​Take Your Broken Pieces and Make a Beautiful Life

Image by Ruthann Hurwitz - Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0 

“The wound is the place the light enters you.” Rumi

I saw this flash up in one of the Transcendence 2 episodes about emotional healing, which I had been watching fresh from the heat of an argument.  I’m not going to pretend that I let the light in and had an epiphany at this point, the feelings of the trauma recreated in the argument were still flowing through me and I was basically distracting my mind by watching.

It’s important to point out the word re-created here. I’ve moved past the phase in my life where I’m completely identified with any self limiting thought patterns for any length of time, I’ve stopped labouring on points of principle and right and wrong. But on a bad day, and in the heat of an argument, yes siree, I report for rewind and repeat duty.

Thankfully it doesn’t take long for conscious awareness to kick in, and I realise the details of the argument are not important. What is important to me is to recognise the pattern, and uncover what about the whole interaction poked at an old wound and caused the flare up into automatic pilot.  I try to use each opportunity as a chance to at least let the light in retrospectively.

In that moment, however, I was just too exhausted to do anything more than recognise that this was exactly what had happened. The self righteous voices in my head disappeared and I vowed to look at it afresh when I had the energy, clearly there was some work to be done.

I do wonder sometimes if I will ever be free enough of the encumbering patterns to live life as my kintsugi-ed essential self. Kintsugi is a traditional Japanese art that uses a precious metal (liquid gold or silver dusted with powdered gold) to bring together the pieces of a broken pottery item and at the same time enhance the breaks.

As I’ve said many times, those unhealthy thought patterns really came about from my early childhood, in the process of my making meaning about how to be loved and to survive. I know I came into this life with an expectation of growth and expansion, so I look at the process of taking on those thoughts (which started out as helpful forty years ago), recognising they are no longer helpful, then healing and integrating them, in a similar way to kintsugi.

In a bid to quantify this in some way, earlier today I drew out what I called the pain body. The inspiration came to me after watching an energy healer do work on moving stuck energy in a couple of peoples’ biofield. As she worked through their fields, identifying and clearing traumas, it was very clear that both people viewed trauma differently.

Unlike the healer, I know both these people well. One, who I know to be highly sensitive, empathic and more likely to assign meaning to events, had a significantly larger amount of stuck energy in their field. The other, who tends to be more present in their body, had relatively little stuck energy.

There were also no real surprises in their fields, as both had previously talked about the issues that came up. The surprise was that those issues were stuck in there because of the depth of emotion that had been felt and meaning assigned to them by the individual.

I created a picture in my head of my own biofield projecting out around me with the significant events in my life reflected in it. Within my body I saw the beliefs, the repeated thought patterns, which I had developed as a result of making meaning of these events and their potential to cause disease. While many of my beliefs will have had their origins in the time before conscious thought or memory, the stuck patterns will have reflected themselves in later life events anyway and are likely quite visible.

So I first listed out all the significant events I could think of year by year. This ran to three pages. I thought about the two people whose biofield I’d witnessed being cleared and imagined if I were like the second person, and did not feel so much around me, I’d likely have less than a page.

The usefulness in this thought was really only in appreciating how different we all are. We all carry unwanted baggage around with us, but I have high sensory sensitivity, am an empath and meaning maker by nature so my baggage cart was so full I could not even see myself behind it when I started becoming aware of all this on the journey to me.

“The worst predator is our thoughts” says Dawson Church. If you feel any sort of discomfort that is a sure sign you have emotional baggage. Then one of the other presenters in Transcendence 2 asked “Is there someone you haven’t forgiven?” and I know the answer to that in most cases is me. I am very good at forgiving others, but seem to have unreasonably high standards for myself.

This week, after a nostalgic conversation with an old friend, it took me back to a time in my childhood when I was less encumbered, it was nice to feel into that and get a good look at the girl pushing the baggage cart. It’s a useful technique to imagine a conversation between present day me and child me, because I find it a lot easier to forgive myself in hindsight.

My friend was encouraging my writing and it got me to thinking about some of the other people in my life that have really cheered me on and believed in me, even when I didn’t believe in myself. As I result I decided to get in touch with my first swim coach and share with him what his belief in me had meant through the years, only to discover that he had sadly died back in July of 2018.

I lost touch with him in my twenties, and had kicked myself for not getting in touch with him in 2016 when I wrote Magic Happens When You Believe in People. Bill Tinney was the kind of man everyone only had good things to say about, and he took time out his busy schedule to break things down for me so I could perfect my technique.

After I had exchanged a couple of emails with his son, I walked out onto our deck to take a look at the night sky and, would you believe it, I saw a shooting star. I like to think that was Bill acknowledging he had heard and understood, and was still cheering me on.

I figure if I am going to look at what is encumbering me, I should also look at the good stuff: the things that went well in my life, the helpful beliefs I held, the happy moments and the people who believed in me, those are the parts that are worth dwelling on. In fact, these are the very things I need to expand on to get in a better feeling place more of the time

I’ll finish up with a quote from BrightVibes “Stop being ashamed of how many times you have fallen, and start being proud of how many times you have got up.” No matter how broken, the willingness to take ownership of and examine our broken pieces allows the light to enter and the wound to be healed and integrated into a stronger, less encumbered and more expanded you.

​If you enjoyed reading this, you may enjoy Great Relationships Happen When You Put You First, Do You Really Know the Different Parts of You?, Change Unhealthy Reactions and Get in Touch With What You Want for Your Future – Recognise Your Brain Is Dwelling in the Past. To be the first to receive these posts, you can also opt to subscribe to my blog.