THE MOVEMENTS IN WOUNDEDNESS
AN INVITATION TO LOOK AT THE WEIGHTS OF TRANFORMATIONAL HEALING
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04.25. 2023
In one of my hometowns, Bobo Dioulasso, the second largest city in Burkina Faso, a traditional way to treat broken limbs goes like this: the injured person is brought to a traditional healer (oftentimes a male), into a courtyard filled with contorted-bundles of broken bodies audibly writhing in negotiation with pain. With each new arrival, they are occasionally interrupted by a chorus of “what happened?”
Broken bodies, impatiently waiting to be touched by healing hands. A long wait, at times, for a brief moment of release from the agony of brokenness.
Many of us have become estranged within the web of life, relating to nature and one another as “resources” from which to extract what we desire/need.
One way or another, so many of us have experienced, and are experiencing, forms of brokenness and psychological woundedness. I would take it so far as to say that to be born is, for both the mother and the newborn, an act of breaking — the cutting of a union. So much attention is given to the painfully-joyful arrival of a new being in this world that the significance of the final moment of this union between a mother and her unborn child is often ignored. I wonder why it is that a baby arrives in this world screaming like their life depends upon it. And it seems like it does. From a medical perspective, a newborn who does not cry at the time of delivery is cause for grave concern, and the infant is promptly taken for examination. I know that there is a medical explanation for the cry of a newborn, and that it is understood as an expression of good health, but still, could there be something else, hidden, other than the medical explanation — a reason why our first breath is entwined with such a piercing cry, a reason why our very first seconds of life on earth are experienced as agonizing fear?
Fundamental to our individual-collective woundedness is the sense of separation embedded in individualism — the belief that we are an isolated, atomized, individual-self. In the so-called civilized world, the predominant tendency (right from that moment of separation from the mother) is for everyone and everything to get busy shaping us to become such a self. Consider it — our parents bringing us up with the message what we are the most important thing in the world; and our education systems and jobs, emphasizing above all our individual “excellence”/”failure” through evaluation and ranking. All of this contributes to conditioning us towards a self-centered, human-centric understandings of life. From this narrow starting point, most of us would go on to devote ourselves to the pursuit of individualistic and capitalistic notions of well-being, which we were made to believe could be achieved through working productively and consuming. As a result, many of us have become estranged within the web of life, relating to nature and one another as “resources” from which to extract what we desire/need.
With such an early (foundational) understanding of life — fear of the other (and of nature), competition, self-preservation at all costs (with its unspoken alienation and loneliness), and mistrust of life itself — we are prevented from knowing ourselves and experiencing our true relationship to everything else in the world. Thus, we are unable to cultivate life-sustaining connections. Modern life is rife with contradictions and confusions. On the one hand we are caught up in going through the motions and routines of a purpose-driven approach to living, and on the other hand we can feel like that our pursuits of so-called well-being are taking us us further away from life-affirming ways of being. This living feels to me, at times, like a continuous longing for, and leaping toward, the warm and loving body of the mother — that which would make us whole again or, at the very least, release us from the agony of the contradictions and the separation.
I see the need for more bravery and more radical articulations of our woundedness, in our current trauma, healing and transformation movements. We need more capacious imaginations and more determined bravery to break the hold of what Achille Mbembe has referred to as, “the constant colonial temptation to hierarchize beings and objects,” in order to climb out from the depths of our individual-collective woundedness. This colonial-white-supremacist-capitalistic- patriarchal tendency to categorize beings and objects has systematically condemned a large percentage of the world’s population to a life trapped in cycles of abject poverty, war, displacement, famine, exploitation, criminalization, discrimination, and oppression.
We need to go beyond the analysis/paralysis and deep into the wounds of modernity, class, gender, nationality, race, religion, etc. Going beyond requires unity, and unity requires tremendous courage in a world that thrives on all sorts of existing divisions and violence.
There is no rush in the healer’s approach. He moves gently to listen for the wound’s voice, for its own recounting of “what happened” as he circles a yardstick over the broken area. The limb recounts and then smashes the stick to the ground. The stick is the portal and the messenger delivering the outcome of a council between the wound and the ground. How it breaks instructs the healer on how to proceed with treatment.
Imagine — no, let us actualize — the tremendous transformation and healing we are capable of bringing about by uniting our yearnings for a more humane life with those who have been swept out of our lives into the marginalized edges of society or to the centered wastelands. This is what Minnie Ransom, a character in Salt Eaters, seems to be daring us to do while simultaneously warning us against it. She said, “Wholeness is no trifling matter. A lot of weight when you’re well.” The weight of a passionate wakefulness, of intensely feeling-full aliveness, of courage, of broken-open-heartedness, of unity and its radical solidarity — with all their daunting risks and challenges. Here, I am inviting a conversation in which we look together at what we must shed in order to avail ourselves of the weight of transformational healing. This is a dangerous invitation — not for everyone. And that is part of the tragedy — that to be fully and intensively alive, to no longer live with our heads buried in the sand, comes at a high price.
In a recent piece, Kristin Diggs wrote that: “To be undone is to fall, away from the burden, away from the bondage, out of the lie, through new openings, away from old enclosures. There are no promises. There is only what we devote ourselves to and what we are willing to embrace.” She warns us that, “It will cost, and it may cost you-me-us greatly depending upon what I-you-we have been holding onto and how hard it will be to let it go.” It has already cost us. Many of us have equated the price we’ve paid with life itself, and dare not look any further. In the summer of 2015, while waiting for a table at a restaurant on Kenya’s coast, my late son, Yann, stunned me into speechlessness with a series of questions. If I remember correctly, he said, “Mom, what is the meaning of life? I mean, what’s the point of going to school, get a degree, a job you don’t really care about, get married, have kids, and die? What’s the point of going through all this? Is this all that we are here for?” He was turning 17 that summer. I remember how emotional I became, much later. The thought of him, such a tender and sensitive person, struggling with these questions in our brutal world. At the same time, I was proud to be the mother of such a being in search of meaning. He would pass away suddenly less than three years later.
At his age, Yann was already keenly aware of the cost, the weight he was expected to bear and the masks to wear — the stuff that we so-called “adults” have equated with living and expect our children to do the same. I dare say that one of our deep existential wounds stems from knowing that our lives are filled with contradictions, self-deceptions, and that this cannot be it, though the weight of it all appears too costly to shed. The mask has become the face.
It has already cost us. Many of us have equated the price we’ve paid with life itself, and dare not look any further.
I am deep in the woods somewhere in Mexico, marveling at the peeling trunks of the madrone trees. How naked their trunks look. The timing of it — when the trees are mature. What is the root’s request of its trunk at such a time? How much to peel, from where, for how long? Madrone trees have been nicknamed “refrigerator trees,” due to the cooling effect of their trunks made possible by how their bark holds water. I imagine the subtle responsiveness to life that allows the trees, those trunks, to know when to peel themselves into mulch for the soil in the heat of summer. How totally involved with life they must be to know when to shed parts of themselves for the soil and begin the journey of regeneration. We, humans, could learn a lot from such a wakeful aliveness.
“A lot of weight when you’re well.” One kind of weight is that of wakefulness — of bearing the realization of how unwell one has become, of knowing the risks and challenges, as well as the fruits, of trying to reclaim one’s humanity. This, in a world that pushes us to conform, to resort to complex networks of escapism — numbness, pleasure, suppression, denial, distraction, gratification, etc. — to survive. Staying busy and burying myself in doing the “important work” of “changing” the world (as an activist), distracted me from paying attention to my very being, and from feeling my own pain. And perhaps rightly so, for who among us, one way or another, does not have to resort to numbness at times in order to cope with the tremendous sorrow one bears in life? Numbness is a protective layer. However, for us humans (unlike the madrone trees), the difficulty lies in knowing when to shed numbness. Knowing when to touch the wakefulness of our inner authority, the light within, to illuminate our true needs.
Instead of trusting our inner knowing, many of us defer entirely to others to diagnose and heal our pains while seeing only what appears outside of ourselves as cause for the pain in our lives. And, many of the causes of our pain do lie outside ourselves. Still, I wonder how it would be to reach with a greater trust, and more deeply, into our own agency? How would it be to feel how we are and to know how we are (and are not) using our inner resources in ways that may be contributing greatly to our own wounding/healing. For me, it was only when I slowed down — for long enough — that I began to see, for instance, how stress was robbing me of my ability to remain present and sensitive in my own life. Stress was preventing me from feeling my own wounds and from seeing how they were causing pain to those around me. At the age of nine or ten, Yann began to attract my attention to the fact that I was always tired, that we were rarely doing anything fun together as we used to do. As a young, newly single, African mother in America, I took a full-time job in the fashion industry and worked the graveyard shift — mostly from midnight to seven or eight o’clock in the morning. Woundedness is not an individual responsibility; thus, transformational healing cannot be up to the individual alone. Nevertheless, awakening to the need to heal does arise within the individual.
Returning a broken limb to its memory requires the involvement of many, seen and unseen, a council whispering an uncharted road to remember the pieces of home. The road is a wet earth ointment that is quick to dry — a canvas of cracks covering the wound, allowing the frailty of healing to remain exposed, engaged in conversations with its environment, with the woundedness of others, and in relationship to the healer. The dance of healing begins where there is quite a bit of uncertainty, that of not knowing when/if the limb will heal. In this context — in the ways of the “poor”, the “uneducated”, the “uncivilized” — healing is always a “fuzzy” communal affair in which “proper” and “comfort” are incidental.
“A lot of weight when you’re well.” One layer of the weight of being well is that of facing broken-open-heartedness. In this weight is a steaming intensity of being wakefully alive to all the layers of me. Another layer is the fear of becoming unfit for this world as a result of feeling it more fully. Many of us also fear ostracization for not conforming to numbness. Yet — alive, we can be! And for that, one must shed courageously: The persona/ the worn/ the latent /the decayed /the conditioning/ the frailty/ the status/ the dependence/ the familiar/ the duty/ the unfeelingness/ the self-deception/ the power/ the confusion/ the comfort/ the fear.
And stand naked to oneself, and allow ourselves to be seen as such. It can be a terrifying or liberating prospect — or both? I am thinking of the newborn baby, arriving, screaming, naked, sticky with all the stuff that nourished and gave birth to them. Before life buries it all.
“A lot of weight when you’re well.” Another kind of weight is the awareness of the fragmented nature of the individual self. There is also the weight of the refusal of such fragmentation, which gives way to the weight of beginning to re-imagine wholeness. To me, wholeness implies unity. For instance, that of the indivisibility of a mother and her unborn baby. I dare to imagine unity as an umbilical cord — the canal through which travels the essence of life and connects us to one another, to the seen and unseen. Unity is also the loving care of the hands that return the clay shards of a broken vase to a new form, inclusive of its cracks. In the words of Norma Ryuko Kawelokū Wong Roshi, a Zen priest, teacher and activist: “In the traditional woodworking of the islands [Hawaii], islands that have finite resources, you cannot afford to overlook wood if it has a crack or a fracture or an imperfection. You learn overtime and in apprenticeship of masters before you, how to see and how to feel, how to discern, where the fracture might be bridged and the effort, the craftsmanship, to make that bridge well. You see and feel and imagine the whole.” A feeling, a seeing, discerning, and touching, that is medicine. This is unity as well as wholeness.
The risks — we must acknowledge the risks of being well. We must name and face the fact that the ground on which we imagine and dream of transformation and healing is broken, is full of cracks, in so many ways and in so many places. Some of those cracks can be found in an approach to life that has reduced living to goals and objectives, an approach that insists on identifying the “productive”/”purposeful” aspects, and the “results,” of every human endeavor. Shedding these old enclosures is risky in a world that punishes any attempt to free oneself of them. We must acknowledge the inner self-enclosures as well, with their holes and cracks of old self-deception, of fear, sorrow, and decades of conditioning of the heart-mind. For many, these are the ground on which we stand. We must acknowledge the slippery slopes of these familiar terrains, watch out for the real risks of re-inscribing old patterns, and devote ourselves to being utterly lost if only for a little while. This can be a terrifying proposition, I know. Who wants to be lost in this world? But we are already so lost, actually, and ecological catastrophe tells us so. Alive, we can be! And transformational healing seems to be asking us to turn together towards our fear, and learn to shed the old trappings and all the violence that they inflict, and dare to emerge through the fissures (the cracks and holes) into new possibilities.
Like those with broken limbs traveling to a healer, seeking healing and relief from pain, some of us are converging at conferences, workshops, through talks and books to speak of the current state of the world and expounded on the necessity of healing and transformation. However, much of this has remained within the framework of the familiar and comfortable dance of mere intellectual dissection. One could argue that we have not gone deep enough in our intellectual inquiries, or that we have not actually begun to include our bodies in our inquiries and explorations enough to be jolted into action by what we see in the depths of our maladies. The map is not the territory. The map is necessary, as a finger pointing at the moon, but finally we must actually see the moon within us, and then dare to go to places within that are beyond what our minds could possibly preconceive. To see the moon here would require a radical transformation in our understanding of how to live fully and in relationships with all else. As for me, I’ve taken a generous, inquiring bite into what such a radical transformation might be, and I’m chewing. I am chewing on how to live differently. I think this might be at the heart of such a transformation. That is where I am, presently. I am devoted to the act — not merely to notions of chewing and digesting. I am devoting myself to the actions that flow from understanding, and to holding close my late son’s question “ — Is this all that we are here for?” — and making it my own.
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Text and photos by Mariam Armisen