The Wound is Where the Light Enters You
“What the theologian shrinks from, the poet grasps intuitively.”
I sit with people and their pain for a living.
I am only qualified to do this work because I have first sat inside my own. Let it crack me open, let it teach me, let it soften all the ways in which I was hard and braced. I am still learning how to do this, I still hate it, I still resent being vulnerable. Only now: I practice with more gentle intention than before. With more compassion for the moments I fuck it up. With more patience with my slow, stumbling self for all the ways I am still a slow learner.
The poet and Sufi mystic Rumi wrote the beautiful words about how the wounds are the place where the light enters us.
To me, light is a metaphor for the Divine presence, for the illumination which comes with waking up and remembering who we really are, for the in-dwelling presence of Love. Our core wounds, when left un-integrated, un-illuminated, un-owned, un-seen create unconscious compulsions. These unconscious compulsions are the rudder that steer us, and subconsciously inform our behaviours and choices. Our behaviours and choices are the parts of us visible to the world. And so it is easy to look at someone making terrible choices and repeating patterns of behaviour and think that is just who they are.
No, that is where their wounds are.
When I am working with a client to map their core wounds, so we can get healing at the site of the injury (and not just effect behaviour change) I explain it to them like we are explorers building a map of their consciousness. Wherever I find a core wound, we mark it with an “x marks the spot” moment, and I reframe it for them as the gold waiting for their alchemical healing process to reveal itself.
“This is where it hurts the most”
(Yes, yes yes it hurts there)
“And so this is the place where your most potent and powerful medicine for the world will pour forth from you like a fountain once we tinker with it a little bit.”
I gaze at their consciousness with the gaze of Love, because I work in service to Love. It is for Love, and with Love that I partner and work, and that is how I gently coax them to bear being witnessed in the place it hurts the most.
Because others first witnessed me like that.
And the light entered my wounds and became the place I was illuminated by the Divine, and my power and potency now flows from that exact same aperture..
I know the remedy for shame, because I was first crushed under its weight and was forced to chart a path back to wholeheartedness..
I know the remedy for terror, because I stand in the yawning gap of my own terror daily.
I know the remedy for abandonment, because I was abandoned over and over and over again until I finally stopped abandoning myself.
You see? It is not my training or the letters after my name which qualify me. And I am up front about that with my clients. I work with what Fr. Richard Rohr calls ‘the authority of one who has suffered.’
“Once our core-wounds have been recognised and witnessed skilfully, they can then be gently integrated. This can be slow and steady work for some, others can shift through at quantum speed. It is never linear, and always an art rather than a science.”
Once we can name our core wounds (usually abandonment, engulfment, existential annihilation and erasure are part of the story), we can then begin to map our sneaky unconscious compulsions. For example, someone with shame around their sexuality as a core wound, likely has unconscious compulsions to engage in sneaky, risky or deceptive behaviours around their sexual expression. Someone with no sense of self-esteem or soul-esteem with have unconscious compulsions which show up like addictions, to numb the pain. Someone with abandonment as a core wound, will choose friends, partners, bosses who leave them high and dry, out in the cold and abandon them. Thats how it works.
Our unconscious compulsions shoehorn us into behaviours which can baffle us at times. We can leave ourselves thinking “why do I keep doing this over and over again?”
We do what we do until we are done doing it. When we are done doing it, we are ready to do a new thing.
There was a Hebrew prophet who once wrote a stunning piece of poetry that I think about often. He said ‘See, I am doing a new thing. Now it springs up; do you not perceive it? I am making a way in the wilderness and streams in the wasteland.’ Once we are finished doing the old thing, before we can do a new thing, we usually have to go back and check a couple times that we are really done doing the old thing. This is the most painful and frustrating part of healing - realising you are back at square one and you’ve been here before and you’ve done it to yourself. And now you have to start again. This is the Fibonacci sequence at work, and it is divinely ordered, liturgical and cyclical in nature - because the Divine knows we easily lose our bearings if we don’t get brought back to the zero point again and again.
When we start doing the new thing, at first it can feel like dying. As our old neural pathways which we developed to literally keep ourselves alive die off, it feels like we are dying. We are not, but a version of us is. People call this - variously - the ego death, or the death to self, or the resurrection cycle. I call it all of these things, as well as the way of the Phoenix, or the Christos, the Cruciform pattern or the way of Chiron.
It is the path into Love, dear ones. The only path. There is no other way. The only way to allow Love to break through, to break us open, to bring us to our knees, is to agree to this death, and to go willingly.
The first time I did this, I wanted to die. Sincerely. For a long time.
The second time, I also wanted to die, but it was over quicker.
I have now engaged in this process over 20 times, brought about by my extremely painful soul contracts, and can confirm that each time I have grown more and more loving and more and more powerful.
Last time I had one of these moments come on, it lasted for 4 days. I went into a deep Shamanic state and worked with death energy in a way I haven’t before. It wasn’t that long ago, just a few months really. It was the worse one I have been through, but because I have been doing it a while now, there was a trust in the process that held me fast.
The wounds are the place where the light enters us.
The more wounds we have, the deeper they go, the more magnificent is our capacity to hold and wield spectacular light.
We are light beings - made of stardust and the breath of god and our bodies are mini-galaxies. We are encoded for being wounded, and encoded for healing. Our bodies bear witness to the wounds in the soul of the world, in the soul of the planet, in the soul of the divine.
Inhale: “I am not the sum total of all my failures and fuckups”
Exhale: “I am strong enough to let Love in.”
Inhale: “My wounds are the place where the light enters me.”
Exhale: “I will turn these wounds into wisdom.”
And so it is, and so it is, and so it is.