Let's see if I can get this right, and not put my foot in it somewhere. It is to do with the shadow, and our need to have a balanced relationship with it: not to deny it or judge it, but not to over-identify with it either. To the degree we deny it, we become one of the 'good guys' and we see the 'bad guys' as out there somewhere (often in the form of 'the system', or political or business leaders, or anyone who we denounce in a way that makes us feel, if we are honest, secure in the moral high ground); when, on the other hand, we place too much emphasis on the shadow, then it becomes a refuge, we are 'wounded' and that can become a get-out-of-jail-free card.
Now this is where I am trying not to put my foot in it. Our traumas are real, and they can take a long time to even know they are there; the first signs may be that big parts of our lives do not work properly, or we get ill in some way, and it can then take a long time to persuade those terrified pieces of ourselves back into some kind of relationship with our conscious selves (hence the shamanic paradigm of soul loss and soul retrieval).
It is the language of being 'wounded' that I am wanting to chew on. When you are physically wounded, you are no longer able to function normally until the wound heals. But I don't think it is necessarily the same on a psychological level. Yes, we need to be careful and considerate around our traumas, and if we are not aware of them they will tend to come out as anxiety, anger, addiction, violence, self-pity etc. I think most of us have them in one way or another, it seems to be part of the human condition.
But we human beings are also resilient, we can have really difficult stuff going on within, and maybe only those close to us know about it, partly because it is very personal, but also because we usually still have the capacity to function reasonably normally if we choose to do so. And it's as if the language of being 'wounded' can suggest we do not have that capacity, and I do not think it is helpful to think like that. It easily becomes a bit of an identity and not a helpful one, we get stuck in it. And then it is a get-out-of-jail-free card, inasmuch as we don't need to be so responsible any more, we can blame whoever gave us the 'wound'.
I have this kind of reservation around the notion of the 'witch wound', which gets tied into gender politics (which like all collective movements has its own shadow) and exaggerated notions of what happened 400 years ago, along with a literal identification with past-life stories of having been there. It easily becomes a victim fantasy. I am NOT saying it is necessarily or even usually so, and I am sorry if this offends anyone, but I wanted to get it off my chest! While not wishing to diminish the nature of what happened, the real figure of witch executions was between 40 and 60,000, not the 9 million sometimes claimed, and 1/4 of them were men. The larger figure seems to me quite grossly politicised. I therefore doubt there were historically enough witches to go round the number of people nowadays who have past life memories of being executed. So I have no doubt these memories correspond to real experiences, but I think they are best seen as archetypal, pointing to something ancestral that needs healing. But probably not literal like, in my view, many past-life memories are probably not literal.
I think that all along Spirit, the Metaphysical, needs to be our perspective, the idea that our essential nature is pure and abundant and joyful and compassionate. This perspective is the real healer over time: it allows an alchemy that is beyond our understanding or control to be set in motion. And with this perspective, WE STEP OUTSIDE ALL IDENTITIES. The real solution to eg 'low self esteem' is not affirmations to create 'self-worth', but rather not to have any ideas about what you are in the first place, just keep aligning yourself with Spirit and do something with your gifts, however tentative. This is the nuclear option, this is where the megawatts of healing power lie. Not in fishing around in your difficulties on their own level, but by exposing them to the compassionate light of the Great Spirit.
And I think it can be the same with those hard-to-get-hold-of illnesses that many of us experience: the ME, chronic fatigue, fibromyalgia, irritable bowel, auto-immune, multiple sclerosis and so on. They are often the crack where the light gets in. They often suggest unconscious trauma that needs to become conscious; and they are also a call to listen deeply to ourselves and to Spirit, because it is only then that we will get well. Most people do not listen deeply to themselves or to others, and they do not know this. These types of illness are a demand to stop trying to fit in and to be 'normal', and instead to listen to that Other voice.
It takes a long time, it is not easy, but is anything worthwhile created without that? The tragedy is that many people get stuck, to some extent, in the illness phase, it becomes an identity around which their life revolves, it becomes another get-out-of-jail-free card. And that is a miserable place to be, it becomes a tiny circle of life with little room for movement.
So I am saying acknowledge that coalface of difficulties, of shadow that is part of the human condition. Love it, do not judge it, stay with it at least some of the time, and you will slowly see it transform. But do not form an identity out of it, do not disempower yourself by thinking too much that you are ill or wounded. Above all, listen to yourself and trust what is there.
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