Apologies to all who felt I’d left them hanging at the end of the last post. I’m told they wanted to know how I was wreaking inhumanity upon myself. I reread it and thought perhaps it wasn’t enough to know that a person feels this way. Or do we have a fascination for the methods of a person’s undoing? It seems so when we glance at the covers of any women’s magazine or tabloid newspaper. In the wake of the undoing what do they do to rebuild their lives? Noting that the Sacred Wound was the next installment in this series of posts I felt that the hanging was a perfect segue into it.
The Sacred Wound for me is a tear in the fabric of the soul caused by a traumatic event. This could occur at any time during our lives and open us to what may seem initially to be a Pandora’s box of experience and yet also contain that which remained in her box – hope. Hope of an increased soul consciousness, of heartfelt connection to all divine sparks that exist in this universe.
The best discussion I’ve found on the net in regard to the Sacred Wound is at Lightworkers.Org. It gives a comprehensive outline to a subject that is really an abstract concept. Anyhow….
Spring is in full swing, new beginnings, new life sprouting. A time to trim the threads lank and frayed by the depths of winter, cutting away that which has served its purpose and splicing what is still strong back into our lives.
All this talk of threads and hanging has me considering rope more deeply. Ostensibly the twisting of hemp firstly into strings and then three strands are twisted together to form rope. Metaphorically I see the whole rope symbolising our physical existence and the three strands representing the emotional, intellectual, and spiritual attributes we all carry with us. Life is a constant twisting of the strands together allowing ourselves to be fully connected. It reminds me of the helical nature of DNA. Rope is used to bind, to secure, to attach. And it tangles.
My obsession with MASH at present has not left me and I find I’m seeing threads in the stories that have left me feeling that those episodes were somehow unfinished.
I‘ve been guilty of leaving things hanging. I have attached threads to those I have been in relationship with and have not had the sense to consciously detach myself from them. I have become entangled in these threads and by allowing this I have metaphorically hung myself in my relationships. The threads I’ve left hanging in the external have been the unravelling of my inner world.
In New Zealand we have the Plunket Society who provide support services for children under 5 years old. Families had a Plunket Nurse who would monitor the development of the child. Their progress would be written in up in a Plunket book including graphs of their growth. A few years ago my mother gave this book to me and browsing through it I noticed that from the age of 6 months my graph went into a decline. Until then the graph described a straight line upwards, after, it began to fall off. I asked her about this. She said that at the time they’d left me with my grandparents while they attended a wedding in another part of the country. I imagine this to be my sacred wound. A sense of abandonment perhaps. I have no recollection, no memory of it except this record of a decline. And yet I have a strong sense this played out in my relationships. That when I felt a sense of abandonment or neglect, a severing of a bond, then I would go into a decline and seek that bond in someone else. I see now that it became the end of my marriage and other relationships into which I entered.
I remember during my marriage developing an emotional though unrequited attachment with a co-worker. But not consciously detaching from that previous entanglement I came to point in a subsequent relationship where the thought of meeting her again and the hope of reciprocated feelings led me to exit that relationship. It remained unrequited and a period of grief followed.
Grief for what? Grief because this was my Sacred Wound insisting I look more closely at it? Grief because I had betrayed the essence of love? Grief because love requires me to love myself first before surrendering to relationship for a fuller expression? Or all of these things?
I return to MASH and one episode sticks in my mind…. In it they explore a soldier afflicted by hysterical paralysis. Nothing is physically wrong with the patient but he is unable to move his lower body. He has feet of clay. In face of an enemy attack he is absolutely frozen with fear. The method of treatment is doing nothing for the patient until he breaks through and begins to take responsibility for himself and goes back to the fighting. The fear is that if sent home instead of returning to the front guilt will overwhelm him and affect the rest of his life. A line at the end of Black Hawk Down fills this out further – one of the soldiers says to another that war is not about politics or ideologies, its about the guy next to you. This was the wound experienced by the soldier in the MASH episode, doing nothing to look after the guys next to him, the guilt of this causing his hysterical paralysis.
Having not experienced war first hand this is all supposition from me and yet I get the feeling that war is a collective sacred wound.
I’m aware that this is somehow unfinished but there is a second part to come….
Resources:
http://www.shiftinaction.com/node/3025
http://lightworkers.org/channeling/86314/sacred-wound-gateway-higher-consciousness
A new wind has blown through my reading habits. Prior to finding Ellen Burstyn’s