Our deepest wounds surround our greatest gifts.  – Ken Page

Temporary, but excruciating, pain is the price of healing. – Vironika Tugaleva

We are all broken. It’s impossible to live a full life and not come away with a dent or two. This is part of the journey, but just because we don’t make it through in one piece doesn’t mean we’ve failed. These broken places end up being the crack that lets in the light. Carl Jung talks about the healing that takes place as an archetypal energy we all experience. The wounded healer within comes to give the gift of greater consciousness. As funny as it sounds we need the wounding, because it’s only in the process of healing that the magic of transformation happens. This relationship seeds growth, and there is no escape from this cycle of wounding and healing except to surrender and go through it. Here is where our choices of how we deal with what’s been handed to us matter most. In the end we are responsible for our own healing.

There’s no doubt that life can lay it on thick sometimes. We are given plenty of practice dealing with tumult and tragedy. Sometimes life gets the best of us and we start to limp along through our days just getting by. We run and hide from what tortures us, we numb ourselves and tell ourselves lie after lie to avoid a painful reckoning. It may seem a reasonable response, who courts disaster or purposely runs into the flames? The problem is that running away cultivates a cavernous void, there is emptiness where joy should reside. We have to look inside to fill the void. Healing takes place when we face the parts of our self that are broken and take responsibility for the role we play in them. When we finally accept our part we somehow facilitate the miracle of healing. Once we face what we fear and all that wounds us we are forever changed, by the wounding, the confrontation, and overcoming the fears that have kept our true self hidden.

Life asks us the same question in a million different ways, who are we, what are we made of? Our answers bring us closer to our essential self. These answers come by doing the work of the self and the spirit at the deepest levels possible. When we do we begin to heal those inner lacunas in a way that makes sense to us and are freed in the most unexpected ways. Responding with our own unique voice heals our own particular wounding. This is the process that opens us more fully to life. The way we answer may be different, each wound unique, but where we are broken always points directly to what needs tending. If we follow where we are lead there is redemption, and the old habits that kept us stuck in half living fall away.

So find the places where the wound has split you open, it offers a truth that’s waiting to be discovered.

kb