Superficial Wounds
How what we choose to believe shapes the way we heal & the reality we live in
(Kintsukuroi is the Japanese art of fixing broken pottery with lacquer dusted or mixed with powdered gold, silver, or platinum. As a philosophy it treats breakage and repair as part of the history of an object, rather than something to disguise.)
I pulled my hand off the jagged top of the broken bottle and held my wrist as fat, wet drops of deep red blood flowed onto the floor.
The immediate thought that came into my mind was “it looks deep enough for stitches.” Taylor took a look while he called his parents, quickly mobilizing plans to watch the kids (and napping toddler) while he took me to the emergency room. “This is why we moved back close to family,” I thought, as I gathered my things. Grabbing an oddly small handbag and a Human Design book to read, forgetting my headphones, but remembering my giant Stanley water cup - I gathered an odd assortment for my trip. I even managed to fill the Stanley with the warm water I had been making when the honey dropped out of the cabinet and smashed the oil bottle standing below, my hand landing on its jagged edge as I tried to catch it mid-air.
The bleeding only stopped when I pressed hard on the wound, usually unperturbed by blood, I winced and turned my head when Rob, my father-in-law looked at it. “Sure you don’t want to get a butterfly tape and some bandages?” he said. “Yes,” I replied, “I think there might be glass in it.” Off we went.
The sweet triage nurse told me that it wouldn’t be long for a hand laceration, and I settled into the waiting room on my own. I focused on my energy, circling myself in a warm light to soften the vibrational blow of being in the murky energetic soup an ER carries. It was surprisingly easy to set my space. I opened my book, Jenna Zoe’s new(ish) one, re-reading the information I knew so well but always needed reminders of… like this one: “uou are constantly dancing with life and here to lift up everyone with the findings of that dance…. the secret to making it work is in the way you frame it.”
Cultivating my vibration has been my sole focus of late. Well, it’s something I thought I was doing, and I was in some ways, for years. Yet, a transformational shift has been alchemizing over the last three months.
2023 was one of the most challenging years of my life.
I know this to be the case for many, each in our own unique ways.
The uncomfortable truth most of us know by now is that those rock bottom moments, whether we like it or not, provide the fertile soil for our future. This applies to our natural growth, the kind that flows easily from difficulty. But I find the “soil” metaphor to be most powerful when it comes to gardening, versus wild regeneration which always happens in its own mysterious ways.
What I am trying to say is that when we take the send our hands purposefully into the compost of our own lives, the process of intentional cultivation that can propel us towards quantum leaps in our innermost love and alignment.
What I have found again, and again, is that when I breakdown there is another level below it - and another below that one. Even though each layer comes with its own breakthrough, I’m consistently surprised by how big the difficult feelings can get before the shifts I have been desiring begin to take form. The decomposition process always lasts longer than we think it will.
This fall I felt I was trudging up the hill, making great strides - and I was in many ways - but the emotional hits kept coming, the patterns weren’t budging, and something just felt off inside - even with the progress I was making in some arenas of life. God delivered me two things. One, the opportunity to work with a coach who embodied her work and epitomized love, challenging me to break patterns and raise my vibration to new heights. Two, an experience with a different coach I was been working with (and am no longer) which offered me a the opportunity to align with love in a different way, through a challenging experience.
It was the type of turning point moment I have come to call a choice point. A choice like this one had come across my path a few years earlier. In it, I was given two paradigms of belief to choose from. Here’s what I know, deep in my soul, that drove me to choose what I did then, and what I chose again a couple months ago: what we choose to believe about life creates our experience of it.
We shape our own realities. It does not come down to objective Truth with a capital T. While there are objective truths at play in this universe, they are less powerful than you may think. For example, an objective truth is that in the objective universe, all time and space exists simultaneously. This is reality that mathematics points to - it’s called the block universe. Yet, this is not how we experience time as humans. My point is - does it even matter if it doesn’t apply to our direct daily experience? Sure, but at the end of the day - no.
Mostly because the objective Truth, capital T, is veiled from us, not entirely but mostly, clothed as we are with our very subjective human consciousness.
What we do know about human time, human Truth, human consciousness, is that we are a subjective species. What does this mean? Many truths co-exist, and we get to choose which ones we believe.
I was presented with a belief that I had played with in the past, that in many ways I believe may be true, about the spiritual realities of good and evil. What I realized, yet again, is that my choices direct my energy and therefore my experience of life. I do this through making a choice, and then choosing it again and again with my thoughts, cultivating it from an idea into a belief. This is how we create our own faith.
I could have chosen to believe that the dark had any power whatsoever over me and reality. This is a logical choice, to be honest. There is a sea of experiences, stories, information that proposes that this is the Truth of reality, of existence. That evil is very real, very powerful, especially in our earthly realm. We see it daily in the horrors of war, the selfish power struggles of politics, the cruel actions of corporations, and even the daily hardships we face. It is beckoning us to believe in it, to believe that evil is everywhere and possibly at the very root of existence. This is what the Gnostics, for example, believe - that the world was created by a malevolent “demiurge” divine being.
Can you see how it always comes back to creation? And how what we believe about creation is what we create through believing in it?
I chose to double down on the choice I had made years before.
I chose Love.
This was God’s reminder, the ultimate shake back into alignment, and a call to share the message that I knew was at my core, but that I had been afraid of. I truly hadn’t even known that I was afraid of it, but once I saw it I couldn’t unsee it - how my fear of being disliked and my fear of being wrong had kept me gently looping in old patterns. It had felt like alignment was just barely out of reach, like I had the key but I couldn’t find the door - and that’s because I was so close.
Being “close” to a spiritual breakthrough is not linear, it does not mean the pain will be less, because sometimes the smallest adjustments in coming back into alignment ask us to change patterns that have held us tightly in our very core.
As I sat in the ER, wound on one had, and my Human Design book the other, I felt my vibration lift gently. For two months, I had been re-patterning in a way I never had before. I thought I had done so much work! It’s true - I had.
There were so many “shoulds” left, they had become so subtle, so ingrained, so embedded in all the ways I doubted and failed to value myself.
My coach, who happened to use Human Design as one of her primary tools, held the mirror tightly to me, challenging me to rewrite stories I had clung to, that I didn’t see were wrong - or recognize weren’t even mine. It was a process of seeing, releasing, and choosing again a new thought, moment to moment. As it had always been, but the struggles of 2023 had conspired with love to devote me, ever more deeply to healing completely. Not complete in the sense of finality, but the ending of one way of life and the building of a new paradigm - upon a dusty, abandoned foundation of my own inner truth and truest essence.
What this experience, this choice point, had taught me was that the path is very simple. Sure, there are many stories to unwind, many methodologies from mindfulness to somatic healing, but they are all the same, when they work that is. That everyone had got it wrong when he said “I am the way, the Truth, the Life,” that it wasn’t about HIM at all.
It was about Love.
I decided to open up the kitchen paper towel matted with blood. As I peeked below it, I realized the cut wasn’t that bad. A little deep, sure, but as I probed it gently I knew there was no glass in there. A couple of stitches maybe would have helped, but I was an hour into waiting, and that’s when it hit me.
Yet again, I was hoping for someone else to save me. I was outsourcing, and thinking that would help me avoid pain.
David Whyte says there are three illusions that we each hold individually but all of humanity shares collectively, and they are this: that we can somehow construct a life in which we are not vulnerable, construct a life in which we will not have our hearts broken, and that we can somehow arrange things so that we can see our life’s path, right from where we stand to the horizon.
To lift the veil on all three illusions, there is only one pathway forward. To have faith in Love. How do we have faith in Love? We choose to believe that Life itself is Love, that it is inherently benevolent, that we are innately not just worthy, but beautiful, perfect just the way we are.
I stood up and walked out of the ER, my husband picked me up, car full of our three children, and we laughed as my wound seeped a little blood.
“Are you sure?” he said, “are you sure you don’t want to wait and make sure there’s no glass in there.” “Yes,” I replied.
I was certain, I trusted my instinct, I trusted what my body told me and had told me from the start, but that I had overriden with an old “should.” As I taped my butterfly stitch over the cut, it hit me that walking out of that ER, and the trip there in the first place, was a profound rewiring. One that I had to take with my actions and my feet - that the fact that I went all the way to the ER and sat there before having my realization made it all the more powerful than if I hadn’t gone at all. I went to the edge of my old way of living and being, tested that boundary, and then sat in the newness of my current energy.
When I did that, when I stayed in stillness in that ER waiting room, that’s when I heard my instinct speak to me, louder than it had been able to in the pain of the immediate injury, the anxiety of caring for the kids, and the rush of emotions that had sent me out the door. In the quiet of my own mind, I went back to my practice. I elevated my energy. I nurtured myself. I told a new story. The new story is what walked me right out of that ER, back home to myself, knowing I could tend to what I needed simply.
What made the difference is that loving story within me was held by the benevolent container of my loving worldview, without.
Don’t you see how if I chose to believe that life is struggle and hardship and evil is just around the corner, I would have ended up staying in a story of fearful what ifs? What if there’s glass in the cut? What if it gets infected? Isn’t it just safer to be safe and have the experts check it out?
This is where so many of us go off course, where I had been falling off the wagon of inner alignment all along. I had been adhering to a view of reality that acknowledged one truth over choosing another.
Here’s the catch… it’s not that one view is more true than the other. It’s that when we give our belief to one view we give it all the power, and when we choose to believe another view, we take back our own power.
Rationality and logic could not get me where I wanted to go, and in retrospect, it was never designed to get us to our destination in the first place. Individually or collectively - we can see where the reign of reason has brought us all to these last few hundred years - surface prosperity the world has never seen before, and a deep spiritual suffering.
There’s this key, in the marriage between believing in Love, and being love.
When I decided to leave the ER, I believed that I would be fine in a larger sense, I dismissed all catastrophising thoughts, and, most importantly, I believed in my ability to tend to my own wounds.
The outer larger belief about Life, capital L, was symbiotic with my belief about my own capabilities, about the power of my intuitive knowing, with what comes down to self-trust.
Trust is the action verb that we individually choose to take. What do we choose to trust? Love. The love that we are and the love that life is. Holding this trust for a sustained period is called faith.
Trust is like the thought, faith the belief.
Trust and thought are the muscles we flex over and over again, that build and foster the faith that we hold. Trust and faith are neutral though, they are vehicles, and we decide the energy that we direct them towards. We can have trust and faith that things will go wrong, and yes sometimes they do, but what happens when we have trust and faith that things will go right?
What if we trust that if things do go wrong, that we are smart enough and strong enough, and just ENOUGH enough, to handle what comes our way? What if we had faith that, beneath all of it, this wild reality is was woven from goodness? How would that shift how you acted, how you moved, how you believed in your self and the course your life might take?
If nothing else, why not just try it out? See how it feels to believe that it’s not just the Universe, or God, that “has your back,” it’s that THAT God, that Universe, that LIFE are all one and the same and that Divine force is LOVE, down to every last thread.
PS - This is an updated version of the essay I sent earlier with minor edits & typo fixes. I just got so EXCITED I pressed send a little soon. Thank you for your love!!