you were heading toward.

I remember month four of my healing journey. I thought I was “done” with my childhood abandonment issues. I’d journaled, meditated, even had that one breakthrough crying session that felt very movie-like. I was ready to graduate from trauma.

Then my ex called.

Within five minutes, I was sixteen again, desperate for approval and willing to twist myself into a pretzel to get it. All that “progress”? Gone faster than free food at a community function.

The Art of Becoming: Why Souls Don’t Follow Spreadsheets

Your Healing Has Its Own Rhythm

Here’s what I’ve learned after stumbling through years of trying to optimize my emotional growth: Your soul doesn’t care about your timeline. It has its own rhythm, and it’s usually much slower—and much deeper—than your mind wants it to be.

Think about it. When you cut your finger, you don’t stand there tapping your foot, asking why it’s not healed yet. You clean it, bandage it, and let nature do its work. You trust the process because you can see it.

But emotional wounds? They’re invisible, so we think we can rush them. We think we can think our way out of what we felt our way into.

The Onion Metaphor Everyone Uses (But Nobody Really Gets)

Yes, healing is like peeling an onion. But here’s what the self-help books don’t tell you: You don’t get to choose which layer comes off next.

Sometimes you think you’re working on your trust issues, and suddenly you’re face-to-face with that time in third grade when the teacher embarrassed you in front of the class. Your psyche has its own agenda, and it’s usually smarter than your conscious mind.

I spent months trying to “fix” my relationship with money, reading books, doing affirmations, visualizing abundance. Nothing worked. Then one day, while cleaning out my childhood room, I found an old report card where my father had written, “Good, but could be better” in red ink.

Suddenly, I wasn’t healing my money blocks. I was healing my relationship with never being enough. The money thing? That was just a symptom.

The Permission to Be Unfinished

Embracing the Messy Middle

In our Instagram-perfect world, we’ve forgotten that being human is supposed to be messy. We’re not manufacturing units producing consistent results. We’re complex beings with decades of conditioning, trauma, and stories that shaped us long before we even knew we needed healing.

The most radical thing you can do is give yourself permission to be unfinished.

Not broken. Not failing. Just… in process.

I have a friend who’s been “working on herself” for eight years. She used to apologize for it, as if healing was a character flaw. “I’m still dealing with my stuff,” she’d say, embarrassed.

Now she says, “I’m still growing,” and there’s pride in her voice. Because she finally understood that healing isn’t a destination you arrive at with fanfare and fireworks. It’s a way of being in the world.

The Comparison Trap

Social media doesn’t help. Everyone’s sharing their breakthrough moments, their before-and-after transformation posts, their “I’m so grateful for my journey” captions. What they don’t share are the Tuesday afternoons when healing feels impossible, when you’re crying in your car because someone’s tone of voice triggered something you thought you’d already processed.

Stop comparing your behind-the-scenes to everyone else’s highlight reel. Their timeline isn’t yours. Their trauma isn’t yours. Their healing journey isn’t yours.

You are exactly where you need to be, even if where you are feels uncomfortable, slow, or “behind” some invisible schedule you’ve created in your head.

Practical Wisdom for the Impatient Heart

What Actually Helps When You Want to Speed Things Up

Here’s the paradox: The more you can accept your natural healing timeline, the faster you actually heal. Not because you’re rushing, but because you’re not wasting energy fighting the process.

Start measuring progress differently. Instead of asking “Am I healed yet?” ask:

• Am I more aware of my patterns?
• Do I catch myself sooner when I’m spiraling?
• Am I kinder to myself when I mess up?
• Can I feel my feelings without drowning in them?

These small shifts matter more than the dramatic transformations we think we need.

The Practice of Gentle Persistence

Healing isn’t about intensity. It’s about consistency. It’s showing up for yourself on the days when you don’t want to, when the work feels boring, when you’d rather binge-watch Netflix than sit with your discomfort.

Think marathon, not sprint. The tortoise wasn’t just competing with the hare—he was teaching us something about sustainable pace.

Some days, healing looks like therapy and journaling and green smoothies. Other days, it looks like ordering pizza and watching comfort shows because you’re too tired to optimize your emotional growth. Both are part of the process.

The Long Game of Becoming Whole

As I write this, I’m five years into what I thought would be a six-month healing journey. I’m not the same person who made that vision board, and I’m not the person I’ll be next year either.

The other day, someone asked me if I’m “healed” now. I laughed—not because it’s funny, but because I finally understand that it’s the wrong question.

I’m not trying to get back to some original, unbroken version of myself. I’m becoming someone new—someone who can hold both joy and sorrow, someone who can be strong and vulnerable, someone who can love deeply while maintaining boundaries.

That person didn’t exist before my trauma. She’s being born through the healing.

Your timeline isn’t behind. Your pace isn’t wrong. Your process isn’t broken.

You’re not a problem to be solved. You’re a human being learning to be human, and that’s the most courageous thing you can do in a world that wants to rush you through your own becoming.

The vision board is long gone, but the dreams it represented? They’re still happening—just not on the schedule I demanded. They’re unfolding in their own time, in their own way, exactly as they should.

And somehow, that’s even better than what I originally planned.

Ready to explore more about finding peace with your own timeline? Join my newsletter where I share weekly insights about healing, growth, and the art of being beautifully human. Because the best conversations happen when we stop pretending we have it all figured out.

What’s one expectation about healing that you’re ready to let go of? I’d love to hear your thoughts—drop them in the comments below.