Wounding, healing and wholeness
Wounding, healing and wholeness. I recently attended this community enquiry, hosted by Harthill, and facilitated by Ben Phillips and Rebecca Stevens. Its title feels especially relevant to a world that I experience as increasingly fractured and polarised, and presented so often in the media and social media as black and white, characterised by schisms of all sorts, in which there’s a quest for ‘I’m right’ – which inevitably means ‘You’re wrong’, with no space for interest or care in what ‘the other’ may think or feel, and therefore no space for dialogue. Most of all, some aspects of living in our world these days feel to me like, more than ever, they lack humanity – human connection and warmth – and, rather, feel sharp-edged and cold.
Wounding
So ‘wounding’ felt like an apt lens through which to start looking, on an individual level, a relationship level, a society level and even a world level – because wounding seems to be present in all these contexts.
Another lens which intersects with that, as we were invited to reflect on, was how we make meaning of wounding, and the nature of the stories and assumptions we create around it. I realised that for me the meaning I create out of wounding is inevitably negative and narrow. It evokes pain, whatever the cause of the wound. However, as I sat with the enquiry, I realised that my reflection was broadening out into wondering whether there’s any sense in which wounding might be positive – both the experience of feeling wounded and the experience of creating wounding in another person, another being or another system.
I’m still struggling to find an affirmative answer to that question, but also realising that its very nature prompts me to think about whether, in the presence of wounding, I have a place in offering something more nourishing into the world: connecting, compassion, love, care, listening and witnessing, for example. I realise too that there might be learning in wounding, especially from the point of view of perspective. For example, I can find myself falling into blaming the person or the organisation or institution that I may see as the cause of the wound, and seeing them negatively. What if I adopted a stance of both greater compassion and greater self-compassion? Might my own wounds then take on a different perspective? And might connection emerge where previously there was disconnection? Might schisms begin to be bridged? Might humanity begin to show up more in the way we live together?
Healing
If we think of wounding in terms of damage or pain, it’s interesting to consider the antidote as healing – and interesting to look at healing from a few different perspectives. Two of them include educator and writer Nora Bateson’s approach to the interdependencies in a system – an approach that she calls ‘warm data’: the interrelational processes between and among systems. And teacher, consultant, and advisor Margaret Wheatley’s principle that ‘great healing is available when we listen to each other….. If we can speak our story, and know that others hear it, we are somehow healed by that…. It has something to do with the fact that listening creates relationship. We know from science that nothing in the universe exists as an isolated or independent entity. Everything takes form from relationships, be it subatomic particles sharing energy or ecosystems sharing food. In the web of life, nothing living lives alone’[1].
Wounding can cause alienation, separation and isolation – a route to possibly more wounding. It seems clear to me that wherever and whenever we can, it surely is fruitful and positive to aim to create healing both for ourselves and others, albeit that that might, in certain circumstances, require contemplating our own views being challenged, empathising with the position and experience of others to whom we feel opposed, and pride being swallowed. Speaking from my own experience alone, I can report that it creates a quality of connection that can be very precious.
Wholeness
So what’s the connection with wholeness? Does healing necessarily mean wholeness – and what does wholeness mean, anyway? An engaging concept arose in the workshop – that wholeness is peace. I found (and find) myself very drawn to this framing: peace is attractive to me somatically (a sense of ease but not complacency – rather ease that engenders vibrancy, alertness and sharper awareness), and also intellectually: it evokes integration, a sense of the elements in the system interconnecting, fitting together, humming together, finding creative ways to function together in the knowledge that safety is present.
Peace is both internal to each of us, and external in terms of how we, and all the elements that make up our world, interrelate. If peace is present, I’m thinking, wholeness is more possible, and so is healing in the face of the wounding that will inevitably always occur.
[1] ‘Listening as Healing’ – Shambhala Sun, December 2001
Photo by Aarón Blanco Tejedor on Unsplash
