The wound as initiation

It’s important to honor that part of us that isn’t so sure about healing, about turning back toward the shakiness and the shattering, as at some deep level we sense what the implications of true healing really are: the ending of one world, without any solid knowing about the world that will replace it.

And while this may seem exhilarating or thrilling or “what we really want,” it is also disorienting and devastating to the psychic status quo, and there may always be an unconscious investment to avoid this sort of reorganization. This hesitation is not neurotic, but intelligent and human, and is deserved of mercy and understanding.

It’s natural to have some contradictory feelings about healing. While honoring that uncertainty, we can simultaneously have an aspiration to stay open to the ways our wounding may be a portal to deeper healing.

To stay open to the cry out from the heart of the wounded healer: This grief, rage, shame, melancholy, and sadness, these are not pathology, but path; with the invitation to stay open to the ways our wounding can serve an initiatory function.

The wounded healer isn’t only some myth that we can learn about: Chiron and his weeping wound and the Asklepian dream incubation temples in ancient Greece. But a living reality inside our very DNA, in our cells, buried in our neural pathways, and wired into what it means to be an open, sensitive, relational human being.

That Asklepian temple is alive within you now and its doors are open.

The medicine we’re longing for is not found in a wound that is already healed, but in one that is weeping and presenting itself to us, opening itself to be updated with new experience.

The medicine is inside the wound, not something we apply to the wound, a discovery of the alchemists and well as the neuroscientists of relational trauma. The wound has to open as well as the neural networks holding our wounding, so that we can go inside and seed those networks with new levels of holding, companionship, and safety.

Photo by nextvoyage

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An autonomic form of gaslighting

Much of our wounding occurs prior to the acquisition of language and is not able to be healed through the questioning and reorganization of patterns of thinking. In other words, we can’t think our way out of trauma.

When our capacity to process unbearable terror, panic, shame, and rage is overwhelmed, undigested pieces of experience are held subcortically and in our cellular circuitry, unreachable by thinking which is a layer removed from the fires of the alchemical body.

Encouragement to “just get over it, that’s totally irrational, you can’t really believe that, you know that’s not true” and so forth is experienced by an inflamed nervous system as the activity of violence and aggression.

It’s like an autonomic form of gaslighting and reflects a deep misunderstanding of trauma and the workings of implicit memory, and only contributes to re-traumatization, in personal, cultural, and collective networks.

In addition to shattering and unendurable experience – which is painful and terrifying enough – there is a profound sense of aloneness that goes with this, the sense that no one can understand, that there is no companionship into the dark night. I am alone in this. This is devastating to the soul.

When that raging alive little boy or aching little girl cries out longing to be held, to be known, to be felt, to be heard, to be remembered… peeking their little heads out as if to say, “Is it safe now? How about now? I’ve been waiting for so long for a companion and friend. How about now?”, they’re really not all that interested in our clear cognitive analysis, rational inquiry, powerful spiritual insight, and thoughts on the matter.

They’re yearning for something else… for you, for your heart, for your holding. To know that you will stay near, that you will not abandon or shame them, that you will do your best to provide sanctuary and safe passage for them to come Home, to be allowed to come out of that frozen state and live once again.

In this way they don’t even want or need to be healed, but to be held. And to feel safe.

Photo by Lisa Runnels

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A new sort of self care

No matter how things are going in your life, you can start right where you are. With mercy, grace, and a new sort of self-care.

The restlessness, the shakiness, the raw shattering, the grief; all valid responses to a sensitive, tender nervous system, in a world where it’s not always easy to have our center of gravity within a felt sense of safety.

We cannot tend to a future moment; it’s just not close enough, tactile enough, intimate enough. But we can surround and contain the achy life as it surges in a moment of here and now.

For just one second, shift your awareness out of the claustrophobia and spinning of conditioned thinking and into the soles of your feet as they make contact with the earth. Root there, into the mud and womb.

It’s not so safe in those old patterns of thinking – enactments of intergenerational trauma and trance. Allow your attention to come up out of the earth and infuse your belly, your heart, and your throat, with compassion, holding, and breath. Holy data.

Renew your vow: I will not turn from myself and abandon my embodied vulnerability. No, not this time. I will no longer pathologize my emotional experience, the somatic narrative, the story of my nervous system.

The lion’s roar: Grief is not pathology. Heartbreak is not pathology. Sensitivity is not pathology. Not pathology, but path.

Two seconds. Then rest. Then three. More rest. As we send breath into the broken shards, into the lost pieces of soul, a new groove is laid down, new circuity is encoded. As we turn the light around, a new pathway appears.

Ask the earth to hold you, to share her soothing water, shade, and safe haven, and stay near as you open.

Find a friend, therapist, lover, ocean, moon, star, or holy roaring lion to bear witness as you turn into the raw alive somatic world.

The seen and unseen ones are always here to help us, to reveal the way home. To illuminate the pathways of darkness and of light, each containing a particle of the mystery, a strand of love seeking you as a tender vessel through which it can come alive here.

Art by Krista Marleena – the emerging of the holy lion, as ally and guide, ceramic sculpture

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