None of us voluntarily go through hurtful, devastating life experiences, and yet they happen. For many of us, our traumas and losses from this and past lifetimes are coming up for healing these days. After having suppressed the memories and emotional pain for so long, we are reluctant to face these parts of ourselves and feel the emotions that we couldn’t when the unwanted events occurred.
Our survival instincts had labeled anything related to these traumas as, “don’t ever touch this”, and we gladly abided by this, placing the experiences and related emotions outside of our awareness. We buried the shame, anger, and sadness over what happened to us against our will. Most of us made ourselves small all our lives, and becoming people pleasers, tried to evade more atrocious actions against us. We habitually remained in victim mode, firmly believing in our own unworthiness and deficiency.
Many of us have been on a healing journey for years or decades, trying to make sense of what happened to us, and put our tormented selves somehow back together. And while we may have been able to feel much of our previously dissociated emotions, make it a point to practice self-love and forgiveness, and spent time with our inner child, most of us are still energetically and emotionally bound to the traumatic experiences, unable to move on and come out of survival mode.
It may seem almost impossible to actually fully overcome our traumas. Many claim that they are healed, but their unhealthy emotional responses and toxic acting out behavior speaks otherwise. Most of us are stuck in approaching our healing and emotional processing from a certain mind-set. We are used to trying to get rid of the unpleasant by going toward something more pleasant. It is how we are “knitted” as human beings, a mindset that has been passed down for generations.
Exclusion has been our mode of operation in our attempts to avoid pain and only experience good in our lives. We have approached our healing from that same mindset, gladly putting the cork back into our emotions, after a moment of falling apart, and secretly hoping that we don’t ever have to go back to that raw and vulnerable place within ourselves. But most of us have done this lifetime after lifetime, not being able to learn the lessons that we contracted for and that were set before us, repeating in essence the same experiences over and over, like a merry-go-round of victimization that we can’t get off.
As we look back on our emotional traumas, we are used to instinctively rejecting what happened to us and the associated emotions, trying to keep our past experiences at arm’s length. Instead of treating our healing with the same reluctance with which we would scrape splattered roadkill from the asphalt, with a clothespin on our nose and averted eyes, we could simply embrace our inner devastation without judgment and permit ourselves to just exist within those emotions and cellular memories without labeling them. Our traumas have always been a large part of our identity, but only in an unconscious, negative manner. We have basically been saying, “I can’t live up to my full potential and be who I truly am because of what happened to me”. But what if that is not true, and you are actually in an excellent position to live up to your full potential, BECAUSE of your experiences and the pain you endured.
There obviously is no excuse for the atrocities and losses we suffered, and the pain and hardship this has caused us, but if we are to move forward on our healing journey, and move beyond being stuck in victim mode, we must change our relationship with our experiences, and change our perspective. Looking at everything from the same perspective of victimhood, asking “why me”, and “how could you do this to me”, we keep getting the same results of being stuck in a loop. If we continue to identity as a victim, we cannot access the hidden gifts that these experiences bestowed upon us. We continue to give our power way, being slaves to our past.
Most healers, lightworkers, and wayshowers had to endure incredible darkness and pain in their lifetime. It is time to make peace with what we have been through and with ourselves. We must stop shaming and punishing ourselves over what was done to us, as that is incredibly unfair to ourselves, creating only more blocks. At some point or another, we have to accept what has happened to us and fully accept it as a part of who we are. All of our experiences have shaped who we have become, and there is no shame in this. We are so hard on ourselves and give ourselves so little room to expand.
Take a deep breath. Release the tension in your body and how you thought you had to hold yourself together so tightly. Let go of control and find compassion for yourself for trying so hard to do everything right. The fight with yourself is over. You are in a different place now, and it is safe to release the old ways that weren’t working. Your traumas are a sacred part of you. Instead of continuing to go through your life in survival mode, highlighting lack and loss, and unconsciously reliving those devastating experiences over and over, see if you can change your perspective. Maybe it is possible to view the experience and knowledge you have gained from your traumas as assets, instead of continually giving them the energy to drain the life force out of you, dim your light, and keep your precious self in the “wounded” and “defective” box.
Can you look at yourself differently and see how strong you are? How loving and kind you are despite everything that you have been through? Can you see the beauty in your brokenness? Rumi said, “The wound is the place where the light enters you.” Leonard Cohen sang, “…Forget your perfect offering. There is a crack, a crack in everything. That’s how the light gets in.”
Do you see? The alchemical transformation of your pain has already been your evolution. It brought you out of the doldrums of human ignorance and self-centered shallowness into a deep compassion and sacred vulnerability – an openness to the rawness of your heart and the light of your divine Spirit.
Based on the experiences you have been through, you now have a deep understanding of what others are going through and are able to offer them what has worked for you. Or just hold space for them so that they can find within themselves what they need. But you have the tools and wisdom now because of all that you have been through.
You are building a new foundation for living within yourself from the rubble of your broken parts. You have the opportunity now to look back at your life and learn the lessons it contained: Heed your intuition and set healthy boundaries. Know that you don’t owe others your life, and that you have the right to be authentically who you are and speak your truth. Stop enabling perpetrators and giving them your power. Practice accountability and let others have the consequences of their actions. Reject the projections of wounded people onto your sacred self. Change those patterns of feeling unworthy and find love and compassion for yourself…
It is time to give yourself a little credit and start holding your head high. Accept who you are – all of it – without reservation and shine your beautiful light. Acceptance of all aspects of the self, including all that you have been through, actually has the alchemical power to change your life and get you unstuck. Use the compost of your wounds to nurture your evolution. Give gratitude for all your experiences, and for the gifts that the metamorphosis of your deepest darkness has brought to you, and through you to those around you and to the world.
Neha