The Gift Held Within the Wound
Our gifts are innate, inborn, and effortlessly expressed.
Our wounds dwell in the same place as our inherited gifts.
They activate and catalyze one another.
You can not learn to sail in calm seas.
No wind?
You didn’t learn anything.
It’s when the winds get fierce on the ocean, that the real learning occurs.
By preserving through the gale force winds and navigating to weather the storm,
you come safely through the storm, gifted with a reservoir of strength and confidence about your new found abilities.
When someone is experiencing suffering there are two pathways you can go down to help them transform the suffering. One is by way of their gifts. If you can see someones gifts, then you can empower them to bring those gifts out into the world, which strengthens their overall sense of self. The other way is to support them to alchemize the wounded aspects of self that they feel are in the way of living a fulfilled life. If you follow the trail that the wound takes you on, it will lead to the gifted place. Either trail of the wound or the gift, will eventually lead to the same place.
Deep inside of the Soul, there are gifted resources that only awaken when we are willing to weather the storm of life and navigate through the sea of wounding that has occurred. It’s by way of your courage to go on the journey, that leads you to the skills needed that empower you to activate the gifted resources within.
Much like the symbol of Taoism, the ying/yang, the light is held within the dark, and the dark contains the light. To be in balance, we must reside in the center. Neither leaning too much in one way or the other, but maintaining balance at the center point. We need both the light and the dark to create life on earth. The wound is the balance point to the gift. Can you reside in the harmonious center and the balance of the two?
The more a person initiates and becomes fully alive to the power of their own life, they will also encounter their own suffering. Most of society tries to correct our emotions and make them wrong. This mentality creates an unhealthy stress response within us. If we think emotions are somehow wrong and need to be fixed, then it leads to either suppression, or eventual explosion. We are meant to be with our emotion fully, just as it is. Neither suppressing them, nor wildly expressing them. But rather, being present and awake to the fullness of the emotional charge and allowing it to simply be as it is. In total acceptance and without making it wrong. Your suffering has intelligence held within it. It is ancient and wise. If you slow down and tune into your suffering, what wisdom does it have to share with you?
To gather our gifts, we invoke and engage them through various methods; creative forms of artistic expression, spiritual practice, dancing, inner-child connection, spending time in nature, ceremony, and the compassionate acceptance of the wounded self. To embody our gifts we cultivate our core powers, consisting of our core values, core abilities, and core wisdom. These three core powers combine into a united force that empowers us to manifest our gifts into the world.
