The Healing Time
By Pesha Gertler
Finally on my way to yes
I bump into
all the places
where I said no
to my life
all the untended wounds
the red and purple scars
those hieroglyphs of pain
carved into my skin, my bones,
those coded messages
that send me down
the wrong street
again and again
where I find them
the old wounds
the old misdirections
and I lift them
one by one
close to my heart
and I say
holy
holy
It is possible to get through this life without ever becoming aware of your stuff. The stuff that is running your life, that is keeping you stuck or stalled, and most of all the stuff that is keep you at a low-grade of misery. But let’s be clear that just because you aren’t aware of something you are holding energetically within you does not mean it doesn’t exist and is not having an effect on you. So many of us are terribly good at convincing ourselves that painful experiences and deep heartaches don’t impact us, when their impact may be apparent to everyone but us. Will you be happy if you get through life in this way? Will you experience the deepness and the richness that life has to offer? No, and don’t try to fool yourself into thinking that you will.
We are deeply afraid to look at our wounds, to look at where we are bleeding into our lives and where the wounds have become infected until we are damaged and our happiness destroyed. We also live with secret shames and denied darknesses that haunt our inner spaces. We’re not free of them because we deny them. Our family secrets, our painful traumas, the shame of our human deviations block up and corrode the pipes through which our vital life energy is meant to flow.
So what do we do with all that we don’t want to acknowledge that is weighing us down? We get in touch with the light of our consciousness and we let that light shine onto it all. We stop walking around with gaping wounds hoping no one will notice and pretending we don’t see it ourselves. Instead we look straight at all of its ugliness, and as the poem above says, we make it holy through awareness, honesty, love and reverence. We feel the deep hurts and the aching in our hearts, and we do it consciously. We let the tears flow and acknowledge for once how the painful experiences have shaped us and caused us to go to sleep. Now we’re awake and just the act of bringing the light of awareness to all that we’ve been suppressing and denying begins to free us and to heal the original injuries under the dysfunctional patterns we developed because of them.
I thought of the song sung so often “this little light of mine, I’m gonna let it shine” and it occurred to me that it is not just our calling to shine our light out into the world but it is also our responsibility to shine it onto our inner world where its capacity to heal us can be so very powerful.
So, even if it is the smallest pin prick of light, that is enough to be hopeful in regards to transformation. When you get that little light bulb or aha moment and you suddenly become aware, even in the smallest way, of what you have been denying or what has been causing you to act out dysfunctionally, you are now in the game. You are now headed to victory and cannot go back to sleep. That awareness has opened the door of choice. You now get to choose to do something different, feel something different, and perceive your experiences differently. If you choose to go back to denying and being unconscious of your stuff, it will be even more painful than before. Why? Because now you know and once you know, you can’t undo the knowing.
When you let your light shine into the dark and dusty crevices of your inner world, your consciousness is now more aligned with the Universal mind and this grows your light and the light of the entire Universe. Becoming aware, waking up, healing, transforming…it is all a tremendous act of altruism that propels us all forward collectively.
So, let it shine!
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