A Call to Heal
I share this as a call to heal.
Suffering is part of life.
Healing is a long and winding road, and sometimes there seems no end to it. It’s more common for people to talk about the journey than the destination because it can be difficult to walk a path shrouded in fog, with pitfalls, and howling voices in the night. The uncomfortable truth is that we often never leave the path—sometimes because the journey is long, other times because we are resistant taking the next step forward, and other times I think because the journey itself becomes a kind of comfort (it can become a kind of identity, not victim-hooding, but a mode of being that we grow used to in terms of how we exist). But there is of course victim-hooding as well where we attach our ego to our suffering often in a way where we elevate our suffering above others.
In a significant way, we do create our reality, the look of our path, and that seems both obvious and impossible given how many factors beyond our control influence the shape of our life.
I’m in a men’s group that I attend every week. A month ago, I was sitting in the circle and it was my turn to speak of something that I was resisting or an issue/emotion(s) that I felt called to work on. I’d been holding on to something for a few months. The work felt overwhelming. I’ve lived with complex PTSD since the beginning. I have done deep work in the past that has cured aspects of it—for example, I used to live with constant low-level pain that sometimes increased with emotional intensity. During an incredibly powerful piece of work, I burned the trauma, I burned the pain, and the part of me that had been tasked with holding back as much of the pain as possible reintegrated with my core self. For the first time in my life, the pain was gone. And I had a vision of my ethereal self being reborn in that moment. Heady stuff!
But there was a part of my mind that I had locked away from a time when I was a baby and a little boy. There wasn’t much in the way of memory—but there was raw, intense emotion that felt like a riptide of whirling blades if I so much as looked in that direction. The lack of memory made it all the harder because my mind is wired to seek understanding and there was nothing to understand. Any attempt on my part to step into it caused emotional overwhelm and disassociation. The problem was that I was unable to exist in that part of my mind as an adult. During the circle, I stated my work as a want to reclaim that part of my mind. In terms of how, I had no idea. I didn’t want to work—but I felt a certain level of group pressure (in a good way – given with love and support) to take a look, and it felt complicated, I was unsure what to do with it, and perhaps it was too much for the circle.
I made the choice to step into the circle. I had two seasoned facilitators. I had a later memory connected to the work, and the focus was to resolve it where I would rescue my little boy and thereby release a part of me trapped within the memory. But I was resistant. I fell into the trauma. I was yelling, no!, over and over. The facilitators pivoted, and still I resisted and I felt myself dissociating. I told the facilitators that was happening. They pivoted again—one of them asked me to bless the men of the circle who at that point stood around me in a ring. I was caught off guard, and in that instant, the magic happened. I was yanked from a trauma state into my King’s energy, and there was an effervescent moment where my mind felt open and free and, in that moment, I chose to be done with the trauma locked in the closed part of my mind.
That part of my mind “blew up.” I had a vision of wandering around in a wispy fog of shadowed emptiness. I gave the blessings. I appeared calm, and I was focused on the blessings, but my mind was on overdrive testing whether the emotional energy of the trauma was gone. I was unable to find it anywhere. There were echoes of a sort but I experienced them with my adult mind. I had achieved my want. It was a miracle. There was no longer a long, winding path—I had plowed to the end. I don’t know yet what that means. I didn’t sleep much that night—not out of distress, but it felt like my mind was re-booting, and my inner world was rebuilding. My life was built on a foundation of pain and trauma, and I had just blown it up. For the next week, I sensed by subconscious in an overdrive of reorganization, and I got little sleep. I considered it a worthwhile price to pay. Alas, I have insomnia and when I get too rundown, that will takeover and I was locked in a pattern of bad sleep until I picked up a covid-flu virus making the rounds in Houston (it tested negative to both, but the symptoms are classically covid). I was sick 8 days, and I’m on day 3 of my recovery.
I had times when I wondered if it was worth it—the healing. Perhaps sometimes it’s the better part of valor to let sleeping dogs lie. But after 3 days of reasonable sleep, I have the clarity to say that it was. I have a sense of wholeness that I didn’t have before, and for the first time in my life, I feel like an adult. I feel like a man. I am done with a major piece of my healing work. Hallelujah!
I carry regret that it has taken so long for me to finish that path. I have much gratitude for the journey and the healing that came so unexpectedly. My writing has changed— the change to my inner world is reflected in the verse and it seems at times like a different person is doing the writing. How cool is that? There is so much I cannot control— but I can choose to heal— with a lot of work.
