The Sacred Wound is the destruction of the old , the comfortable, the cherished before our very eyes of all that we have loved and cherished and from which we sought succor.  Our primary nipples in our adult life:  joy, laughter, color, sunshine, the children we loved, the parents we hated, the job we miss, the friends we eschew, the clothes we loved, the city that is too big, music, art, movies, whatever worked before is empty now, devoid of meaning and pleasure.  Now what?  Life is painful, awkward, empty, meaningless.  It is the existential void.  How do we find meaning when all or part of what we treasured is gone.  It could be the relationship is gone.  The job is gone.  Our looks; even our mind is not functioning as it once did.  Now what?

The Sacred Wound has come to transform our view of the world, our life, our place in life and we are left to pick up the pieces and make another life, not the one we had hand-crafted meticulously for many years at great expense and time and work.  We had created this “perfect” life and it is gone, and the gaping void peers at us and beckons us in to…

Nothing…The empty bed, the nothing to do the next day, the look in the mirror, the friends who don’t call, the darkness all around, the Silence…What do we do from second to second.  Do we cry?scream, turn on television, sit alone, drink? pester friends?  Some people drive endlessly, some eat compulsively, spend money needlessly, and then the myriad of unhealthy occupations.

The panic has hit that this nightmare is not going away, your precious life is never going to be the same, and then if we are the lucky ones, we have a flexible bag of ideas, plans, prospects to build a new life, or even just to conceive of building a new life with whatever skills we have left in our arsenal of ideas.  We re-train, we re-group, we hopefully see the benefits of this new life we are creating.  And then the panic subsides.

Yes, we can live with this new idea of life.  We can adjust to being alone, or moving someplace that seemed horrible at first, or living at a reduced income level.  We are human.  We adapt if necessary, but the knowledge, wisdom, maturity is to now be able to recognize The Sacred Wound when it comes, be it in little ways or in larger ways.  You can make a new plan, new choices, or turn the corner into a different set of circumstances.  You will be able to enjoy life from this plateau into which the Wound has unceremoniously shoved you.

The Sacred Wound is the hard-knocks kick in the pants that life has given us to learn a new unwanted lesson, otherwise it would just be a gift.  It wasn’t a gift.  It was painful.  We loved our old life.  We thought we had it made.  And then life pushed us down a rabbit and we had to learn a new world view, a wiser world view.  For is not wisdom just moving through our circumstances and knowing we will make it and that something profound will come from this eventually.  And the next group of people coming after us can use our experiences as their stepping-stones for their life journey.  Each of us journeys and when we get stuck, if we are wise, we must take that next step, and if we are really, really, wise we can smile going through it.  Learning to smile through our pain is the spiritual path, and perhaps that is what The Sacred Wound is all about–Our ability to smile through the Unwanted, The Unloving, The Lack, The Darkness.

It is The Sacred Wound because it is not just that life “hurt me”, or that “the boss had it in for me”, but that seen from a higher level of consciousness, the event is the opportunity to make another life, to start over, to move, to re-invent your life as a gift from God, not a chore to endure.  Even if we can see this as a very adult form of play.  Gurdjieff used to take his band of disciples to different cities and countries, where they didn’t know the language or customs and let them figure out how to survive there as a lesson in self-realization, self-actualization, and human potential.  The pain of loss and suffering can be transmuted into a source of enlightenment, saving us years of guilt, blame, self-flagellation, by realizing these events have come for a higher purpose in our lives and to honor and respect our losses as leading us to a spiritual breakthrough into the whole spectrum of human life.  Only a child believes that life is candy and fun.  The mature individual understands the full spectrum of human experiences from fun to work, pain, love, loss, and silence and alone times, as well as the love for and from others.