Excerpted from my free video on “Trauma and the Wounded Healer”
Many of us interested in things like spirituality, yoga, meditation have been wounded in our lives – whether that be physically, emotionally, or at a deeper soul level.
Whether this wounding manifests as trauma, disorganized attachment, depression, or through any manner of personal or archetypal betrayals, it has a way of coloring our perception and affecting our capacity to feel safe.
Our increasingly speedy and fragmented culture has come to pathologize valid human experiences such as grief, melancholy, restlessness, and anger, giving rise to psychiatric and self-help communities determined to “cure” or “transcend” dimensions of our experience that contain essential data and information for our unique journeys.
The truth is that for some of us, initiation occurs by way of transition, dissolution, and loss. These experiences are not signs of error or mistake, but calls to depth and evidence of how our wounding can serve an initiatory function.
At times, deeper healing requires that the wound disclose itself in more subtle ways, that it open and reveal, where it can seem like things are getting worse.
This is really hard to let in: why is it taking so long to feel better, to heal? What am I doing wrong? I’ve failed, yet again. To really start to trust this process and the timeline that is guiding it asks so much of us, as we don’t really live in a world that supports this idea of the wound as initiation.
It’s not an easy life, that of the wounded healer – and certainly not one that we choose consciously. But is the honorable and noble inheritance of many who are called to the path.
To really embrace this invitation requires us to walk in this world against the grain - with our own sensitivities and eccentricities by our side - and remain open to deepening revelation of shadow, and to dare to consider the radical possibility that the ally will appear in infinite ways. Not to harm, but to reveal.
… I go more deeply into this in the free video and then more extensively in the 5-part self-guided online home study course, “The Path of the Wounded Healer”
Image by Enrique Lopez Garre
