Even if our primary interest is in spiritual transformation, we cannot separate out our unresolved relational trauma, attachment wounding, and the narcissistic injury we may have experienced.
What I’ve discovered in my own life (the hard way) and also in my clinical practice with a lot of dedicated spiritual practitioners is that if we fail to tend to our own wounding and trauma, it will inevitably leak out, and color any realization that we might have.
Unprocessed somatic and emotional material has a way of creating a perceptual sieve through which we come to imagine ourselves, others, and the world; and also how we imagine and relate with nature and with the Divine.
There is no bright line separating our verbal, emotional, somatic, and autonomic narratives; they weave together and interpenetrate one another in strands of dark and light. Each, we might say, an equal arrow in the quiver of the Beloved as he or she or it or they seem to come into the world of form, of time and space.
No matter how deep and profound our realizations have been, they will be filtered through whatever unmetabolized trauma that remains in the vessel of the body.
The invitation is to enter into that vessel with curiosity, with a fidelity, even a devotion to the full-spectrum unfolding of this human form, to care deeply about all of it, and to allow that devotion and care to flow out into the neural circuitry of the world.
Photo by Ingo Jakubke
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