This culture is full of olders on drugs but has a deep poverty of elders dispensing medicine. This culture is full of young people with gifts to give and no one to recognize those gifts. Years ago, I interviewed the good David Waugh of the Natural Gifts Society
Robert Bly put it well with the phrase, 'The wound is the source of the gift.' He also examined the shadow side of the wounded healer in his poem 'Wounding Others.'
'There's a wound in my chest
Where I wounded others.'
This is something I wrote on the theme (includes one use of the f*** word):
“This life just won’t stop messing with my head.”
“Well take yourself away,” a small thought said.
“OK. I’ll walk the Downs to get things clear,
So clear that, yes, they’d grace the written word.”
“And yet your voice is never really heard,”
The fuck-it-all thought whispered in my ear.
I walked up to the edge of Beachy Head.
“Just keep going,” the final-call thought said,
“You know that’s been your tried and true refrain,”
I love this version of the Chiron story --and the framework that "believing in ourselves" is a job that's way too hard to do alone, was never meant to be done alone, that it's like saying "pull yourself up by your own bootstraps". (For one thing, where did those bootstraps come from? And for another, how could that work?)
I think too that when we go deep enough in our wounds to find the source of healing, we transform things way beyond what we can know.
Robert Bly put it well with the phrase, 'The wound is the source of the gift.' He also examined the shadow side of the wounded healer in his poem 'Wounding Others.'
'There's a wound in my chest
Where I wounded others.'
This is something I wrote on the theme (includes one use of the f*** word):
“This life just won’t stop messing with my head.”
“Well take yourself away,” a small thought said.
“OK. I’ll walk the Downs to get things clear,
So clear that, yes, they’d grace the written word.”
“And yet your voice is never really heard,”
The fuck-it-all thought whispered in my ear.
I walked up to the edge of Beachy Head.
“Just keep going,” the final-call thought said,
“You know that’s been your tried and true refrain,”
But then someone was with me in the mist,
Tired and stubbly, like an out-of-work priest.
I said, “You here to make me think again?”
“Perhaps…” His voice was low against the sea.
“…This time you’ve come to turn the tide for me.”
I love this version of the Chiron story --and the framework that "believing in ourselves" is a job that's way too hard to do alone, was never meant to be done alone, that it's like saying "pull yourself up by your own bootstraps". (For one thing, where did those bootstraps come from? And for another, how could that work?)
I think too that when we go deep enough in our wounds to find the source of healing, we transform things way beyond what we can know.