Piercing the Wound

You know what you’re in for with this spirituality blog post. We’re not dancing around issues. We’re not coddling egos. We’re going straight for it. Until a wound is pierced and the inner damage is seen, it will continue to be a wound. No alcohol, spiritual mantra, psychological coping mechanism, or any other tool can cover it up for long. This must be done. This is the courage required of you on the spiritual path.

I often describe our wounds like broken bones. You cannot truly live with broken bones in your body. Your entire life has been compromised. But this is what we try to do. We also try to blame other people and the world for breaking our bones, and while other people have their own karma to bear for inflicting damage on us, most of the pain that we carry is of our own making and choosing. We choose to feel abandoned. We choose to degrade ourselves and perpetuate a sense of unworthiness. We choose to forget that we are interconnected to a greater whole that supports and sustains us.

In that forgetfulness, we then create intentional ignorance, and the pain deepens. The cycles of pain and suffering build up as we try more and more things to ignore how much we are hurting. But at some point, this has to stop if we are going to truly live. At some point, we have to pierce the wound.

Nobody Loves Needles

This is kinda of an inside joke for those of you who have been reading this spiritual awakening blog (Check out “Be Nobody” if you want to get it). It’s also a double entendre because it speaks to the fact that none of us really enjoy discomfort. But the needle that pierces the wound is necessary. We can’t really deal with an issue until we can peer inside at it. That looking is your needle. Your awareness and the sharpness of your clarity is what helps you to cut through all the upset feelings, body sensations, and mental stories to see what is really going on. Yes, there will be a lot of metaphorical pus coming up. I’ve never said that this is a clean path. But until you can clear out enough of that initial junk, you will not find the hidden bullet. You will not be able to get your handles on the two bones fragments to set them into a whole bone and begin–let me repeat–BEGIN the healing process (Some people think they should just immediately be healed, but that tends to not be how it is). So it generally gets messier and yuckier as you go in and pierce the wound, but it’s the only way to do it.

No More Easy Outs

I hope if you are reading this post today that you are done with easy outs. I hope that you are ready to get into the messiness inside of you because you and you alone are responsible for it. I hope that you are not just hoping that life will somehow be perfect after all of this either. It’s life. Life is a mystery, and I don’t want to hold out any mystical carrots to encourage you along. Can I say that being healed and whole is awesome compared to the reverse? In my experience, yes. Can I say that life has gotten easier? Absolutely not. But my inner space is far more at ease. In any way that you are still seeking ease from the external world, you will need to drop that idea and make more space for the messiness of the external world as well. We really are in a practice of loving everything as it is–both the dark and light colors on the canvas. It’s best to understand this early on, so you don’t run away when things really get rough.

The Seas Get Rougher

As you go deeper inside, you’ll be unveiling more and more illusions. Illusions often start with ideas that somehow we were happy with our lives. We were happy with ourselves. Things were going pretty well, but we wanted them to be better. If a person believes in these illusions too much, then they won’t go deep enough. They won’t peer into themselves deep enough because they’ll feel like they are going to lose too much. Even someone with an intense victim mentality may be afraid of healing because then they can no longer be a victim. A whole way of living is being eradicated for this person to start standing in his or her power. Really, wherever you are, you should take note of all the things you think you want to hold onto and all the ways you’re trying to construct some form of familiar reality that you think you want. It’s time to stop. You have to let it all go and step into the unknown.

More to the point, life is always unknown. We don’t know how things will evolve exactly. We don’t know where a lot of things are going, and a common human fear is the fear of the unknown. In a way, this is a fear of the truth. But deeper still, it is probably an association between the unknown with pain and death. But the unknown doesn’t necessarily bring these things. Some times it brings beneficial things. Sometimes it brings strange and weird things. It is the unknown. By it’s nature, it can never be predicted. Thus, the roughening of the inner seas can’t be predicted. It simply must be experienced and allowed.

Closing in on the Main Issue

As you peer deeper and your aim sharpens, the emotions and sensations tend to intensify. That’s why relaxation is your greatest ally. In tension, we tend to lose our centering in our breathe and heart rate. The body musculature starts to clench. Nothing is flowing, or at least, it is not flowing properly. If you want to bring your process to a halt, stay here. And maybe some of you should if only to notice how awful it feels to hold on because that is what you are doing. You’ll notice how tight muscles can’t move right. Poor breathing and blood flow means you can’t think right. And this agitation tends to lead towards more intense upset feelings. You may feel greater anger (often a result of energy not being able to move). You may feel intense fear (often a sign of stuck and frozen energy). What you feel will depend on you, but if you are ready to release this issue, breathe in. See if you can soften a little more. Let yourself experience whatever emotions and sensations are coming up. You cannot run away from you. You also will not be lost. A part of you may feel overwhelmed, but that is a story that believing you can handle only some of your feelings, thoughts, and sensations. Whatever is coming up are just your experiences, and you can handle all of you.

As you breathe and practice calming yourself, the waters can clear. You can drop a little deeper, and then you hit it.

The Spiritual Revelation Arises

A spiritual revelation is simply a revealing. The word revelation is derived from revealing (unless I am completely linguistically mistaken, but if I am, just roll with me here). In much of the spiritual path, we learn that life is always being revealed to us. That revealing simply shows what is already here. Many times people will say after a revelation, “I think I always knew this.” Whatever painful thing that came up was never really that hidden. It can happen that some truths completely blindside us, but after that initial feeling, we settle down. We may notice that even with these surprises, we aren’t as blindsided as we initially felt.

Thus, we come into the deeper understanding that we already have all of our answers and that many of our questions are just mental games to keep us away from the perceived inconvenience of what we already know about ourselves. We know when something isn’t true for us. We know what we really care about. We know where we really want to go. It’s all the conditioning, pain, and karma built up in huge layers that makes it seem like we don’t. But when you’ve found the bottom of a particular wound (and you may realize that you have many), it is only natural to scoop out the bullet and begin the process of healing. With that wound cleaned properly (probably for the first time in your life), suddenly life does get a little bit clearer and more spacious, and your awareness expands–until you find the next wound limiting your life.

The Healing Continues

If you have been walking around on broken legs or with bullets in you your whole life, the rehabilitation that follows the piercing of the wound may take awhile. Anything and anyone who supported you in living a wounded life needs to go. Only those situations and people who want to support you as a whole, healed individual will make sense to have in your life. Typically, this is where another layer of healing soon begins, and you have to let go of more things in life to make more space for yourself and healthier situations and environments.

Consider if you’ve never believed in yourself your whole life because of a lack of self-worth. You most likely have surrounded yourself with other people who don’t believe in themselves as well as abusers who make your decisions for you. You probably are in a job that you don’t like, and you probably have had very unhealthy romantic relationships. All those things have to shift. If someone wants to grow with you, that’s fine. But this is why the spiritual path can be so jarring and unsettling. It’s taking out the garbage inside of you, and then you realize all the other people you brought into your life to help you make additional garbage. They aren’t bad people; they are simply suffering from much of the same unconsciousness you’ve been suffering from.

Along with that, we aren’t hear to fix others, and most of you are too early on your paths to go out proclaiming the truth. You’ll notice that many of us who are healed and whole don’t really proclaim our truths. We live it. Those who want to get in on the truth come find us. There’s nothing to proclaim anyway. The truth speaks for itself.

Noticing Greater and Greater Freedom

If you do continue to following the healing path, you will notice greater and greater freedom afforded to you. Freedom comes in many forms such as being willing to feel more emotions allows you to connect on more emotional levels with others. Being able to open your body physically more allows you to enjoy physical things like dance, touch, sex, and other levels of physical connection more. And the open mind creates greater and greater space for clarity and seeing what is real–which is in many ways the basic definition of spiritual awakening. It is amazing to actually be free inside of us, and as such, to do that generally means being really uncomfortable for awhile to process all the pain we carry. In the end, letting go is natural and obvious. We don’t really want to carry pain. It doesn’t feel good. The pain in our hearts, minds, and bodies has been telling us–perhaps for decades–to just let go. So go inside. Pierce that wound. Let it open up, clean out, and heal so that you can experience the freedom that is already here.