Wounding and healing
Wounding, healing and wholeness. I recently attended this community enquiry hosted by Harthill, and facilitated by Ben Phillips and Rebecca Stevens. Its title felt 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. 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.
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 negative and narrow. It evokes pain, whatever the cause of the wound, and I’ve always found it hard to think of anything more positive. However, as I sat with the enquiry, I realised that my reflection was broadening out into wondering whether there’s any sense at all in which wounding might be positive.
I’m still struggling with 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, 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 look at myself, at what the wounding evokes in terms of memories, and whether it’s actually still relevant or appropriate to me as I am now?
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 Nora Bateson’s approach to the interdependencies in a system that she calls ‘warm data’, and 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]
[1] ‘Listening as Healing’ – Shambhala Sun, December 2001
