If you have ever wondered why there is a feeling of being lost, it's due to the effect that our issues have upon us. They take us on loooooong trips during which we ride the waves of history - the story embedded deeply within the conditioning of our issues. During the trip, we try to make it work. We try to become better and stronger, but often sink into avoidance, escape upon threat, fight when we must, and retreat when decisive action is called for. The stories make us believe this is who we are, yet this identification makes us inseparable from the very core of the issue. Thus we live through the issue like we live as a particular character in our "favorite" dream or nightmare. Yet when we wake up from it, we realize it was a dream.
Our issues are what make us dream while awake. And we dream in as many ways as we have issues that all contain a certain character with a particular history. That history is full of physical, emotional, and mental reactions to particular stimuli that push our buttons. Those buttons make us re-experience those age-old issues as if they happened right now. Thus we find we are not free from them at all - thus the fear, sadness, and anger, not to mention bodily symptoms that we've been carrying in certain parts of our body for years and decades.
Waking up from issues means waking up from the identities our stories have made us believe we are. Each one of them create a sense of separation from the wholeness of life. Thus each healing of an issue serves as a mini-awakening - an awakening away from who we thought we were towards what we actually are. In practice, it means the lessening of the internal dynamics: negative thoughts, emotions, and physical sensations - and experiencing oneself much more of an observer (or witness) to the dynamic rather than being submerged or identified with them.
