It is no small feat to walk with our wounds intact. You can tell a lot by how a person walks, and by this I mean both in ones physical posture as well as in a more poetic sense. You see a man walking, is he hunched over, concave, and folded in on himself or is he overly proud walking with a puffed out chest that seems to speak of his superior confidence and masculinity, when in fact more then anything his posture is probably an over compensation for some real or perceived lack? There is a third option. There is the man, or person, who walks tall, but is supple, agile, and pervades a sense of humility, contemplation, and just that amount of pride that is appropriate to the fact that we are spirited human beings living in nature.
In the poetic sense, to walk with our wounds intact means to carry our wounds, scars, and burdens in such a way as to neither hide or over exaggerate them. Sometimes our wounds will overcome us with grief and in these moments it is appropriate to cry, lament, and grieve over the very real sorrows and sufferings that we experience in this life. Then there are times to be joyous, to be strong, to be soft, and to be gentle. If we are supple and subtle in our way of being then our being itself cannot help but to act appropriately to the thoughts, feelings, and emotions one is experiencing in any given moment. Now of course I am not saying that a person’s visage and physical posture will radically change with every fluctuation of emotion, although if we look closely at both the posture and the eyes we will usually be able to get some indication of the type or quality of emotions and thoughts a person is experiencing. In essence what I am saying is that the skillful person will be able to experience and react appropriately to the full spectrum of his psychic experience.
We must ask ourselves the question, what is a wound? There are two types of wounds. There are physical wounds and there a psychic wounds. The former consists of mental and emotional wounds. More often then not all wounds at base are psychic wounds, for every wound, even if it is simply one breaking his or her arm or scuffing ones knee, comes along with an emotional experience. There is no such thing as a purely physical wound because as human beings we have consciousness and due to this consciousness everything we experience has a psychic component. So, in our discussion of wounds we will primarily focus on the nature of psychic wounds. We will certainly not overlook or ignore the intersection of the psychic and the physical because as we know we are psychophysical beings, or as I like to describe the human condition, we are consciousness experiencing itself in embodied form.
A wound is a place of down going. Let us take for our example a physical wound but extend it to our psychic explanation of wounds as well. Say we are cutting a tomato and in the middle of cutting our wife comes home and begins to talk to us. All of a sudden our awareness is no longer focused on the task at hand, i.e. cutting the tomato, and as a consequence our hand slips and instead of cutting through the tomato we cut into our finger. The knife wound marks a place of entry into the physical body. We have penetrated the external surface of our skin hence opening up a certain portion of that world of muscle tissue, blood vessels, arteries, etc. that exists beneath. Likewise with psychic wounds, a wound penetrates the surface level of our being and opens up places of mental and emotional vulnerability.
Opening up these sore spots, these vulnerable places, is not easy or particularly fun. These aspects of ourselves expose our fears, insecurities, hopes, wishes, and expectations, and once they are open, try as we may, we can never close them. We have two options from this point on. We can attempt to cover over and hide these psychic openings caused by our wounds or we can dive into them. It is really a very silly idea to try to hide from our psychic wounds because as the lead singer of Pearl Jam Eddie Vedder says, “The sorrow grows bigger when the sorrow’s denied.” We cannot hide from our psychic wounds. Everyone has them and everyone must learn to walk with them. All sorts of neuroses and pathologies are born out of denying our sorrows.
Without pointing to any individual sorrow, just look at our American culture at large. We are so afraid of death that we have developed plastic surgery, Botox injections, and extreme makeovers to hide the fact that we age (of course I am talking about the more extreme cases here and not about a person who likes to dye their hair a little or has a tasteful bit of surgery to a particular feature that could legitimately boost their self esteem). Laying aside the practical medical applications of something like plastic surgery, as in the case where someone’s face or arm is mangled in an accident, have you ever noticed the eerie feeling that surrounds certain people, both men and women, who try to hide the fact that they are aging? You see a woman wearing clothes that you are not even sure that her teenage daughter should be wearing and it just doesn’t work. Energetically something feels off. Or you see the manipulated face of a woman who has undergone significant plastic surgery and you can’t help but wonder what she is hiding and if she really thinks it makes her look good.
The other option, as we mentioned above, is to dive into our vulnerabilities. We can look at our wounds as a place of depth, power, and insight into our lives. Going back to the image of the knife wound, the opening is a place, an opportunity, for us to see below the surface of our make believe selves into the inner workings of our soul-psyche.
Wounds occur in many ways. We may be wounded by an emotionally abusive parent who makes us feel insignificant or guilty about ourselves or a family friend or relative may sexually abuse us. The list goes on and on, and there is wide spectrum of emotional and physical damage that can be done to someone, whatever the act or acts that inflict the damage may be, depending on their particular sensitivity of the individual. The ways in which a abuser wounds us become the places of our greatest vulnerability and sensitivity. (As an aside, we would never be able to find these places of vulnerability and sensitivity, which can be our places of greatest strength and goodness when developed correctly, if something or someone had not brought our attention to them.) This is not to justify the terrible things that some people do to others by saying that if the abuser had not done this or that thing to the other then the other would not have an opportunity to grow. No, it is just pointing out that we all have wounds in our lives that are potentially gateways into deeper levels of reality.
In the previous paragraph, I have mentioned the more extreme examples of how wounds are inflicted. There are certainly people who come from relatively peaceful and so called “well adjusted families,” but make no mistake that no matter how well adjusted or “normal” our family and upbringing may have been, we will acquire wounds of one sort or another. Again, I am not saying that all parents are bad no matter how hard they try to be kind and loving. I am not saying this at all. What I am saying is that part of growing up, even in the most normal or supportive of environments, is to run into conflict and sorrow.
The conflict and sorrow that we experience in the process of growing up is actually our first initiation into man and womanhood and the corresponding deeper levels of our beings. It is only through confronting these places of vulnerability that we learn the true value and significance of who we are and who “I am” as a human being. Through confronting our wounds, our dark spots in the psyche, we learn qualities such as patience, courage, hope, strength, stictuativeness, and faith which are essential to a mature humanness. Without these qualities we are like grown up children, and that is by and large what we have in our society, grown up children or “Big Babies.” In America we are confronted with a culture that does everything it can to distract us from the essential characteristics of a mature adult. We are told that we must work a job that will consume most of our waking life doing a task that for most people seems totally uninteresting and mundane because that is what it means to be mature and responsible adults. Yet I have to ask, why?
Why are we asked to work our lives away in these mundane jobs that do little more then perpetuate the economic behemoth that is American capitalism? Is it so that at the end of the day, week, month, or year we are so tired that we do not notice the vast inadequacies between the rich and the poor and the racial inequalities that stare us in the face in this country? Is it so that we have no time to take seriously whether or not the job we do exploits people in other countries or ruins the environment both at home and abroad? Perhaps the answer as to why we live like we do within our given socio-economic system is so, being the Big Babies that we are, in the few precious free moments we can play with the new toys that our jobs have bought us. That is if we work at a type of job and live a type of life style that can afford us these toys.
