Often when we hear the word “wound”, we think of physical wounds to the body. However, intense trauma such as sexual violence, rape, abuse, neglect, or intergenerational trauma can also create wounds, and can shape the way we perceive and make sense of ourselves, our lives, and our relationships. Each of us carries a wound that is unique to us within our hearts, our bodies, and our spirits. At the deepest level, wounds like these can embody a sense of separateness and disconnection from our true selves, from others, and impact other aspects of our lives.

The healing journey encompasses the full spectrum of the wound, and honours both the somatic as well as the relational component of our hurt, sensitivity, longing, and grief. It is not evidence that we have failed, or that somehow something is wrong with us, or that we urgently need to be cured. It means we are alive, that our hearts are beating, and that our nervous systems are sensitive. That our psyche is open, receptive, and tender.

Our spirits are calling out and attempting to reach us. Not to harm or cause disruption to our ways of being, but to invite us back into relationship with our bodies, to come into balance, and into connection with all our relations.

Colonial thinking often treats feelings as things to be solved, not as things to experience. Your grief is not pathology. Your rage is not pathology. Your broken heart, your longing, your sensitivity… These are not pathology, but a path towards healing. Hidden inside the wound is medicine; the spirit’s attempt at self-healing and revelation.

One of the more common forms of wounding in our lives is the simple experience of feeling down, uninspired, physically exhausted, or incapable of experiencing any real sense of meaning or purpose. Whether we view this as fatigue, having “the blues”, depression, or as the dark night of the soul, we are often unsure why we feel this way. Even if we can’t attribute these feelings to a cause, and often we can’t, somehow we know deep within us that we are meant to be living in a way that is more creative, more inspired and more meaningful.

Another very common form of wounding is that of shame and a deep sense of unworthiness. We become convinced that something is wrong with us, and that we’ve failed in some way . That we’ve fallen short in some fundamental way and are simply unworthy and unwanted as we are. That we have to change who we are in order to be loved. These wounds are felt at the core of the body, mind, and spirit.

This chronic sense of shame and unworthiness usually arises out of early environments lacking in empathic attunement, situations of consistent narcissistic injury, failure in mirroring, neglect, sexual/physical abuse, or witnessing violence. Because it was unsafe to locate the cause of the missing connection, a lack of affection, or the love of our caregivers, we internalized it. It became who we believed ourselves to be.

Another place in our lives where our wounds show up is in our personal relationships. Relationships where we’ve taken a risk because another matters to us. It can result in feelings of abandonment, uncertainty resulting in fear and insecurity. We find ourselves once again in an endless loop of conflict with others, unsure of what is happening and how we could have possibly failed yet again. It is from this matrix of experience that we can fall into extremes of caring for others to our own detriment, or shut down into a fantasy that we really don’t need others in our lives. These extremes can be painful and leave us feeling more alone than ever.

It’s so easy to view the presence of our wounding as clear evidence that there’s something wrong with us or that we’ve done the wrong thing. However, it’s important to disentangle from these ways of thinking and use the potential in the wound to heal and move us forward on our journey.

The spirit talks to us in many ways. As images in the dreamtime, as painful or joyous emotions and sensations, visions and messages, signs and symbols. But one of the most important ways it reaches out to us is by our symptoms, our wounds. This is a forgotten teaching.