The holidays have a way of turning up the light, sometimes softly, like candles flickering in a quiet room, and sometimes all at once, exposing everything we carry beneath the surface. They illuminate memory and absence, tradition and rupture, joy and the unfinished business of our lives. For me, this season has become less about celebration and more about awareness. I call it illuminated healing.
For a long time, I believed healing was something you achieved. That if you worked hard enough through forgiveness, discipline, or sheer will, you would eventually arrive at a place where the past no longer touched you. What I’ve learned, through years of living, losing, loving, and telling my story, is that healing is not an endpoint. It is a practice. One that requires honesty, courage, and a willingness to sit with discomfort long enough for it to teach you something.
In my book, Christmas Cactus, I trace my life through moments that at first seemed disconnected: a childhood shaped by passion and expectation, journeys across Colombia by train and road, the humbling months I spent shoveling horse stalls in rural Georgia, the formation of unexpected sisterhoods far from home, and the unraveling of a long marriage that forced me to confront who I was when the roles I’d built my identity around began to dissolve. Each experience carried its own lesson, but it wasn’t until I began looking at them together—mapping what I now call emotional DNA—that I understood how deeply connected they were.
The holidays have a unique way of activating that emotional DNA. They bring us back to family dynamics, rituals, and stories we may have outgrown but never fully escaped. They remind us of who raised us, what we inherited, and what we’re still carrying, sometimes unconsciously. Illuminated healing begins when we allow those patterns to surface, not to judge them, but to understand them.
Like the Christmas cactus itself—unconventional, blooming brilliantly when least expected—healing doesn’t follow a linear path or a tidy timeline. It emerges when conditions are right: when we slow down, when we listen, when we stop trying to fix ourselves and start telling the truth. I’ve learned that healing can happen in silence, like the shared stillness of a women’s retreat in the Catskills, or in radical honesty, like the moment I met myself in a psych ward and had no choice but to see my pain clearly. I realize now that you own your healing; like my cactus, life will present its thorns, and you can hang lights and ornaments to turn your life into a beautiful Christmas cactus.
This season, I’m reflecting on how far I’ve come because of these difficult chapters. I’m honoring the courage it took to write my story, the humility required to acknowledge my mistakes as a mother and a partner, and the grace it takes to accept that not everyone heals at the same pace—or at all. Illuminated healing has taught me that awareness itself is a form of liberation. You cannot change what you cannot see.
As the year closes, my wish is for presence, not for perfection or resolution. That we allow ourselves to sit with what is—grief and gratitude, longing and love—without rushing past it. That we trust the quiet intelligence within us that knows how to heal, how to soften, how to bloom again.
May this holiday season offer each of us illuminated healing: the kind that doesn’t demand answers, only honesty; the kind that doesn’t erase the past but transforms our relationship to it. And may we carry that light forward into the new year, into our families, and into the stories we are.
by Lina Clavijo