Much of our wounding has its origin in historical experience, what happened and what didn’t happen at an earlier time. But as we all know, the neural networks which hold our wounding can and do open in the here and now. In these moments, our wounds begin to weep and to make themselves available for new relationship.
As painful and difficult as this can be, this reality is one of tremendous hope and possibility and what makes transformative healing possible.
We can’t go back and change what happened to us, or undo failures in empathic mirroring, narcissistic injury, and the tragic effects of an inadequate holding environment.
But what we can transform is how our experience has come to be organized, and update the networks which hold our wounding.
As the emotional and somatic material is digested and revised, we’re able to tell a new story of integration and wholeness, dream a new dream, and be the artist of a new world.
As midwife of the achy, tender shakiness that was once unbearable and unendurable, we provide a sanctuary where metabolization can occur and where safety is restored.
This is the entryway into the mandala of the wounded healer.
Somehow, by some grace, the ripening has brought us to this point in our lives, in ways we may never fully understand. Somehow, by some unfolding of mercy, the resources and the allies appear.
There’s nothing more hopeful and unstoppable than that, than the majesty of this body-temple and holy nervous system, and the wild realities of neuroplasticity and the human heart to reorganize and heal.
There is a trust and a confidence that dawns slowly, over time, that we can do this, that we can hold and contain and digest the grief, the fear, the heartbreak, the shame, and the rage. That new cloth can be woven. That we can feel home again, with ourselves, others, with nature, with the divine.
Alchemically speaking, that we can transmute the lead and the tin and the rust into the emerald and the silver and the golden, safe and connected, no longer alone, but fully here and welcome and wanted, and knowing that we truly belong.
Art credit: wolf as ally and portal by Krista Marleena
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