The Wound and the Vessel

Pain as teacher, but only in its own time.

There are moments - whole seasons, even - that transform us through sheer endurance. Their lessons are too vast to stay contained within us alone.

A friend tenderly reached out recently and asked if we could meet to talk about, what I would categorize as the hardest, most soul-developing, and refining seasons of my life. My first reaction was one of hesitation. “Am I ready to go there? Is that pain healed-enough in me for it to be of any salve to someone else?”

I’d just completed my offering for the Wild Edges workshop which focused on sensing into the “yes” and the “no” of our intuition in our body. I sat with myself for a few minutes and checked - my body gave me a clear “yes.” So I accepted the invitation.

My friend and I sat in the bright open coffee shop, surrounded by other hearts doing similar types of soul connecting.

After our time together, I checked in with my body. I’d just revisited the hardest seasons of my life and how those seasons had wounded, shaped, and ultimately transformed me. And what I felt was peace.

Not necessarily neutrality - there was plenty of aliveness there, and even some subtle charge, but there was so much peace. A recognition that what I’d held for so long in me with cautious hands had actually transformed into something entirely different. A new softness, a new approachability, and new lessons about the Self that had navigated those seasons for me.

I realized I was feeling this tension as a kind of living, breathing presence in my soul - pain as both a wound and a vessel.

When I was in my own most painful season, there were anchors around me that had navigated similarly choppy waters. I found them like buoys on a long swim through open water. Heaving my arms around them, breathing deeply as the choppy water around had its way with me.

My mother was a buoy, God was a buoy, familiar hiking trails with my dad, my prayer and journal, the blogger who’d written about her own dark season, my friends who’d let me talk about anything except this season, Jeffrey. Jeffrey the most. All anchored buoys.

The biggest anchor of all, perhaps birthed from all the ones above, was my own intuition. I didn’t know it at the time, but what I was developing was a deeper relationship with my own knowing, and a deeper understanding of the freedom and empowerment I have in that relationship.

I stunned a client once when I reflected back “you don’t have to accept every invitation that the universe, or God, or the Divine, or even your highest self offers. You can say ‘no thanks’.”

That was also a pivot point in my own dark season - what allowed me to transform some of my pain from being a wound to being a vessel.

Simply put “I can choose how I want to move through this and I can take a break in the soul-development that comes with pain, and just let it hurt for a minute.”

What that looked like for me was standing out on the balcony at my perfect little condo, where me, and my pain, and Jeffrey had nested and releasing my own knowing out into the sky. I whispered the blessing over myself:

“I give this all away, because the knowing of my knowing is too heavy right now, so I asked that the Bigger Than Me Love hold it for me, so I could just be a creature.”

I carved out enough space so that I could breathe, take everything just a little less seriously. Let play back in, and enjoy the season I was in, even with its sharp edges.

As I sat with that friend and brought them back to my heart every so often since, I’ve thought to myself, how brutally meaningful our pain is, not only to ourselves, but to all it will inevitably touch.

And I believe our work in those seasons is to invite our pain to be vessel alongside wound. When, and only when we are ready.

To honor the complexity of pain and not demand it be purposeful yet.

Let it come in its own time.

For there is something bigger than us happening in us. Always.

P.S. If you're feeling the pull to tend to your inner world in a more intentional, seasonal way, you're invited to join me for The Seasonal Self - a once-a-month gathering beginning June 8th.

Each session offers a gentle rhythm of rest, reflection, sensory ritual, and guided Reiki. We meet just one Sunday evening each month to reconnect with the natural cycles around us - and the quieter ones unfolding within.

You can read more and register here.