Be aware of your wound. Don’t help it to grow, let it be healed; and it will be healed only when you move to the roots.
Osho, The Empty Boat
Your new life is going to cost you your old one…
Brianna Wiest, The Mountain is You
To everything – turn, turn, turn
There is a season – turn, turn, turn
And a time to every purpose under heaven.
A time to be born, a time to die
A time to plant, a time to reap
A time to kill, a time to heal
A time to laugh, a time to weep…
Pete Seger (#1 hit for The Byrds)
There is an ebb and flow to our personal development, just as Mother Nature demonstrates in the daily rhythm of the ocean tides and the cycles of the seasons throughout the year.
I find myself alternating between two main contrasting phases; the silent phase of withdrawal into inner work – a time characterized by contemplation, solitude, and grieving losses – and the gregarious phase of human interaction, of creating, of making things happen.
It has taken considerable cultivation of Mental Fitness to come to a point where both phases – alternating haphazardly and sometimes apparently overlapping – are equally welcome, when the interchange feels as natural as the repetitive inbreath and outbreath of respiration.
It is the threshold – the transition from each phase to the other – that I find both most challenging and rewarding.
After roughly five months of seemingly retrograde inner work, I find myself re-emerging into the teeming marketplace, filled with enthusiasm, new perspectives, novel ideas, and revitalized energy.
As life begins to move across this threshold, several old ideas are ready for shedding.
The first is the belief that our past gets to determine our future.
No inner work can bear ripe fruit without a frank assessment of what went on in our family of origin. The wound denied is a wound beyond the powers of healing.
The most challenging years of life are, by definition, those early formative ones. Clinical research points to the fact that the fundamental wiring of our neural networks is almost completely laid down by our fourth birthday.
These networks determine our temperament, our behavioral patterns, and belief systems well into adulthood. They will remain dominant until we consciously begin the practice of rewiring, of rewriting the script – if we are so lucky to realize the possibility of doing so.
While the past, therefore, certainly shapes me, laying down mental patterns geared towards survival, this default programming does not necessarily get to dictate the rest of my story, as I have been shown by experience. We can change, or, more specifically, we can be transformed.
The benefits of neuroplasticity are available only to those who believe in it and thus become willing to ditch the idea that because something has always been a certain way, it will always remain so. Contempt prior to investigation must be abandoned as we begin to break through denial and take our first steps beyond the periphery of our comfort zone.
At some pivotal juncture in our journey, we are invited to liberate ourselves from the people, habits, and patterns we have already outgrown.
„Yes, but how do we know when such a point has arrived?“, you may ask. If we need to repeatedly convince ourselves to remain in a weathered stance, or find ourselves explaining away red flags, it might be time to jettison certain attitudes, relationships, or circumstances.
Equally, if we need to keep shrinking to make something fit, it has probably already served its purpose. The lifejacket we donned at age three fulfilled its original intention by keeping us afloat in troubled waters. At thirty-three or sixty-three, the very same garment will suffocate us. It is not a good idea to wear it into the next chapter of life.
The second novel idea experienced on this threshold is the realization that I can transcend the version of me that is exclusively focused on survival. This discovery paves the way for healing, growth, and thriving.
One of my mentors recently offered me the following feedback: „Patrick, you have already become the person those years were designed to produce. Your life no longer needs to revolve around just getting by. Recognize that you are both in the light and of the light, illuminated and radiant“.
That immediately struck a chord. One of the primordial wounds many of us carry is that of „separation“. An early rupture in a significant relationship may have morphed into a belief that we have become fundamentally separated, as if the umbilical cord connecting us to the Source had been severed. It may be accompanied by the false belief that we somehow deserve to be alienated.
While language is a wonderful phenomenon I greatly appreciate, it can be very limiting when we try to formulate deep, essential truths. Being „in the light“ implies a subject-object relationship, making us separate from the light. Being both illuminated and radiating solves the quandary, expressing that we are both in and of the light. We are the light; there is no separation.
By integrating the – often painful – experience of adversity of our formative years, by tending the wounds that have so long sought our attention, and by applying the lessons learned, life can now be created and lived in an expansive, creative, joyful fashion. It can be lived to the full. It is never too late for such a shift.
Very few of us really anticipated, as children, the life that we are leading now and have led thus far. Some of us may be working in a field that we wanted to get into, but, as in my case, the route and roots can only be traced retroactively when the Big Picture begins to take shape. I could never have envisaged the jobs, the people, the places that life has put in my path.
We can’t get from where we were then, to where we are now, on purpose. Nor can we do so by design. We create our unique life as we move through it. We create it according to the opportunities we see around us and the talents we find within, and our willingness to be open to both.
And, as I can attest through personal experience, the process in on-going. Reinvention keeps happening, ad infinitum.
Furthermore, the manner of its unfolding is not linear but, rather, organic. Like the best jazz music, it is composed as we go, on the fly. It is an on-going process of improvisation.
When we update our CV, we make the whole thing look like it was all planned. This is because the last thing we want to do is to give the reader an impression of the actual chaos we’ve been living through. Instead, we attempt to convey that this was a strategic plan we’ve been faithfully executing since our early twenties. Often, we even begin to believe our own nonsense.
We would be better off learning from some of the great jazz masters. Miles Davis is quoted as saying that: „If you hit a wrong note, it’s the next note that you play that determines if it’s good or bad.“ Later in life he went further, conceding that: „There are no wrong notes in jazz: only notes in the wrong places.“
The nonlinearity, the inner retreats, the outer manifestations, and the pendulous thresholds: these are some of the key ingredients of the constant unfolding of life.
In terms of inner work, we look inside to identify, embrace, and treat old wounds. The Ancient Greek word for wound is „trauma“. That process – invariable involving encounters with pockets of the original pain and the requisite grieving – helps us discover who we truly are.
Our natural aptitudes, personal passions, and enthusiasm begin to emerge. We begin to discover what truly fires us up and we learn to drop those patterns which have been draining and exhausting us. For those who have been living according to the hidden scripts of family, religion, culture, society, etc., we reclaim dominion over the screenplay of our lives.
The on-going cultivation of silence helps us cut through the clutter and noise of daily demands to understand who we really are. In a recent Mental Fitness retreat, when searching for a definition for „expansion of consciousness“, one participant came up with: „We get to know ourselves better!“
In terms of making things happen „out there“, we look outside into the world to test our ability to practice newly won insights, risk new experiences, and explore available opportunities. It is about interacting with our environment and, through the practical, daily cultivation of trust and Mental Fitness, creating the right conditions for our talents to grow.
In the course of this dance of inner work and outer manifestation, each time we re-emerge from our inner depths, we find that the way we used to see ourselves (and the world) has changed. Thanks to the work that happens beneath the surface, old identities fall away as long-standing patterns become impossible to ignore.
We outgrow versions of ourselves that once felt permanent. By the time we move forward again, we are no longer the person who entered that previous cycle.
Our perception has been altered. „Change the way we look at things and the things we look at change“ is how Wayne Dyer expressed this.
The fears that fuel the Saboteurs that once impulsively made our reactive decisions begin to lose their influence. We become adept at anticipating and intercepting the Saboteurs before they get the opportunity to hijack our thinking, our feelings, and ultimately, our actions.
Simultaneously, we cultivate the Powers of Sage (Compassion, Exploration, Innovation, Navigation, Activation) and can utilize them creatively to consciously deal with whatever challenge we may be facing. We become „response-able“.
The heartbreak that convinced us to accept less than our full potential begins loosening its grip. The stories we kept telling ourselves about what our life could never become lose their punch.
Transformation is no longer only something happening inside us. By means of the ripple effect, it begins shaping life (and the lives) around us.
The flower wilting now are gone, not lost waiting to return. Petals once fallen are fallen forever. Flowers do not return in the spring, rather their next iteration emerges. Rebirth implies death. This is what makes transformation so terrifying for many. The price of transformation – a price that must be paid – is the death of that which has lost its value.
Healing involves transcending injury, woundedness, trauma, and disease, returning us to our pristine state of wholeness.
