Saturday, Feb.11: Woundedness, Two

WOUNDEDNESS, TWO
I was clearing through my filing cabinet yesterday and found a section I hadn’t looked at for a long time, the health section. In it was an article about Caroline Myss, the medical intuitive who has focused some fine understanding on what holds people back from healing. She’s even writing a book on this, called, appropriately enough: Why People Don’t Heal. In the article, written awhile back, she talks of being surprised to discover that people, at some level, really didn’t want to heal.

They wanted to hold onto their wounds. This cocoon of woundedness was so comfortable, that they preferred their suffering to the radical shift that healing would create.

Compare Feldenkrais’ definition of health: the ability to recover from shocks to the system. Whether it’s a cold, or an accident, or a mean boss, or a bad day in traffic, health is the ability to snap back to being interested and excited by life. This last is my embellishment, but if we aren’t happy with our lives in the moment, whose job is it to change that?

If it’s someone else’s, then we are sunk, we are a skunk, the whole world is going the smell bad to us, unless we are around some magical mommy/sucker who will sacrifice and keep us feeling cared for. This is the purpose of woundedness. It’s a con racket to get someone, either in imagination or reality, to come to our add, and service us, make us feel good, compensate for whatever imaginary or real harms that have come our way.

What’s an imaginary harm? A mate leaves you. This hurts your image of how life should be and reinforces doubts about our lovability, but the harm is all in the mind and heart and story of how reality to should. A real harm: someone punch you. Someone molests you when you were young. Someone bombs your village, or comes and steals your land and burns down your house.

Whether the harm was real or imaginary, we can get weak and wounded over this, and wait for the world to fix us as a compensation for whatever we went through. Or, we can come into the present and see that this isn’t happening and look around in the present and find something more interesting to do.

Like take a walk.
Or talk to a stranger.
Or talk to a friend.

Or talk to anyone and stay conscious while we talk, instead of going over and over all our old tapes. This is where life gets interesting: can we be present around other people? This is the life of intense awareness.

The life of the wounded is the opposite: we wait for the world to feel as sorry for us as we do for ourselves. We obsess and focus on our woundedness. We might even look for a mate with similar wounding and then use this as our bonding. Poor me, poor you, let’s huddle together against the big mean world.

And so what’s the way out of all this: choose to be happy. Choose to be present. Choose to be as healthy as we can be. Learn to move and live and speak with more and more awareness and ease. What a nice pathway, don’t you think?