“The wound is the place where the light enters.”
Rumi
This simple quote is a great pointer for handling pain, struggle, and difficult times.
Our thinking mind’s job is to prevent pain, to keep us safe and strong. It doesn’t know about spiritual growth. So when we’re centered in our heads, problems and emotional wounds seemingly have no redeeming quality, no purpose, no rhyme or reason.
But of course there is more to us than our intellect and survival mechanisms. Our soul can grow whether or not things are going well. Sometimes our soul grows the most when things aren’t going well.
Why is that? Because our soul grows from being intensely present, focused in the moment. And little does more to focus us than pain from a wound.
How many times have you heard someone say something like, “what I went through made me into the person I am today” or “it was the hardest thing I ever went through, but I wouldn’t change anything” or “I am so grateful for the time that …[insert personal horror story]”?
These statements make sense to us when we hear them. We can relate, because we’ve had our own dark nights of the soul too. Even if we’re a teenager, we’ve been through something difficult, and come out of it stronger.
But there is something about being in the middle of it, that makes it difficult to have the same wise vision. When we’re in the middle of the hero’s “ordeal” stage, the “all is lost moment”, we forget that the wounding we are experiencing is going to open up a space for light, healing, and strength. I think this is because we don’t yet know how we’re going to grow, what light is going to enter, and what the treasure we will find is. It’s easy to recognize the healing after it occurs, and the treasure after we have it. But no matter how many times we’ve been through trials and challenges, our survival mind tells us, “this time it’ll be different”; “this time it’s just going to be bad.”
And, the more times that voice has been wrong, the more I am able to doubt it’s claims, which sound so convincing in the moment.
Our minds evolved – with glitches – for survival and reproduction. It’s job is to steer us toward that, and it isn’t particularly concerned with things like spiritual growth or unreciprocated altruism. For example, imagine that a partner is about to abandon you. This creates a wound (hurt, fear, anger). The mind isn’t interested in the light that will enter this wound (self-love, surrender, presence). It just wants the partner back. Or to emotionally cutoff the partner to find a different one. It’ll recommend pursuing, coercing, manipulating, withdrawing, aggressing, or whatever strategy it learned in the past. These are reasonable mind things to try. But they often aren’t in our best interest, because they are based on preventing or minimizing wounding, and disregard the growth (light) that can enter from such a situation. The challenging and highest action might be to let go of control and feel the insecurity, the fear, the loneliness, knowing that it is temporary and will pass, leaving us more resilient. The ambivalent partner may return, or may not. In either case, we have the light that we opened to.
I think we can get better at recognizing the future treasure, the future healing, before it we have it. We can reflect on all the times in the past that wounding has led to growth, strength, insight, and perceptivity. We can hear the hero’s journeys of others. We can practice meta-cognition and mindfulness to inoculate ourselves against believing the distorted thoughts that our pain is something to be terrified of and escaped from at all costs.
Like a physical wound, an emotional wound will heal more quickly when we are feeling equanimous about it. I see this quote as a reminder to keep the heart open and the body grounded in the present, even while taking any necessary action that our situation requires. Stress and worry won’t stop the healing, but it will slow it down. Even this in itself is a valuable lesson. When we forget that big pain is always a potential new beginning, we eventually remember. In that remembering, we learn the difference between appropriate helpful healing action and unhelpful wheel spinning, and that growing recognition is a victory. With practice, we allow the light to enter the wound while simultaneously using our minds for creative solutions and practical behaviors where any are appropriate.