the wounded healer…

Maps.   Gabrielle Roth’s brilliant work is based on observation: how does energy move in human beings?  The essential 5Rhythms map is a wave. As we begin to move we are asked to notice how we receive and what we are taking in.  Like right now.  Taking in these words, this next breath.  Being.  After we gather it up, we let something out. A synthesis, a visible expression of what we took in. Doing.  This continual process of in out in out in out leads to a breaking open, an emptying out, a re-arranging.  Until something shifts, is transformed, falls into new alignment. Then a period of stillness.  Until the next wave comes. This can happen in a minute.  This week I felt it describe my lifetime.

I knew Gabrielle had mapped the path of the wounded healer.  I had read about it but this past week I had the opportunity to dance it.  To embody it.  To feel into the utter truth of it.  A wave that begins with victim---something happened to me. I let it in and eventually knew it was wrong.  This leads to being a survivor---I lived through that and I am still here. Then I embarked on a convoluted path of healing and all the practices that moved that slow train forward.  Until things began to look different.  I could feel that the work was working.  I began to feel reconstituted, transformed.  Maybe even stronger than before.  Finally all this energy integrates, there is a sense of wholeness, I am filled with gratitude and appreciation. I have so much to give, feel truly resourced, am called to a life of service.  A full wave.  Spread over a lifetime.

When the week was done, these words spilled forth:

Path of This Wounded Healer

All the way through that first decade, 

I was a tender target for trauma:

physical insult and emotional onslaught,

mental confusion and soul-shattering scenery,

abandoned to a realm devoid of spirit.

Somehow my rugged survivor self prevailed,

tear-drenched in shame, uprooted time and again, 

until “not belonging” became the norm,

hypervigilance a well-honed knife,

defended heart a necessity.

Middle-age-busy fortified the wall,

but deep into my parenting forties, the armor began to crack.

It was my dancing fifties when the chinks began to fall---

sometimes like a gentle rain and sometimes like a tidal wave:

dissolving, breaking open, washing clean yesteryear’s grime,

alchemizing all those crevices into healing gold. 

Transforming post traumatic wisdom into soulful destiny.

At last hearing spirit whisper “I have never left your side.”

Whatever the wave of your journey has been in this lifetime, may our paths cross soon.

 ❤️Bella

Esalen October 2024