“Often it is the one who has been wounded the most, who displays later in life the deepest abilities as a healer.”

This is not really a quote; more like a paraphrase. To de-legitimize matters even further, it’s source is not Mother Theresa or a wandering Benedictine monk. It actually comes from a scene early on in a Jason Statham action movie where Michelle Yeoh’s character is explaining to Jessica Alba’s that the lethal fighting machine character (Statham) studied a while with her father concerning Asian herbal treatments despite his violent skills and tendencies.

It is more than this though. The script writers, for sure, borrowed the idea from a very well-worn trope which has spanned many human cultures and centuries. Carl Jung even declared the Wounded Healer as one of his psychological archetypes. In astrology, practitioners have associated the asteroid, or planetoid Chiron with this theme in human biography analysis. As Greek myth told it, Chiron was singularly unusual among the race of centaurs because of his wisdom and curative insights. The half-man half-horse centaur figure represented the unperfected man not yet under the control of his own I but subject to the whimsy and soul dysfunction of his animal instincts and tendencies. But Chiron alone had determined a way to transform and transcend this within himself. Devotees of the Bible will be quick to identify this identical theme within both Testaments. Joseph, for example in the Old, who suffered the abuse of twelve brothers, was sold and left for dead, but who became the wise judge of human affairs for an entire people. Or Christ in the New, who carried transformation to its logical extreme of complete Resurrection.

Human soul wounding is common and even rampant in these times; one wonders whether an actual race of centaurs isn’t in the physical making. Or perhaps swine-men. So the question of what to do about this wounding is both an individual existential one and a universal social one. There seem to be three distinct approaches or pathways, although at first, maybe for years, an individual will find himself or herself mired in a quicksand mishmash oscillating between these possibilities:

1) Succumb — utterly give in to the despair and depression resulting from the inflicted soul wounds

2) Evade — avoid acknowledging and experiencing the pain, numbing it with various substances, distractions or contrivances

3) Explore — cultivate curiosity (already an objectifying tendency) and observe the effects of one’s wounds upon one’s inner self, gradually finding measures to heal and transform them

Looked at in this way, it is easy to see that the third option could lead to pointed wisdom concerning soul crises and transformation potentials because the wounded one cooks an individual solution in the crucible of intimate experience. Especially in modern culture, with it’s morbid over-emphasis upon the intellect, it is important to see that any knowledge-wisdom gathered on the difficult road of inner experience must be tempered and balanced by a correponding emotional warmth. A true healer cannot be too clinical, else why not submit to AI therapists? The heart has to be developed at the same rate or levels as the piercing insight. Without compassionate love, a healer is handicapped and in danger of falling into a strong or prideful egoity.

There is a foundational humankind soul wound at the basis of all this very real individual drama. It is the ultimate archetype of humanity’s quest for transformation, for becoming whole, in the face of some nagging subconscious awareness that things within us, both as group and as separate member, are not as they should be. Or could be. It is our separation from spiritual reality as physical, material human beings. This separation is in truth a consciousness matter — it is not actual. Although it carries the potential to become actual eventually, if mankind fails. Religion, or better put, the original spiritual impulses which have deteriorated into contemporary religious activities, was the original response to the original human soul wound. Something like the concept of Original Sin, which is much misunderstood at present. This original soul wound was the cleavage between spiritual existence and reality and human experience and cognition, or consciousness. This was a gradual cleaving. And it was by design. The decision of the spiritual world, in regard to humanity, was to force a seperation so that an individualized intellectual awareness (freedom) could be gradually instilled within every human person. The mission of returning, but crucially under our own individual free decisions, to a spiritual awareness of reality, though transformed because it carries now the enhancement of freedom and love, is the healing vehicle for the present world wound. It is no less messy than the individual struggles which real afflicted lives must go through psychologically. More messy I’d say. There are hundreds of false roadmaps available, and zillions more to come, as intellects become more powerful. It is not even that widely recognized that this earth-wide existential malady exists. We are very much in the subconscious stages of evading and succumbing to depression, as outlined above. But everything is much more vague, because it takes alot of individual work to learn to see these realities, and not everyone is so inclined. But the gnawing pain is there, as constant symptom. It will become more vivid throughout this century and beyond. Our very way of life itself will gradually come to be seen as illusory and a clever example of evading the pain awareness. By this is meant materialism. The idea that only what is physical is actually real and mostly what matters — or in many cases, only what matters. The social disruption this dawning realization will unleash will be enormous. But equally, the continuing and growing concealment of this realization, which wants to surface from our depths, is also creating massive amounts of social disruption and tragedy. It has to be seen that this state of things is not normal, but an aberration we are submitting to and participating in preserving. Things will get worse! Just like with natural physical laws — too much increasing heat within a closed container will eventually explode. So it is with spiritual law — persistent ignorance of reality will reveal itself in widespread uphevals, disharmony, tragedy, and violence. Everything will depend upon the availability of more and more talented and compassionate wounded healers.

I leave off with a few quotes for contemplation around the idea of wounded healers, from the work of Henri J.M. Nouwen:

““The great illusion of leadership is to think that man can be led out of the desert by someone who has never been there.”

“The mystery of one man is too immense and too profound to be explained by another man.”

“When the imitation of Christ does not mean to live a life like Christ, but to live your life as authentically as Christ lived his, then there are many ways and forms in which a man can be a Christian.”

“Since the God ‘out there’ or ‘up there’ is more or less dissolved in the many secular structures, the God within asks attention as never before.”

“Through compassion it is possible to recognize that the craving for love that people feel resides also in our own hearts, that the cruelty the world knows all too well is also rooted in our own impulses. Through compassion we also sense our hope for forgiveness in our friends’ eyes and our hatred in their bitter mouths. When they kill, we know that we could have done it; when they give life, we know that we can do the same. For a compassionate person nothing human is alien: no joy and no sorrow, no way of living and no way of dying.”

_______RS

Image : snippet of artwork from a website discussing the archetype of the Wounded Healer.

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