Once the pain of the emotion has passed, once we have completely and compassionately descended down to the bottom of the rock, we experience a sense of relief. We begin to widen, deepen, and expand to include the wound. It isn’t that the wound has disappeared. The point is not to disappear the wound, and it isn’t a one-time-fix. This is a lifelong journey of compassionately holding the wound so that wisdom, love, generosity, and goodness can emerge. The point is to transform it, to make good on it. This descent into the direct experience of it actually does that.Instead of holding the wound as something that needs to be masked, the compassionate, body-centered, present-moment descent allows us to begin including the wound into our being. Once the wound is included, we have a lot more space to become more of something.That ‘more’ can only be expressed by the wound. I often notice with my clients that if they’ve been regarding themselves as unintelligent, the pull of the self-sabotaging voices not only becomes less strong, but my clients begin to have compassion for the parts of themselves that they’ve previously disowned. In a way that 'more' is your genius.
Your Genius
Genius has two etymological understandings. In one sense, your genius is considered to be your “guardian deity or spirit that watches over you from birth,” as in genie. It’s also you power to produce, since gen- means to “produce.” Your genius is the energy that resides behind your generative capacity. I am not asking you to consider your genius literally as a “deity within.” Instead, I am asking you to consider your genius “as if” it is a deity within. This isn’t about creating a new belief system complete with gods and goddesses. What I am referring to is not that, but it’s about finding access to these latent energies within your being and learning to relate to them, as if they are a god so that you can start to activate your capacity to produce or create something new.
Sacred wound work is about learning to suffer with (com- with passion- suffer) our pain with a quality of patience and unconditional friendliness. As a result, something new emerges, something that is expansive, innocent, generative, forgiving, and playful. Our wound is calling us into a deeper alignment with our bodies, our hearts, and our minds.
Exercise in Learning to Stay
For the next hour, you will silently contemplate/meditate on one or two things you’ve been unwilling to be with. I encourage you not to distract yourself. If you notice that your mind is wandering in a million other directions, just bring it back to the task at hand, meeting the wound of what you haven’t-- up until now—been willing to be with. Please do not write in your notebook, speak to anyone, or do anything other than be with your wound. You can take a meditative posture, you can lie down—as long as you don’t fall asleep—you can take a walk outside or just sit on a park bench.The point is to reestablish a relationship with the genie within, that generative power within, to begin listening to it in a new way.
Transforming the Sacred Wound Series
This is one part in a nine-part series that explores ways to heal and transform your sacred wound. Be sure to check out the other posts!