Wounds

Wounds

A lover of mine taught me a lot about love and sex and pain and the wounds left behind. She was a bit of a dream for me. More experienced, mysterious and dynamic. I was learning to fall in love with dancing. She danced as a way of being human. She was kind and patient, terrifying and insightful..

One day she turned to me, as I remember it – out of nowhere – and said “You know there are two ways to have sex. One is a sharing where both people are fulfilled. In the other, one person can dump their garbage. It is all for them.

Sometimes she struggled with words as if they didn’t like her. Other times she said things like that. Sometimes, words just aren’t the best way to say things. Other times, they are.

After talking, she bent her body, demonstrating an unwanted intrusion, miming the pattern of a woman who is forced to painfully adjust to whatever rhythm a man inflicts upon her. She looked away “When a man is in a bad mood, he can push himself on a woman. He’ll leave happier. She’ll leave with the bad mood alive within her.” She didn’t need to say ‘don’t do that to me’.

She looked at me again, and suggested that I never even imagine making love with a woman who doesn’t love me…”When people have sex without love, they embody what the other despises..”

I never forgot these exchanges. I centered most on the sense of why. Why is it even possible to want to share something awesome, with someone who doesn’t want to share it?

When someone is wounded, the wound itself is a bundle of wound up energy, that vibrates in direct relationship to the incursion that cut into their space. Trauma exists like spiritual rape in our energy body. Whether this is a literal blade that has entered flesh, or the remnants of a soul that has been abused by rage, the wound itself lives on well after the body and mind seem to move on.

In your energy field, the wound up energy continues to vibrate. It occupies a part of your life force, sapping strength just to keep living on, parasitically. It makes sense to itself. The same pattern often acts to intrude into other people’s lives, to force itself into the world. To be more real.

This wounded spirit often acts as a tension. You may not really experience it directly very often. Yet the static of its presence can induce habitual mental strain, and physical stress. Like an unwanted song, buzzing in the background, undermining the rhythm and harmony of the life you want to be living.

For many, the act of kicking the wound out of your immediate awareness is their primary concern. When you do not have to regularly think about it anymore it seems like a wound is gone.

This is not true healing.

To get life into a state where you don’t have to feel or remember the echo of the pain, can seem to be a victory. Yet this often functions as a painful sacrifice. The healing is not over, and until it is, the resonance will continue to live inside you, draining. Keeping you weak. The state of suppression can often be a step backwards, because you will resist feeling and remembering the wound again. Often, you must feel and remember in order to fully heal. If your goal is to avoid discomfort, this cannot happen.

Hurt people hurt people. The energy of a wound contains the story of wounding. The wound is a pattern. It includes the entire play you lived through, with the roles of abuser, witness, saviour, enabler, and whoever else was somehow invested in the environment of the initial trauma. Thus, if your primary goal is to ‘stop the pain’, you may get lost in a karmic cycle.

When you’ve been wounded in some form of drama, you will be magnetized to similar stories in other forms. You will continue to live through these similar dramas, until you fully disengage from the core karma.

You will not be able to escape the pattern until your karma is complete. Yet you will be able to play other roles within similar stories. Often, these roles may seem preferable to being a victim again. You may be drawn to turn the other way when another person gets wounded, subconsciously grateful it isn’t you. Worse, when rage and hate fester, they draw minds towards a more hellish role as an abuser. When you are the one who inflicts abuse, you briefly seem free from the terror of being abused.

If you allow yourself to understand this patterning, you’ll be confronted with the painful and challenging truth of deep healing – healing is not about escaping pain. Healing is about transforming your relationship with the entire pattern that created the wound. None of the roles in such a story are acceptable. Not even the role of saviour will completely save you. Because true healing is not complete until the entire story is cleansed from your aura. Gone from your karmic life. The intensity of this truth lasts beyond lifetimes. Until you learn to transform yourself, you will continue to find roles in similar stories, haunting you.

I have never met an abusive person who was not themselves abused. In this way, our popular culture does us a deep disservice. Evil is neither powerful nor complex. It is simply the sick, wounded and broken psyche, addicted to its own pain and driving maniacly to re-experience the initial story, in a different role. In a role that seems to be powerful.

As such, to defeat evil, you have to aim deep into the mess that a wounded person has become, and see the hurt within. Then, this person must somehow be contained, and connected. The resistance at this depth of sickness, is intense. The wound itself is essentially in control of the host soul. It is making the major decisions. It is fighting with a majority of the person’s strength – fighting NOT to be weak again. So getting underneath this resistance is extremely difficult.

Underneath the resistance is a shard. The remnants of who the person was at the time of their wounding, frozen in time, caught in a broken cycle.

Imagine life as a journey on a spiral road, where progress weaves along the course of a three dimensional path. A wound traps someone in a circular loop. When life makes it around a 360 degree turn and is about to rise above an old turn in the road, the wound itself reaches out to trip the progress. The soul falls back down the spiral, forced to traverse the same territory again and again in a broken loop.

If you are honest with yourself, you will be able to identify ways in which you repress hidden rage and pain. Hopefully, these forces do not take over very often. So it’s unlikely you think of yourselves as evil. However these stuck wounds are the seeds of the worst forces we live with.

And if that is not enough to inspire you to more carefully address whatever wounds you carry, I hope it is enough to recognize that you lose your strength when you do not fully heal. It doesn’t just generate your bad moods and lethargy. It prevents you from being full and alive and prepared to invest inwhat you really want to make real. You feed your wounds with your own strength, daily.

Wounded people cannot trust enough to share true, deep intimacy, because their circuits are entrained with the pattern that hurt them. This wound supplants natural instincts and deeper love. People may seek to inflict themselves on someone else, to feel powerful within the same patterns that have wounded them. If they manage to contain these instincts, they are still bound, wound up, in cycles of feeling rage, and holding it down. Anger turned inwards in this way, creates depression.

We are bundles of energy, collections of waves of light. Imagine you have 100 strands of light. Each wave becomes committed to different aspects of you. Every morning, as you awaken to the world, you can sense yourself re-investing your own lights strands in different ways. Some of the strands of light become committed to wounds when you have not yet healed them. If you are not directly addressing them, you have to do something to work with the dissonant vibrations. This is often a simple act of repression, which absorbs still more of your energy. You are feeding the wound, and you are committing energy to hold it down, supposedly out of sight out of mind.

Lacking the ability to hold your pain down, it is possible to essentially inflict it on someone. They will be forced to adjust to your rage. By hurting someone else, they leave with the resonance you may deny as yourself. Temporarily, the vividness of such predatory behavior may alleviate the torture of the dissonant wound. Hurting someone else blocks out the pain, for a while. Yet the cycle doesn’t last, and the dissonance returns. Mastering this terror is a true victory, but it is not complete healing. True healing frees you from the entire cycle.

Yes, we can identify many shades of such sharing and encounters. Sharing that is a trade of sorts, sharing where both partners benefit, yet one is more intensely affected than another. Yet the distinction between exchanges that leave garbage, and sex that is truly making love, remains underneath it all. Are you fully alive? Is all your strength available to invest in your dreams now? If you cannot see yourself, look at your relationships. Look into how you share, and whether your sharing brings thriving life to each partner.

I will not tell you what love is. In so many ways, your answer to this question is your sacred right to shape on your own. Yet I will pray, that you only engage intimately with those who, in some way you trust, love you. May those you have left be blessed by your memory. May those who you meet soon, be open to create new dreams with you. May you thrive.

Next Blog… Healing

In the Roots

I’ve been dealing with a swollen big toe and it has been ruining me for days. It sounds silly as I say it, but it really knocked me out. For several days, I’ve had a flare up of Lyme. It has been two years since the last, and this isn’t nearly as bad, and for two days I couldn’t walk. I couldn’t concentrate. I couldn’t sleep… and none of these things have been my worst problem.

Sickness isn’t sick. Disease may make you ill at ease, yet being ill at ease isn’t always bad for you. Fevers cleanse infection. Pain exposes wounds. People often harbor illness, wounds, and dysfunctions. Sometimes, often, sickness and disease are exposing what is already wrong. They are not – in and of themselves – THE problem. When we are broken, and weak, we are no longer capable of hiding from our fears, mistakes and trauma. Sickness is a time to dig deeply and heal.

I say it, and wham! I got sick. I was aware of the irony, yet I had more panic than I’ve had in a long while, at first. Am I crazy to think this way? Is it recklessly bringing on symptoms I wouldn’t have to deal with if I wasn’t so blasé with my attitude?

And yet I followed my own guidance. I stared at myself. Amidst the confusion of a mind gone wild, I learned about myself. I couldn’t read. I couldn’t stare at a screen, or walk outside, or even pee comfortably. So…

I came up, with loose ends. I like this term ‘came up’. It speaks to the truth of it. Pondering, wandering in the mind, is like diving. There is some form of spiritual Oxygenation that calls us back. I’m a whale, and I forgot things in the deep. I was getting dragged down, and I chose not to fight.

I comprehend being skeptical about mystical insight. I ‘get’ how people can write it all off as a placebo – a false belief that works to make us healthy as long as we believe the lie. And I challenge you to get over it. Move past the fear and doubt. There is something for you here.

Spirituality, intuition, mystical healing, all challenge paradigms. It can certainly be frightening and painful to explore health – and life – this way. It is worth it.

So here I was, diving deep like a spiritual whale. I aimed to go INTO the tensions. I breathed with them, and discovered, me. That’s right, me. I felt all these little shards of hope. Different dreams I held in the past. Dreams that are all gone now, yet they didn’t fully leave. I never closed them. They are frayed energy, leaking intention into nothing. Waddling about in my mind, getting lost. Preventing growth.

I remembered a woman I thought I’d marry one day. I never really said goodbye. I thought of a farm I thought I’d help revive, live in a little cottage by the river… and a city I thought I’d settle in before coming home… and a lost dream to live in the woods and choose silence for a year… and.

I wrote them all down. All of them. I lost the lines on the paper, and didn’t care. The squiggles emulating the chaos in my mind. I’ve been holding all of this down, and it made me weak. A weakened body cannot confront disease well. So when disease arrives, face what makes you weak

Do you know how to breathe into different parts of your body?

Here’s how it works. Thoughts and feelings are alive. They have a living presence, and even material weight. They are held in our body, and we feed them with our life-force. Sometimes, you can’t just say no. You can’t simply walk away. Some hopes are too strong to be abandoned so callously. I know this. I teach this. Yet I’d lost some serious dreams by the wayside, and never gave them back to the Earth.

Problems with the legs and feet connect in to the Root Chakra. Challenges to our place in community, and the way our needs are met. The Root acts to feed us. It carries the pattern of the life we are living, and teaches us whether we are in good shape to thrive. Do you have the support you need to live well? Are you surrounded by friends who believe in you, in your mind and heart? Is your service effective? Are you ready and willing to do the work the Earth is asking of you? What do you need to make it so?

All these shards I brought up within the swollen pain, were about huge life choices. At one point – a part of me – was willing to dream my entire life around each of these dreams. Without settling them more clearly, I have been nurturing extreme challenges to the life I’ve chosen. Because they are still there, saying “Follow me! Feed me!” And each of them would have me abandon the life I AM in. (Past dreams can be quite selfish. Afterall, THEY came first!)

I’m emerging from the cocoon of a new child. We are getting the hang of this parenting role, my wife Tali and I. I presume its the intensity of this life, that pushed me so deeply, to find the shards of days gone by, that need to go back to the Earth, now.

So this combination The Root, the Heart, the Chin, makes a very powerful chord. It draws energy up out of the Earth, through our spine and up into our head. It is a strong statement about moving forward. Activating it, and keeping it moving for a while, is a powerful prayer.

So I drew strength up out of the Root. I burned the list of lost dreams, and drummed. I prayed to let them go gracefully, as I embrace the life I’ve chosen. So I can fully be here, now.

Today I will keep the vibes alive. My very real infection, is leaving. My ephemeral haunting dreams, are leaving. And the song and drum call spirit up into my body to flush me clean, and prepare to live well, today.

The Truth and the Lie

It is likely that you are living a lie.

I’ve met some people who are full of the truth. Not many. I can’t name them now. We passed each other in this life, and moved on. I’m sick of knowing lots of people, loving lots of people, and yet taking it for granted, that the truth is something we can’t really afford to trust. The truth… is dangerous.

Or forgotten.

The truth, is that the Universe is covered in life. You know this. You might not remember it. You might not want to remember it. But somewhere in the recesses of your Spirit, it is simply true.

Exploring the truth, as if it is full of maybes, and we will eventually put the parlor game conversation down and go back to ‘real life’, is a lie. It is a lie we have all shared, willingly as if it is normal.

I’m not going to talk with you about the complicated ‘why’, yet. The why is  both simple and complex. Why are we here? The complex why is distracting. The simple why is not. We chose to believe in a lie, inorderto forget. And throughly

Be

Here

Now

I want to talk with you about the truth, and the difference between resting on the truth, planting yourself in the truth, and remaining shallowly rooted in bullshit. But first? A joke.

Here is the joke. The world is 5 billion years old. It went through a number of vast volcanic phases. Oceans emerged. Creatures learned to swim. Then gazillions of years later, they dragged themselves up onto the land. They pranced around. Evolved into dinosaurs. Ruled for a while. Then got smote by a meteor and all died off. Mammels emerged. Wandered. Breeded. Scoped out territory. Plants thrived. The carnivores kept the herds balanced from overgrazing. The stream beds thrived. Life existed in balance…

… untilwecamealongandfuckeditallup.

Within 40,000 years of learning to use basic tools, we destroyed the balance between predator and prey. We ruined the stream beds, annihilated the forests, and dumped so much garbage into the Ocean that the central Pacific is a no mans land where ships will not cross. An ocean of plastic pollution.

Trust me, its a joke. Its bullshit.

There is one, and only one good use for bullshit. Compost. Let it sit. Turn it over periodically, and then, once it has finally broken down, and no longer stinks high hell… sift it into your garden and plant anew.

This bullshit has sat still long enough. Its ready to be torn apart and mixed in as soil. We are ready to stare at the truth. It is time.

There is a stone in a fast flowing stream. You are unsure if the stone is stable. So you put a foot on it, and test it. Just one foot. The other is safely on shore.

Look I get it. Believe me. It is sane to be careful. It is wise to be safe. None the less, there is a profound and fundamental difference between reaching your foot out and standing on that rock, and THEN LIFTING YOUR OTHER FOOT. And standing totally, and completely on its strength.

Some things are true, whether you believe in them or not. They are true whether you can prove them or not. The truth is just true.

Where attention goes, energy flows. Intention, breeds attention. If you commit with your attention to learning the truth, your energy will be invested in it. You will open to it. If you commit to blocking out the truth, you’ll be invested in whatever else you pay attention to. Eventually, the effort you put into blocking the truth will be normal to you.

Because, it takes effort to believe in something that is false. We are already investing this effort in a lie, and it is ours to reclaim. The remaining challenge, is that we are surrounded by support for this lie.

The easy, clear, obvious step, is to focus on something else for a while. Focus on something neutral to the lie. Something that does not need to struggle with it. Just focus on life. Here. In a human body. With its needs and drives.

This, as it so happens, is the entire point. To be here. Now. As it so happens, we are blocking out the truth of the greater universe, full of life. And in the process we are focusing here. We’re simplifying ALL THAT IS by saying no to almost everything, and saying yes to this.

To live in this life, and to invest our attention here. As we invest our attention, we invest our spirit. We are literally creating ourselves in this form.

The truth we are focusing on will be our reality. We will make it increasingly real as we fall in love with living here. We’ll care about parts of the culture and the food. We will create dreams that dream within the confines of this experience. We will be able to do this because we are only paying attention to this experience. As a result we willnotevenbeable to dream of anything else. We will have forgotten how.

We will begin small, and get bigger. At first we will not know how to use our means of sensation, and we will get better at it. In the meantime we’ll surrender to beings that are more developed (theoretically anyway). In the process we will leave behind some other experience. We won’t think about it. We won’t have to focus on it at all, because we will be incarnated in a form that has forgotten it. Its gone.

This all ow beings of many forms to leave an experience, and join this one for a while.

I invite you a little further.

Here’s the thing, ‘Further’ Starts to get quite overwhelming, for most people I encounter. So the tend to check out. Treat it all as a parlor game, they can forget. Keep it all in cloudy maybeland. To learn more, and STAY, you need to be capable of handling the consequences of the intensities that wake up as you reclaim energy from blocking the lie, and open to the mystical vast wonder of REAL

My gift in this, is to support you. If you want to go deeper in knowning and seeing and sensing, its necessary to ground into this body, and clear your issues (because they tend to scream a lot when you make big leaps of learning) and learn to focus yourself and calm and center your thoughts and dreams.

If you have a magnificent party, you are going to make choices. You can invite everyone. You can invite people you choose, only. Or you can do some combination of the two.

Let us suppose you provide things that lots of different kinds of people want. Chances are people will continue to join the party as long as whatever you are giving continues to flow, or until the gathering evokes conflicts that make it fundamentally unpleasant, and people start to leave.

Of course there are these vast in-betweens, where people like what you are giving so much that they stay andsimplyputupwith the negative aspects of the environment.

You see where I’m going with this…

In middle school I learned to type, We got several letters added every week, and at the end of the class we got tested typing something with a piece of paper over our fingers so we couldn’t see them.

I can’t touch type numbers.

here I am typing 30 years later, and I can’t type the numbers without looking down at the screen. I still can’t type them without shifting my eyes down to look. I never learned. I never really tried to learn.

I’m encouraging you to learn about what is going on. Don’t wait until you have to, because your life buckles under the pressure. Start by being willing, and holding hope. Seems simple and vague enough… Do it.

Don’t walk away. Stare at the fringes, the edges of what you thought was solid about your assumptions about living on Earth. Keep learning. This work is here to support you. Because if you wait until life knocks on your door without preparation, you’ll likely go a little haywire when the spirit floods in, and the waters begin to rush.

Wildflowerfire is a rock in a fast flowing stream. It is a course in how to stop drowning. A course in how to swim with the rapids. And love it.