Hello well-being family,
Lovely to be with you again on this gorgeous spring morning here in Queensland.
I've been reflecting a little bit,
I always,
You know,
The podcast episodes come out of the experiences that I'm having in my own life each week and so I'm always alert to what's impacting me,
What's a great lesson that I've learned,
What have I seen with my clients or someone sent me an email and I've read it and there's a learning in it.
And so today what I wanted to talk about,
I just read an email this morning from a beautiful yoga teacher friend and it was about the symbol of the lotus,
Which is really interesting because it's something my partner and I have actually been talking about a lot recently.
Why is the lotus such a symbol for spiritual,
For many spiritual traditions,
For many spiritual traditions.
And I've heard before the story about how the lotus rises up out of the mud and manages to flower on the top of the water and that this is a metaphor for how we are in our lives that,
And essentially that's what this email was about too,
That the mud symbolizes our trauma,
Our wounding,
The difficulties that we experience in life,
The conditioning,
The patterns,
The negative behaviors and the limiting beliefs,
All the difficult stuff that I would call our woundedness.
And then we rise up through the water and manage to flower and the symbol of the flower is that we have this beautiful,
Pure,
Inner,
True self.
It's what the Tao people call our true self.
It's what the Buddhists call the Buddha seed.
And in Buddhism there's a beautiful analogy that it's like a diamond and what we're doing is cleaning or polishing that diamond,
Rubbing away the mud.
So I'm mixing metaphors here but the flower of the lotus is a symbol that despite the mud,
Despite the stickiness of the mud and the messiness of the mud,
Doesn't that,
Isn't that a great metaphor for life?
We have this inner purity which can flower when it is given the right conditions and of course the right conditions are the water that the lotus requires in which to grow.
So I think it's a beautiful metaphor and it speaks to me about something that I sit with in therapy with my clients a lot,
Which is our woundedness.
That many people come to therapy because they feel that they are very broken and they have a history often of,
You know,
Quite severe trauma.
And some of us have more to work with than others,
Obviously,
But that core wound that many of us experience,
I don't think there's anyone who doesn't really experience this sense of a core wound.
That's what I want to talk about today,
That we can actually think about our core wound as a great blessing once we can approach it,
Begin to approach it and work with it.
And that's kind of what I wanted to talk about today is how we transform the wound into a blessing,
How we transform our woundedness into our giftedness.
Because if you stop and think for a moment,
I'm sure you you're aware of what you feel your core wound is.
And if you're not,
Maybe close your eyes and take a breath and think about what are the persistent negative beliefs that surface for you about yourself,
About you in your life.
That's the core wound.
And then think for a moment,
Who would you be if you didn't have that core wound?
Who would you be without it?
And sometimes it can feel that we become a little bit unanchored without our core wound.
I know that sounds odd,
But it's an example of how our familiarity with it is somehow comforting.
And there's a great example of how the comfort zone is not always a good place to be,
It's just familiar.
So then think for a moment,
What does your woundedness offer you?
Just reflect on that.
I'm sure it offers you some richness.
And the thing about our core wound is that it's not going away.
It's not going away.
And that's,
You know,
That might be a good news and bad news,
But it is the core,
It is at your core and it it actually offers you a lot.
And maybe in that little minute where we were reflecting on it,
You've had a little sense of what your wound might be offering you.
And I know that obviously,
As a core wound,
It can be difficult and dark and create difficult emotions and drag you down.
But I'm imagining that there's also some richness there.
And I know that from my own experience,
That my own wound offered me great richness.
And I certainly wouldn't be doing the work that I'm doing if I didn't have my core wound.
And so that leads me to the next step,
That it's about how do we make space for that wound,
Develop kindness and compassion towards it so that it can emerge and we can be with it a little bit more in our lives and process it.
And this is often the work of therapy,
Is processing the core wound so that it doesn't go away,
As I said,
But it loses its triggering capacity.
It doesn't have you by the throat anymore.
It doesn't hook you and grab you and send you hurtling into some chasm of depression or panic.
And that's the difference,
Right?
Like my core wound hasn't gone away,
But I can be with it now.
I can feel very,
Very tender towards myself.
And how hard,
How difficult it was for me as a child,
The difficult situation that I found myself in and how resilient and creative I was to get through that.
And that I made these creative adjustments which,
You know,
Which eventually had a use-by date and had to be undone in themselves so that I could reaccess the core wound and process it and heal it.
And I don't think that healing is ever fully done.
Like I wouldn't say that I'm completely healed,
But I have certainly taken the core wound and I've met the shame and metabolized a lot of the shame that sits with it so that it no longer has me by the throat.
It no longer sends me,
As I said,
Hurtling into chasms.
Or if it does,
Actually,
The more truthful thing to say would be that sometimes it does still send me hurtling into chasms,
But I don't stay there long,
Right?
I bounce back out of it much more quickly because I don't add insult to injury.
I don't feed it.
I don't tell myself things like,
Yeah that's all you can expect because da-da-da-da-da.
No,
What I do is I'm really kind and compassionate to myself and I say,
Oh wow,
There it is again.
There's that wound.
There's that wounded child.
I recognize that feeling,
It's so familiar.
How can I be kind to myself?
How can I help myself and encourage myself to get through this?
And that might be,
I need to take myself for a walk in nature,
Or I need to sit on my yoga mat for an hour.
I need to allow myself to heal,
Basically.
So this is really the difference,
I think,
That when the wound emerges,
Now I can be much more kind and compassionate to myself.
And not just to myself,
But to my whole lineage.
Like I recognize that my parents were doing the best they could in a difficult situation,
With limited skills,
Limited capacity.
And those before them,
The same thing,
That we're all caught in our conditioning and the conditions that we find ourselves in,
And we do the best we can.
So sending that compassion all the way down your lineage is really powerful as well.
So the lotus when it flowers is our pure self,
Our pure unstained inner self,
Which is always clean and fresh and beautiful.
And just waiting for the right conditions in which to show itself.
And that's,
I find that a really uplifting way,
It's an uplifting metaphor for the way that we are in the world.
And I hope that you do too,
And I hope that this episode has spoken to you about whatever core wound you feel that you're holding on to.
And some of the ways that you can work with that inner wound are through journaling,
And through working with your inner child.
So there's a meditation I think that I've put here on Insight Timer about working with your inner anxious over-functioning child.
And you can listen to that many times.
Get really close to him or her.
Get to know him or her.
Be with her.
Say that you'll stay with her,
You know,
From your place as a grown-up adult who is coping it with life.
Go back and visit that inner child and let them know that you're here for them.
Let me know how you get on.
See ya.
