The Wound Is the Portal

Our heart is a mansion with a million rooms

It is up to each one of us to keep the doors and windows open

We are the right people for this moment, just as we are if we remember that our wounds are our portals.

The great Sufi and Buddhist masters speak of suffering as the tool that carves the vessel for joy. But we are not simply the vessel carved by suffering; we are also the sculptor wielding the blade. The late Thich Nhat Hanh said, “make good use of your suffering.” To become aware of the chase, of the sharp edge, of the house of mirrors, allows us to transform our relationship to suffering and make good use of it in our lives. 

To become aware that we are the monster that chases us in the house of mirrors that keep us is to become cognizant of our running. This awareness provides an opportunity to stop the chase and greet ourselves in a new way. Compassion then has an entry point. The monster becomes the sacred master; the blade becomes the tool; the house of mirrors becomes the sanctuary. 

Transformation in our lives begins to unfold when we return to our wounds as curious wanderers willing to greet the beastly shadows and slow down long enough to make acquaintance with the stranger inside. Compassion is born as we grow to know and love the outcomer within.

Compassion is manifested as radical respect for the self and the other. Let’s break this down. The etymology of the word radical is radix, meaning the primary source or the root, and the etymology of the word respect is to look again. So when our primary source is activated by turning and looking again, we begin to truly see the other, both within and without. When we apply this kind of compassion to our wounds, we start to see with new eyes the very thing that once we turned away from. We begin to greet every reflection in the house of mirrors with curiosity. This engaged awareness with our wounds turns us from the carved vessel to the creative sculptor. It allows us to look at the very thing that has been chasing us into the darker corners of ourselves and extend a hand of recognition, in turn ending the chase. In this manner, we shift the paradigm. The road towards integral beingness becomes self-granted, and there the journey truly begins.

Generosity becomes the next natural step. When our primary source starts to root with compassion as its soil, our tree of life begins to bear fruit of magnanimous giving. The healthy tree does not withhold the fruit. Radical compassion becomes expressed availability, a kind of friendship for the self that naturally grows towards the other and the Earth. This kind of compassion goes beyond the self while anchored in the being.

By facing our wounds we learn from our wounds, by learning from our wounds we heal our wounds. When we heal our wounds we become available. As we welcome our terrors into the house of delight and give a seat to the multiplicity of our becoming, we grow available. The root word of available comes from two old English words: avail and able, meaning serviceable. Serviceable means the fulfilling of one’s function. When we sit with our wounds, our shadows, our monsters, with compassion, we begin to fulfill our function in one of the greatest stories ever told: the human story, in a planetary context, moving at great speed through a galactic experience. Our wound becomes the portal. 

By facing our wounds, whether from this lifetime or ancestral, we tap into the collective understanding that we are all in some state of trauma and trauma undoing. That understanding opens us up to compassion. Compassion then becomes the gift, the key for availability, and availability inspires in us service. 

This kind of servitude is not like the one modernity has trained us to look down upon, even though it is the greatest offering. When our servitude is aligned with our availability, and our availability exists because our compassion has grown, and our compassion has grown because our understanding has expanded, that servitude is not inferior or weakness. When we are in this kind of surrender, in this kind of animistic exchange, each sway of the dance begins a process of untangling the energetic threads that have hooked themselves as we passed through the portal of life into beingness. 

Trauma is inherent to humanity; there is no escaping the wounds of racism, patriarchy, colonialism, neoliberalism, ecological collapse, no matter if you are under its boot or wearing it. Then there are the personalized traumas designed by the intelligence of our own life, in order to provide the opportunity to befriend the monsters inside and in them find sanctum, respite, a new way of being. If we are daring long enough to stop running and courageous enough to look again and extend a greeting hand, they might just guide us towards a serviceable compassion most needed in these times.

The initial cracks caused by our trauma become open opportunities for ecstatic presence. This kind of metamorphosis, if embarked upon with humility and wonder, can rewrite our bodies, and transform us from the chased and the chasing to journeyers.