The healer’s journey: The wounded healer and the Divine Mother.
Whether your work in the world is to be a healer or not, we all crave to relieve the suffering of those we love - our children, family, partners, and our dearest friends. This longing to give love and for others to heal is the healer within us - we just don’t always recognize ourselves as a healer.
The healer's journey is our own self-healing, that we then emanate out into the world. We energetically radiate our healed states as an offering to those who have struggled with our struggles. We call upon the divine mother to mother and heal ourselves, and then embody her divinity to emanate unconditional love and compassion to those around us.
We naturally empathize when we witness pain - whether that be in humans, animals, or the earth. It invokes something in our hearts, something in us wants to help.
The wounded healer is the aspect of us, that longs for the healing of others when our subconscious is longing for healing ourselves. We seek justice through others finding justice. It’s a parallel attempt to relieve ourselves.
The wounded healer gets trapped in another's pain because they are trapped in their own. In some ways, it’s a mirror for their processing. It’s a projected outlet to grieve for themselves, to get angry for themselves, and to fight for themselves by fighting for another.
There are parts of us that are so much easier to invoke in the name of someone or something else than to harness the strength and self-reverence to fight for ourselves.
The term of the wounded healer is mostly used in the realm of healers that professionally offer healing services. But the wounded healer is woven much deeper into society than we may realize. This complex is at the heart of dysfunctional relationships and dysfunctional families.
It’s comforting to deeply bond with those who have similar wounds as us but we can trap ourselves because the familiar is comfortable even if it’s painful.
We may not realize the possibilities of freedom because we’ve surrounded ourselves with everyone who has the same issues as we do. We don’t even know that dreaming bigger is a very real possibility to manifest. Our perspective can become so limited, and so vast in our roots that we don’t even know we are thinking small.
The wounded healer appears in cycles of enabling and abuse where there is an endless loop of dancing between the victim, hero, and villain because we are stuck playing out unhealed traumas.
We may play out the victim over and over because we can’t find healing or are still grieving for what’s happened to us. We may take on the hero trying to embody a strength we can’t seem to truly find in ourselves. We may embody the villain as an outlet for our anger over the injustices that have happened to us.
Our subconscious believes the only way to move these emotions and pains that are embedded so deeply is to keep the triangle active.
When we don’t know how to truly heal ourselves, re-enacting these personas is the only way to circulate our emotional pain that is festering and we end up not only sabotaging everyone around us, but we’re unknowingly sabotaging ourselves.
It’s ultimately a complex form of trauma bonding and within the cycle, we offer one another condolences for pain and struggles that we feel like nobody else could understand but it is toxic or at the very least enabling. This may show up within the dynamic of the martyr complex, over-giving, and burning ourselves out when we really need to claim ourselves as our first priority and state and honor the truth of our boundaries and needs.
On the healer's journey to have others who understand us in a way we’ve never felt understood is invaluable, but there is a fine line of appropriate boundaries, enabling and dysfunction, and there is a limit to how much we can grow if we are not acutely conscious of the dynamic at play.
Healing the wounds of the healer is what allows one to truly blossom into their gifts that they have to offer the world. We have to realize that our gifts can thrive without our struggles. Our struggles may have shaped and fed our resiliency and strength, but our strength and resiliency can survive beyond them and are meant to evolve leaving the weight of the past behind.
The healer's journey is harnessing our gifts without having to keep our wounds open to access them.
The healer's journey is finding a way to not lose the insight and medicine we’ve gained from our hardships but to transmute the density we are carrying. We have to lead from the healed state to truly blossom and shed the limitations of our past.
Actions speak louder than words. The force of our essence is the healer. Tending our essence and keeping it clean and clear is tending our gifts we can offer to the world. Self-healing, self-care, self-compassion, and self-love are how we cultivate our power. This is how we embody the archetype of the healer.
Sourcing the divine mother in ourselves to mother ourselves is at the heart of the healer's journey.
Until we mother ourselves we will always seek unconditional, and infinite love from finite sources. Whether that’s from relationships, substances, accomplishments, or anything that is outside of ourselves.
We will always seek an outlet to blame for our pain, and we will always seek out an outlet to prove our worth to ourselves. We’ll act out in various cries for help in our longing to be mothered, or we’ll try to continually prove to ourselves that we don’t need it, always keeping a distance with our guard up trying to deny ourselves from vulnerability and tenderness because it hurts too much.
We will find ourselves deprived of the potential of deep and pure love, connection, and intimate relationships.
No matter how available or unavailable our mothers were, our mothers are still human, and we can’t seek the infinite through them. A mother's job is to teach us to find the infinite within ourselves. And if she didn’t, we have to find this on our own, for our own sake.
Learning to face our pains and learning to nurture them without grasping from outside of ourselves is an art. It’s a lifelong lesson. The divine mother teaches us to accept ourselves, to honor ourselves and our truth, and to claim who we are at heart.
So often when we have deep pain we keep ourselves busy, or we use substances of some sort whether drugs, alcohol, shopping, food, or OCD-like behavior to avoid what is within us. The divine mother teaches us to surrender to the discomfort of sitting still enough to truly listen and to face the true source of our seeking.
Marrion Woodman speaks of addiction as our searching for the infinite through finite things.
The healer's journey is to find the infinite in ourselves. It is invoking a deep love for ourselves, and it’s opening our eyes to see ourselves as whole.
If we are always trying to escape parts of ourselves or to deny parts of ourselves, we will never transmute what needs to be healed.
We can’t change our past, we can’t change what we feel, what hurts, and what pains us, but we have a choice whether we face these truths. We can face them or we can spend our lives trying to escape the unescapable forever stuck in a loop of suffering.
We have the choice to embrace ourselves like a mother unconditionally loves a child or we can berate, and shame parts of ourselves that need our love more than anything.
We have the choice of whether to ignore the warning signs and the cries for help because we think we should be stronger. Or we can look at ourselves in relativity to our whole story, considering why we are the way we are and summon compassion and forgiveness for ourselves.
We get to decide between courage or denial. We get to decide whether we want to take action, seek help if needed, and tend the wounds that are festering. We may not know-how, we may not succeed right away, but this is the healer's journey.
The healer's journey is nurturing our ability to not judge or criticize ourselves but to love ourselves. Yes we need to be aware of choices and behaviors we are not proud of, yes we need to be aware of the changes that need to be made, and yes there needs to be action, but without self-compassion, self-forgiveness, and self-love it doesn’t mean anything and nothing will ever change.
When we are nourished with self-love and self-compassion eventually a switch flips and your will is fueled without force or without having to push, it’s fueled with the purest of light. It’s fueled by the light of divine love.
The healer's journey is a summoning of the divine mother, and once our cups is full of self-love, it begins to overflow. We begin to radiate the medicine of the divine mother, without falling into the current of another’s story or experience.
When we realize no one else could save us and that we had to do it ourselves, we realize we can’t save anyone else either and they simply need our faith and love in them to do their own work. It’s being witnessed as whole that is most powerful. This is our gift we can give to the world.
Compassion allows us to witness one’s pain with unconditional love without taking the pain on ourselves. Without being triggered into our wounds, or being triggered into the complexities of the victim-villain-hero triangle.
We are not looking at another and seeing how we can fix them, we are seeing them in their strength, beauty, and perfection as an ever-evolving creature. We can look at ourselves in this same way. The healer is not empowered by a false sense of believing it’s our job to fix. It’s awakening to the realization that nothing needs fixing, we all just need love.
The divine mother's boundaries are of great strength and she holds them with a wide-open heart that never stops radiating and emanating love. She has sourced so much divine love for herself that the current never runs dry. It’s overflowing at such a force it makes her impenetrable by anything less than this.
It makes her impenetrable to be bogged down by another's pain, projections, attempt to play games, or by dark or predatory energy.
Dark or manipulative energy gains its power from reaction and when you don’t react it has no impact. The divine mother has mastered this. The divine mother does not get triggered, she does not get offended or take anything personally.
The divine mother does not participate in enabling.
Her light and love are such a force, it will illuminate the darkness aching to be faced in ourselves and others around us. What her light stirs will set you free. Others may not like being invoked by its presence but it’s up to each of us to choose whether to look or run. It is our choice to see the unconditional love and compassion that is in this type of illuminating light, knowing it has nothing but your best interest at heart.
The healer embodied has this balance of love and the courage to speak and act on the hard truths that need to be spoken.
The dearest of friends, push us to be our best selves and see our beauty just as we are. They are receptive to the hard truths we speak and they want us to embrace ourselves as whole. They want us to be happy, and they know the fine line of acceptance and pushing. They have to courage to push us when we don’t want to be pushed, they do it with love, they do it without judgment, and they know when to stop.
The healer's journey is learning how to do this for ourselves, and in turn, learning how to do it for our loved ones.
We are all human and even though the goal is to shed the wounded complex, it’s a dance back and forth. It’s a spiral of infinite learning and infinite growth. There is no end game. We learn through ourselves how to heal each other, and we learn through each other how to heal ourselves.
We get to love each other how we want to be loved, and we get to love ourselves how we want to be loved. We are all on the healer's journey, we are all the wounded healers, and we are all the divine mother.
We are sacred mirrors for one another and we are sacred channels of divine love for one another. The healer's journey is channeling that love, receiving that love, embodying that love, and giving that love.
May we all be blessed with this type of love. For ourselves and from one another.
Lots of love sweet one.
Until next time,
Abby
