Tending Wounds Without Building Shrines

Sometimes (and I mean a lot of the times 😅), it isn’t the event that hurt us that binds us. It’s the meaning we give it, the story we build around it, and the way we clutch and analyze the wound to prove that what happened mattered.

As living, feeling beings, we transition through seasons when pain abruptly cuts us deeply and seems to carve itself into the structure of who we believe we are. If we choose to heal and examine the event, it can feel absolutely necessary to tend the wound, honor where we are, process it thoroughly and responsibly, and let it speak. But I have just recently realized that in my experience, there is a fine line between self accountability and “chasing” the closure.

I have been walking through one of those seasons, where a friendship rupture caused profound betrayal and sadness. At the time, I was approaching a chapter in life where I was starting to see my patterns of trauma-bonding co-dependence in intimate friendships (Hello, primary caregiver wounds!). I found myself constantly trying to navigate how to maintain a particular relationship where there were many covert emotional expectations expected of each other, and I was working behind and in front of the scenes to find healthier ways to relate with this person. When the rupture occurred after my sharing open, honest accountable truths that just couldn’t be held by them, I immediately felt relief because the pattern could then be dispersed and healed - however, a week later betrayal set in, because a close friend told me of the person’s recent actions in which they painted me in darkness and twisted events that occurred on public platforms. (For context we are all familiar with, ‘cause we’ve all been teenagers reading tabloid magazines - this looks like when people lash out, paint narratives, etc).

How I relate and see my experience now (through deeper curiosity and understanding with the help from Ancestral wisdom) is completely different and allows a chance for my ego to take a spa vacation and paid time off from constantly processing and chasing “healing” from the rupture. I’ll get into it.

First, I did what many people instinctively do (if our nervous systems have the capacity for it) after the rupture: I tried to make sense of what happened from a loving, Self-led perspective - in my case therapy, self-reflection, conversations with mentors. and insight from wise friends who could hold an impartial stance. I also tried to name what happened, take responsibility for anything I may have said/done and placed it carefully into compassionately named categories to validate my and the other person’s pain. In these early stages, acknowledgement is medicine. With tons of self-reflection over months, I’ve now just arrived at my current lesson - Tend the wound, but do not build a shrine around it.

I started to see my own tendencies plunging headfirst in deconstructing traumas and trying to make more, more and more sense of them. In wisdom traditions, this is known as a by-product of the ego, even when it seemingly has “good” intentions. The ego loves a task of obsession. In my case, it was a task of my inner analytical therapist (who is actually quite compassionate and open-hearted, who works to uncover ten thousand meanings in a painful event).

I began to see the difference between honoring pain and preserving it. There is a huge gray area in crossing the threshold to entrapment when we are committed to healing. With the help of a mentor this week, we drew from the wisdom traditions of both our Ancestors - Daoism and Tibetan Buddhism - and I am now observing and working with the following:

• Honoring injury without clinging to the narrative.

• Letting wounds float, dissolve and re-shape as part of the universal flow of incomprehensible truth (Truth is highly subjective and is much larger than any living being can ever comprehend). All versions of events are valid for each person, no matter how distorted they can feel. Our nervous systems are wired differently and have different protective outputs to try to prevent pain.

What I’m learning is: Healing does not require us to erase what happened. It means not fossilizing what happened into the ego’s obsessive need to grasp concept or meaning to finally say, “Look at what happened! Isn’t this meaningful?! Can you now validate the injustice of what happened?!?!! I can’t believe this happened to me!!! Gahhhh”

Because our egos DO this. They create, create, create to feel special. That’s not inherently bad, it’s part of human be-ing. But it takes immense discipline and openness to see pain as energies that occurred between parties that have run their course and naturally moves in new directions. It’s simply an observable fact (as 💩 as it can sound).

This type of lesson (via highly conscious, karmic, multimillenial Ancestral sight) is ego-shattering and f***ing difficult. It just is. It goes against everything the ego wants to do because it essentially says, “B*tch, basically everything is meaningless but you (We) assign it meaning.” 😅😩 That requires unconditional, loving awareness (liberation) as an ultimate Witnesser, our inherent Goddess/God consciousness.

To summarize, I’ll leave it with the following words:

The wound moves.

The story softens.

The shrine crumbles.

And I remain.

May we all finds ways of understanding that liberates the cause of excessive suffering.

🪷🪷🪷