#MondayInsight:

A new story for your wounds

The dominant story about our wounds is that they come from bad things that happened to us, which damaged us in some way, and are now negatively impacting our lives.

But I hold our wounds as sacred in the same way I see our purpose and mission as sacred. 

Like the South Pole and the North Pole of our planet, I hold these poles of core wounds and life’s mission as two aspects of one thing. 

Core Wounds <<<<——–>>>> Life’s Mission

Our wounds prepared us for our purpose! Because of the life you’ve lived and the experiences you had, you’ve developed the gifts necessary and become the person capable of answering your calling! 

Conceptually this may sound lovely, but let’s face it – when your wounds are triggered, they just hurt.

That’s why we often fall into the story of seeing our wounds as something to deal with, fix, or get over so that we can thrive and live our purpose. 

The challenge with that perspective is that it creates an inner battle where we’re fighting against our wounds – which are aspects of ourselves… so ultimately we’re fighting against ourselves. 

But when we can bless our wounds, we can more easily integrate the gifts born of our wounds, take ownership of our journey and more fully be able to live our purpose. 

To do that, we need to have a different relationship to our wounds and a new story we tell about them.

To that end, I want to invite you to explore three different relationships to your wounds with different levels of “ownership” of your wounds.

1. My wounds happened TO me (no ownership)
   Bad things happened to me, which is why my life is the way it is. If those bad things hadn’t happened, I would have a good life and be happy.  Now I have to do all this work to try to get healthy so that I can thrive.
2. My wounds happened FOR me (partial ownership)
   Yep, that stuff happened, but ultimately I see the gifts in it and see how my journey has been instrumental in training me for my purpose. 
3. My wounds happened BECAUSE of me (full ownership)
   On a soul-contract level, I chose it all. I contracted with my wounders for the very wounding I had. I wanted those parents. I wanted that environment. I needed that wounding to send me on this path to prepare me to do this work. 

One of my favorite Brene Brown quotes is “You either own your story or it owns you.” 

When you take ownership of your story… “I see how this happened for me” or maybe even “At some soul level, I know or feel that I chose it”…

Then you change your relationship to your story.

You’re no longer in a victim stance to your wounds, which frees you to live your purpose in the biggest way possible. 

At a personality level, the further we get into that ownership of the wounding, the more challenging it can become.

And the biggest challenge is how limited our perspective is when we are in this human form!

We cannot see the whole picture of our lives, let alone the world! 

It happened TO me and it happened FOR me are both things we can examine from our current perspective on earth. 

We can easily validate “It happened TO me” by looking at all the things that happened to you – there they are. 

We can also start to do inner exploration and find some gifts born of all those challenges, which can help us adopt an “It happened FOR me” stance. 

Taking on “It happened BECAUSE of me” though, is the most difficult stance to adopt because we simply can’t see our lives from a pure soul perspective, which is the perspective from the other side of the veil. 

That’s why, if you’d like to lean into the “because of me” perspective, it can be really helpful to ask for help from the Divine. This could be your inner guidance, your ancestors, The Universe/God/Source/Spirit, to get the perspective your guidance holds. 

Here are a few questions you can ask…

• Were there choices I made before I came here? 

• If so, what choices would be most helpful for me to know about now?

• Why was it important for me to have my parents? My family? What about the environment I grew up in?

• What would you share with me about my life’s wounds or challenges? 

• What’s the bigger picture of what I was wanting for myself by going on my journey? 

• How do you (guidance) hold my wounds and journey that’s different than how I hold it?

• Anything else?

My hope is that playing with these perspectives helps you see the sacredness of your entire journey, including the beauty of your wounds…

And that the ownership of your story frees you to more boldly, playfully, and powerfully do what you’re on earth to do. 

I encourage you to take right and wrong off the table as you do this. Instead, replace right and wrong simply with things to consider. My partner used to talk to his nephew and would always ask him, “What made you go ‘hmm’ today?” So try this on and see what makes you go, “hmm.”