On Brokenness

Or how your unconscious desires are running the show and what you can do about it…

What if your brokenness, the very pieces of you that you look upon with shame and disgust-are actually the most interesting pieces of who you really are and are present to act as sign posts to what you came here to do?

I mean, think about it. Consider for just a minute. If we were all the same: the same monochrome template, highly glossed, and stretching into infinity: all perk, and bubbles, and no edge. Wouldn’t that be boring as hell?

In some ways, heck in most ways, it is our quirks, our imperfections, and also our deepest wounding that define the very things about life that are most enjoyable. From our wounding we can be gifted with our greatest passions. This is alchemy in action.

If you were to zoom in on my life 5 years ago-you would have seen an entirely different person. Bouncing from failed relationship to failed relationship, and so desperate for love I was willing to compromise all of the pieces of myself that made me, well me.

I had one particular relationship that put me over the edge when it fell a part (as all relationships do that are built on trying to fill a void of unworthiness) and I started drinking to cope with my feelings. I eventually found myself back in the deep dark hole of depression and suicidal ideation that I had frequented in my late teens and early 20’s. And I was utterly fed up, and so hungry for change. I wanted so badly to believe that this wasn’t all there was to life. And I was finally ready to reach out for help.

That willingness to change is a prime mover in our lives. Without enough negative feedback (and boy did I ever subject myself to negative experiences in my 20’s) we humans usually don’t reach the threshold of willingness where we are able to admit that our way just might not be working. And when you come from a long line of negative behaviors (these things usually “run in the family”) it can be difficult to even believe that another way is possible. Well, I’m here to tell you that it totally is. But first, you’ve got to clear away the wreckage of your past.

The wreckage for me had manifested all the way into my physical body. When you don’t love yourself-your body has a tendency to pay the brunt of the price. Having little to no say in the matter, my body had weathered the many storms of my attachments (my addictions) doing her very best to maintain good working order even as I created near to impossible circumstances and standards for that to be possible. And those standards caught up to me: my spiritual bankruptcy, my lack of self-respect and honor, eventually manifested in physical distress. First as mental and emotional instability, and then finally as an autoimmune condition.

If you look at the ACE childhood experiences study (seriously, look it up, it’s fascinating!) you can measure a score of childhood trauma’s and if your score is high enough you can know that at some point you will develop an autoimmune condition. Yep, you read that right, with high enough scores it is not if, but when. And of course, as with most things in patriarchal times: women are more likely to be impacted by childhood trauma. What I find so illuminating about this study, is that it tangibly illustrates a long standing ancient belief from Traditional Chinese Medicine: that our experiences of the world, even if they are simply the words or actions of others, can impact our health and manifest as physical disease.  This was certainly my experience and, I suspect, the experience of many other women.

So now the question is, what do we do with that? What do we do when we find ourselves deep in our inherited familial trauma, when it has manifested as physical illness, or emotional and mental disturbances, or BOTH? And when it is affecting nearly every area of our lives, and we just can’t seem to get a handle on it?

The answer is simple, and profound, and your ego isn’t going to like it.

You get help.

To heal deep seated trauma, (and honestly really any trauma), we need the wisdom of those that have come before us. Those who have walked the path, have the kind of rich spiritual life and coping skills that we so desperately want, and are willing to mentor us in how they got from A to B. Granted, your unique path will undoubtably be different from theirs, and the best teachers will always encourage you to develop a relationship with your intuition for those moments when your experience, and their experience, diverge. But the rough template can be (more or less) the same.

Humans are also social creatures, and we were not meant to hack it alone. Having a community of support is tantamount to creating any kind of real lasting change. And the kinds of changes that need to be incorporated to really heal, are lifestyle changes. They have the benefit of being very simple to implement, being relatively inexpensive while also being incredibly effective. However, they are also hard as heck to integrate with consistency without a social accountability system.

In Traditional Chinese Medicine there is a commonly held perspective on the link between the Dao (your unique ever-changing spiritual path), the mind, and the body. Basically, the idea is that a healthy mind follows the wisdom of nature (the Dao, your intuition, your connection to source and All Things) and thus creates a healthy physical reality. Where attention flows, energy goes. But an unhealthy mind, a mind that has been twisted and warped by circumstance, by patriarchy, by trauma etc. etc. ad infinitum,  does not know how to follow the Dao, and so follows what it does know: the trauma passed on from the generation before. Which in turn was passed down from the generation before that. On and on, like a cosmic merry go round we pass the unhealed pieces of ourselves down to the next generation to be picked up unconsciously and played out. This is why disease processes (like addiction) “run in the family”. It is the ancients’ way of describing the discoveries of modern genetics research.

And it is in looking at the place where the chain so often gets broken (the mind that no longer knows how to follow the Dao) that we also see the way to break the trauma cycle. To say, this ends here, right now, with me.

And the key to this is in how we view, and choose to handle, our trauma. Because I’ll tell you something, dear reader, the wisdom of nature runs deep. And I think very secretly, in the innermost layers of ourselves, there is a teensy-weensy piece of us (called our unconscious, or shadow) that craves the drama that comes along with the human experience. We sit up there in our cosmic forms looking down on earth and drooling over the idea of getting to come here and be a tiny little human with restrictions and constraints and quirks. To an all infinite being, with no end and no beginning, the constraint of time must look so dang appealing. To get to heal, to experience harshness, and scarcity, and then alchemize that into pure luminous gold? Sign me up we said from on high.

And then we get here, and damn is it much more difficult than we ever could have imagined. It’s rough being a human, and it breaks us open in real and raw ways that are just not quite possible to fathom from the other side. It’s also exciting, as the context of pain gives us true knowledge of pleasure. In the west our Christian based mythology calls this split the “fall from grace”, where we are ousted from the Garden of Eden by gaining knowledge of good and evil: the duality that exists on earth. In the western mythologies there is a lot of shame and blame within these stories and this has permeated into our subconscious minds and infiltrated how women think about our trauma, and thus ourselves.

I much prefer the eastern mythologies when it comes to these topics. There is a deep trust in the wisdom of the natural world, and the “fall” into duality is seen not so much as a fall but more as a choice. Because in the Dao, it is the very fragmentation, the polarization of duality that allows for the deepest healing. And like in Kintsugi, the Japanese art of repairing broken pottery with gold, the more intricately fragmented the pottery was to begin with, the more beautiful and worthy and whole the final piece.  Our trauma doesn’t make us damaged, and irrevocably broken. It has the potential, when alchemized, to make us even more whole than we ever could have been without it. And it gives us the ability to shine a light to illuminate the way for others with similar cracks in their beings. As Rumi says, “The wound is the place where the light enters you.”

This is not to say in any way shape or form that what happened to us is ok, or that we on some level “asked for it”. Nor does this give us license to go out into the world and be assholes. It is more a subtle nod to the deeper truth of this reality: that we are capable of holding great pain and turning that lead into gold. And that this internal alchemy creates a wholeness unlike anything you could have imagined before going through this process-which is the point really of incarnating here on earth: to come to know yourself more deeply than you ever have previously. And one path towards this wholeness is being willing to embrace our trauma, to sit with it, and welcome its teachings.

And as for me? I’ve been sober for nearly 4 years. I’m healthy, my autoimmune condition is entirely healed, and I love myself more than I ever have in my entire life. The best part: I now know myself more deeply than ever-and this confidence, this integrity, guides me in everything that I do. I am not an anomaly, the things I have accomplished for myself are repeatable. You too, are capable of this level of healing. It is within you, if you are brave enough to do the deep alchemical work of excavating, dissolving what was never yours to begin with, and becoming who you were always meant to be. Embrace your shadow, it just might be an integral part of who you will become.

Sculpture by Paige Bradley