Healing can’t just be conceptual. It’s not a matter of thinking differently, more “positively,” or even more “spiritually” – orbiting around the wound with our favorite metaphysical beliefs, ideas, and fantasies.
It’s not clear thinking, insight, or even “awareness” that can reach into the wound and reorganize it. These can all supportive, of course, but in the end, healing is experiential, somatic, and embodied.
While the wound is open, while it’s activated and online, there’s a way in that moment that it’s weeping.
That weeping, those tears that emerge from inside the wound, these are emanations of a vital process in alchemy called the solutio. There’s a dissolving that must occur in order for transmutation to unfold.
In that moment of open weeping, the wound presents itself to be reorganized, to receive something which has been missing, something the wound has been longing for.
Not just the wound in some abstract way, but the longing is of the little one, the lost orphan of psyche and soma who has been carrying that burden of trauma, of aloneness, of unbearable emotional pain on our behalf for so long.
That longing, that yearning in the heart is to receive what has been unavailable up until now, and what was missing at the time the trauma became embedded. What that is, is love.
What in the psychoanalytic traditions we call an “emotionally corrective experience.” Or, we could call it a neural reparative experience, or the embodied, felt experience of the missing Friend, the ally, the Beloved.
In this, there’s the discovery - and this is part of the living reality of the wounded healer, an aspect of that archetypal landscape - that we can’t heal a wound that is closed.
Only an open wound can be healed. Otherwise it’s just not tactile enough, sensual enough, and cellular enough for the alchemical tincture, the healing medicine to enter into the wound, to meet and hold those tears and allow them to weep, to grieve, and to purify the heart.
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