The Wound Makes the Medicine, page 1
This ceremony of life
in which we kill the little untruths over and over
to save the big truth of love that lives within us
Sit up for the ceremony!
Love cannot exist without the justice of healing
DEAR READER
THESE WRITINGS ARE THE PIECES of me that rose up during deep healing after a shattering heartbreak touched off many older, yet-unhealed heartbreaks. It would not be fair to speak in detail about the catalyst, for straws that break camels’ backs are merely tipping points that reveal where too many assumptions have been allowed to shape a life. I am guessing that you know what I’m talking about: It begins with feeling like something is a little off, and realizing that “off” feeling is connected in a weblike way to many other little incongruencies and concessions—tiny self-betrayals that amass in a mob to rip out whatever version of the picket fence we’ve constructed.
New grief has a way of stirring up ancient grief. In the process of refusing to go cold in my heart, deciding to stay with myself through the pain and the reality, and titrating the flow of intense emotions, I found strange medicine being made right in my mind and body, by my pain. I made countless voice memos to remind myself of what was happening to me—desperate love letters from the future I could not yet sense that would make their way into the writing that appears here. I could not do anything with them at the time, but they were waiting for me when I made it back to the shore.
When my marriage ended, my heart was perched upon the familiar ledge so many of us face when we lose those tenderest elements we believed belonged to us, the daily nutrients that were taken for granted when we were partially living in a fantasy—ingredients like love, intimacy, connection, vulnerability, security, safety, predictability, trust, hope, and desired outcomes we so hoped for based on positive projections and potential. Good and spirited love built with grand expectations cannot withstand storms when built on quaking foundations of unhealed, unacknowledged trauma.
I live and work on a ranch in the high desert of the Pacific Northwest, where the workdays are long and each adult carries a double load. It was a mild winter that year, thankfully, yet I cannot remember taking my coat off. My throat stayed wrapped in a moth-eaten scarf as I jaggedly walked from chore to chore, not quite numb and often crying. Tears cleanse us—not of uncleanliness, but by offering a sterile flush for open wounds. That’s because they contain the perfect ratio of salt for battered emotions. Weeping was infection prevention for me, and in that time, I became acutely aware of how little weeping I had done in my life. It was debilitating and disabling, and it dawned on me that we have developed a lexicon for mental-health issues in this so-called culture, yet we do not have sufficient language (at least not in English) for emotional disabilities, just as we do not have much space at all for grief. The overculture (dominant culture that creates social norms—and punishes those who do not live by them) does not offer rituals and resources for the brokenhearted. Only distractions and numbing agents, affirmational Post-it Notes that do not stick long to dusty mirrors.
I was torn between the chores of parenting, preparing meals, and tending the land’s never-ending needs. As I felt along my ripped edges, I sensed my untimely rage and my desire for control over the way this relationship was ending that was tearing me apart, even as it challenged me to stay open and remain with myself. I had to surrender the control that had helped me create such intricate armor around me.
It was a sacred privilege to be with my grief—and it was a choice. It was not indulgent. It was a long ceremony filled with visions, nightmares, ancestral horrors, and shit-fit wars with my ego. I battled with fixation on external factors, seeking outlets for my disappointment, frustration, disgust, and annihilation. I walked aboveground by day, as necessary, and I swam in my darkness for eleven months. I struggle for language to describe being in two worlds devoid of identity, floating between the mundane and the existential. Words would not come for weeks, until I managed to stitch myself up; and for several-day periods, there would be what my comrade called “fire in my face”—and then I would go gray again. I could not predict how big the waves would be or when they would overtake me. Old shadows and family legacy burdens haunted my sleep, and I could not remember, nor conjure the hunger, to eat.
Harrowing experiences of emotional rupture impact many of us, especially in these times of collapse we’re collectively in. During my medicine-making period, I began to see how I felt, according to the language with which most of us are familiar. The overculture calls it depression or dissociation, but it also goes by many other names, some of which you’ve probably already heard. Some are helpful for a time—others, not so much. At their worst, our labels and names for things create limits. We’re learning that we are infinite—that our range is beyond naming, that our fixity is not real, that language is designed to help us share our experience as best we can.
I felt my body changing as I moved with disabling heartbreak. My being, as I had come to know it, transformed, recovered, and healed, as my ancient wounds decided they could trust me to see them as they truly were. I assembled the fragments of myself that were coming back together in my awareness in accordance with the elements—fire, water, earth, and air. Each had their way with me as I walked another splintered suspension bridge of internal emotional instability. Fire warmed me and burned my house down. Water quenched and held me under until I drowned. Earth gave me her plants to heal, and her vines strangled my old way of being. Air breathed me whole by day and held a pillow over my face at night. All were teachers with shadow sides that mirrored the option to self-sabotage, to stay encased in the unhealed parts of my proud flesh.
This book uses the elements to demonstrate how, when we are in grief and pain, we tend to live inside the properties of the elements themselves. Sometimes it feels like we’re burning, or drowning, or buried alive, or getting the wind sucked out of us. There are contrary medicines for each of these elemental influences: releasing and transforming, surrendering and floating, grounding and connecting with nature, breathing full deep breaths and reconnecting to the oxygen of life. For me, the processes are not linear, even though they are arranged in order of each of the elements (and preceded by “proud flesh,” which describes the context of the body-in-healing that contains all the elements, too).
I scrawled through the pages of my journal when I felt I was drowning in complex emotions, and I found ways to surrender to the waves and become a proficient surfer. Inflamed with anger about what I couldn’t control when my relationship house was burning down, I carried the pointed sticks close to my chest and hugged them tightly with love for the lessons I was determined to learn. I placed them in the fire as an offering, with prayers to release. When I felt the air punched out of me by betrayal, I challenged the places where my windpipes felt choked and caught, and focused on my whole breaths for days at a time while I literally chopped firewood and did the chores of three people. When I felt buried alive, trapped underground by my grief, I let the earth compost me and envisioned medicinal plants sprouting from my skeletal remains.
Each element has the power to give life or take it away. In my most painful periods, I die. In my most uplifted, I am slowly reborn. Another spiritual awakening has thus far delivered resuscitation, leaving it up to me to mind what has more power than me, to respect the forces of nature long before I entertain decision-making on the bases of fears, ideals, and dreams alone. Failure does not come from making mistakes, but from not learning their lessons.
This is not a book about a marriage ending or the loss of a grandiose dream, but of everything loss sets off inside us and time calls us to finally tend to. The essays within are to be read at your leisure, in whatever order you wish; you might even open the book at random and find the medicine that has synchronously summoned you. The affirmation at the end of each piece is the medicine for breathing in and meditating with as you tend your own wounds that time is calling you to heal. Journal with them if you feel called to create descriptions around the sensations and releases that arise. It can be healing to describe the experience, and then come back to your writing later to see if the description still fits. It is also okay to recognize that words are inherently limiting, and not all processes need documentation in order to impact you.
I want to share in the language I have at my disposal to conjure what a body and heart can do when they release the mind’s desire to control that which it cannot. I have unscrewed the lid to show you the rich, viscous, oily, life-affirming salve that heartache can make of our real-time and ancestral pain. Mine is rustic and roughly scented, like bear tallow whipped smooth, with bits of root, blood, and eviscerated bone, softened in the mortar and pestle of surrender. It will cure over time, and I will continue to add to it. Yours will be different, with sensuous and ambrosial qualities made for you, by you.
Please note that the lyrics in this songbook are not a “how to” as much as a “walks with.” If I had written this book as poetry, as I originally wanted to, I would have tucked my feelings and experiences into noxious yet floral verses containing cryptic instructions for how to avoid feeling profoundly foolish and alone! Another time, maybe. At any rate, my desire was to tenderly touch our scars and find ways to speak to them without objectifying, exploiting, or dominating the pain we all feel.
Loss is death, and losing something or someone of great importance challenges us to get very close with nature, as well as our innate nature, to heal. This book
My aspiration is that your own walk through the creative, destructive, renewing journey with heartache makes the medicine you need most. May you travel around the wheel of elements in a circular manner—through a labyrinth of tenderness, rage, passion, waves, salt, humus, and breath—to be a fool for love in all forms and wise enough to stay connected to your heart at all costs.
Love,
Pixie
PROUD FLESH
Scars form
sinuous and silky
tenacious tissue
to cover and protect
the torn
TENDING SCAR TISSUE
DEAR HEART, YOUR PROUD FLESH is scar tissue that grew over your wounds—more than what was needed to heal properly. It formed thick and substantial on the surface over the energy of your capacity to love and be loved, an overprotective armor that cannot yet trust the air to heal it. It protrudes—raised, uneven, and excessive.
It is understandable that defensive armor results from trust and love disappearing without your consent, taken from you without your control or desire to release it—and yet, exposure to your awareness is what it needs to reawaken to the flow of your blood. Proud flesh doesn’t want to have needs. It is a trauma response that choked out the possibility for you to be loved the way you yearned to be loved.
Heartache is the midwife that can birth you into new levels of healing… with your permission. The cost of staying hidden beneath thick scars impacts all of your relationships, the work you choose to do in the world, how roughly or gently you nurture children, the voice you use to “discipline” yourself to keep on living.
The proliferation of tissue that overgrows your wounds is tough by design, and it must be broken down with care, exposed to sunlight and warmth, tenderized gently but consistently to be integrated back into the body. In your armored state, you must find all the ways to consent to be vulnerable to light and air. Being outside where the sun can fall on your face and warm your bones—while you acknowledge where in your body the hurt is crying silently—is a simple act of dissolution that nature provides. Speaking to a trusted friend, drawing your loved ones close, and learning who can witness you in your fluid and ever-changing moods without judgment can prepare your system for transformation.
Healing your deepest cuts requires your determination to permit the healing to take place within you; to replace your fear with a stronger desire to risk loving and being loved, which includes being injured by love again and again; to be intimate with your body and your life as they are right now, which requires giving up the ghosts that have taken up residence here.
Energetically, proud flesh holds fast, stopping your breath before it can reach all areas of your body. It is my consistent experience that my breath will come up from my diaphragm and catch right where I hold my fear—just at my sternum, midway between my navel and my heart. During my periods of freezing up and fighting my cycle of inner healing, I needed to challenge that catch. I envisioned it as a small pair of jaws that clamped my windpipe each time my body sought breath.
I want all of my breath, in all the places my body needs it. I want you to want yours, too. It is our birthright to breathe completely. Part of the sacred task of transformation is challenging ourselves to return to profound love, which will gradually soften the scar tissue that armors us.
I am called to expose the battered fragments of my heart to light and air, trusting that nature knows best how to move me forward.
STAYING WITH THE ACHE
IT IS POSSIBLE TO RELEASE control, surrender, and be open to an outcome different from the one you had hoped for. Don’t try to go at a pace faster than what you can handle. Simplify. Put your “big plans” on hold.
You cannot make many plans apart from simply being with the ache. The ache will tell you everything you need to know, while fear will try to talk loudly over it. Fear often says that if you stay present with your pain, you will get stuck in it. Fear says that once you open the floodgates, you may not be able to stop the pain from surging through.
Why are we afraid that if we allow ourselves to feel the depth of our pain, we will get sucked into a lifelong depression? I believe that some states deemed by the overculture to be negative and unwanted come from a denial of what hurts. How will denying our hurt move the needle forward?
You must allow yourself to feel your heartache, so that you can be reclaimed by the healing that comes after the worst has been fully felt. Underneath the pain of today’s loss is yesterday’s untended hurt, hopelessness, and disappointment… asking to be acknowledged, to be fully felt.
If emotional pain were a soft-tissue injury, the ligaments around the injury site would need gentle lengthening, so the tissue could breathe and become fluffy and pink again. Toughened scar tissue was not given a chance to be rehabilitated at the time of injury. It now requires extra care, patience, and slow movement so circulation can flow again.
I will work gently and slowly with the old pain awakened by today’s pain, to soothe the original injuries that caused me to hurt so much.
BEING PRESENT AND SETTING BOUNDARIES
YOUR HEALING PROCESS WILL NOT stand for controlling or rigid agendas. It does not call for bullying from the parts of the self that want to hurry the process along, or anxious attempts to accept the hurt and be done already. It will not stand for being filed away, but rather will petition patiently through inconsistent sensations and ever-changing emotions, and the natural ebb and flow of noticing, which will sometimes entail confusion or agony. It needs your devoted attention.
These moments of confusion and agony may feel never-ending, but they will wane with love and proper care. You might unconsciously suspend loving yourself if it seems too hard under the circumstances. Perhaps you’re working through guilt or old shame… but it’s still possible to love and honor yourself, as well as the slow process of healing.
I encourage you to set boundaries for what you do and do not have energy for. I find that interacting with people when I am really hurting is challenging, so I set limits on my interactions, as well as what I bring to and seek from them. It is important to maintain an inward focus in times of pain. We do not think of heartbreak as a listening time, as a prompt to surrender deeply to what is flowing through us. We are accustomed to collapsing, or tucking things away to deal with later, or giving all our time to people and situations outside ourselves.
In this medicine-making stage, we must look into our hurts and be present to them. There is a desperation that comes with unjust loss and a very physical sensation that can feel overwhelming at times. Your body and soul have had to withstand a lot to get to this place of tending torn heartspace. May your wholeness be fed with consistency of care, and cradled by the process itself, as well as by your willingness to be deeply present with it.
I will allow myself to surrender to the hurt and set limits and boundaries around my resources so that I can stay with the process.
TAKING BACK OUR PROJECTIONS
YOUR PROUD FLESH WILL INEVITABLY bump up against the proud flesh of others. What I mean by this is that the feelings you cannot tolerate will show up as projections you wish others to hold for you. A projection is nothing more than a defense mechanism that you subconsciously use to cope with painful feelings. We seek to target others to get out of working with the pain they triggered. For example, perhaps you are experiencing rage that doesn’t seem safe to feel—maybe you end up perceiving your partner or another loved one as being wrathful and angry all the time, and you accuse this person of torpedoing your life with hot temper. There may be a grain of truth to your perception… but there may also be an aspect of you that doesn’t want to claim its own part in the dynamic. Likewise, as you go through your own process of healing, you might face other people’s projections; they might tell you to “get over it” or suggest that you’re too intense, because some unhealed part of them is “too intense,” hasn’t moved through their pain, and requires their attention, care, and love.
