As mortals, we are inherently driven to search for meaning, value, and wholeness throughout our life journey. Could it be that the very thing that wounds us is also the balm that heals us into the integrity and oneness we long for?
Reconnecting To Make Meaning
Our wounding or trauma(s) disrupt our ability to make meaning out of experience, eroding our sense of identity and purpose.
We grieve a part of ourselves that was robbed, forever marked by who we were “before” and “after”.
Trauma shatters previously held beliefs and ideas, dismantles our fixed sense of self, overwhelms our capacity to cope so we can intuitively listen, and forces us to construct a new narrative to move forward in life more consciously. Our understanding of others and the world and our relation to both is fragmented, allowing the tender space for us to question the source of everything.
Besides, it can lead us to disrespect our body as we energetically, cellularly, and structurally carry shame and guilt towards it for not being able to have ‘saved’ itself.
At first we lapse into the frailty of being victimised, wallow in grief, and follow the rage. Once these feelings have been accompanied and fulfilled, taking our power back is a deliberate and intentional choice to make.
The Body: A Container For Upheaval
The choice begins with returning to the physical that was violated, our body, and to orient in the present through compassionate attention.
Since ancient history, the body has been colonised and dressed as ‘civil’. It is the site and container of cultural, political, ethnic and gender battles, explorations, revolutions, and declarations.
It is no coincidence that the body was created in a format of violation because once that happens, we can access the inbound consciousness within us.
The event of our wounding is initiatory to our greatness, setting in motion a deeper dynamic of psychic reorganisation and embryonic metamorphosis.
To heal into reconnection, an education of our stress physiology (especially the freeze response) and appreciation for our body is fundamental to understand and value what it did to preserve our precious life.
Through our body, we can tap into centuries of inherited meaning from our forebears and tell stories in a physical language beyond the limitations of words.
Our Wounds Are Numinous
The origin of both our trauma and the healing that seeps from it is a vocation guided by invisible forces far beyond our personal assumptions and predictions. Our wounding stimulates a deeper, transpersonal process of self-alchemy, healing, and illumination that we could not have initiated alone.
Bounded by the ragged edges of our wounding, we can observe ourselves as active participants in Divine orchestration and step into an all-embracing identity and sense of self that is not separate from anyone, including those that have victimised us.
We become responsible for the roles we play for each other in a nuanced, mythic, archetypal process that is disclosing itself as it acts out through us. We fear not our instrumental nature, moved by greater invisible hands, incarnating through our spiritual body.
We realise we are guided to each other to unveil the depths of our unconscious and encounter our soul with an open heart.
Personally, I see trauma as Divine intervention. It is meant to be so disruptive it breaks us completely open, which paves the way of return and remembrance to seek a more integrated whole. We are never alone in our wounding either, for traumatic events are not merely individual experiences but rather, multi-dimensional portals into the strengths of our ancestry and the transpersonal realm of our wider selves.
Image: Willa Mae Ricker and Leon James demonstrating steps of the Lindy Hop in 1943
