Tag: rumi

Wounded Light: How our wounds, injuries, and hurts illuminate us

Featured by stephsimply, posted in Simple Observations and Musings

“The wound is the place where the light enters you.” Rumi, Sufi poet

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Pain-handler 🔥

My daughter once made an off-hand remark about the way I handle pain. She said something to the effect that my legs could be broken, my hair on-fire, and I’d still claim to be fine because my arms were still working. Of course, she was exaggerating because I am definitely not immune to pain.

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I do, however, possess the ability to distract and/or redirect my focus away from discomfort.  On first glance, this can seem like a good thing, and I suppose, at times, it is.  Tolerating pain and challenges is what allows humans to get through tough times.  And while I could offer plenty of examples of the benefits for “shouldering through the pain/trauma/difficulty,” I think it is important to also recognize that by “shouldering through,” not only is it possible to create a bigger issue, but we are also missing an opportunity to see the Light within.

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Accepting Limits 🛑

There are times when it is necessary to acknowledge and accept our wounds/injuries.  The pain is signaling that, at least for the time being, we need to accept new limits and boundaries in order to enhance the healing process.  This is true not only for physical pain, but also true for mental health trauma.

However, for many of us, myself included, sitting with and accepting pain is often difficult. Whether it is genetics, environment, or society, many of us would much rather suffer through our pain with a smile painted on our faces, than truly feel and acknowledge that we are hurting.  For some, this is a matter of pride, for others, it may mean admitting defeat and/or imperfections–while for others it is simply an extension of their stoic nature.  

Then, there are those who know that to feel the pain would mean to feel their own brokenness, quite possibly forcing them to name their suffering.  This is often a result of the connotation society has attached to specific words associated with pain.  Words such as, injury, hurt, pain, broken, surgery, depression, anxiety, recovery, often have a negative association attached to them causing many to recoil in fear and resistance at such an identification.  For others, there is an association with weakness if identified as having one of those.

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Self-Compassion ❣️

It is with that understanding, I encourage all of us, myself included, to take time to acknowledge our wounds, our injuries, and our mental anguishes, past or present. Additionally, it is important to acknowledge the limitations and/or pain those hurts created.  Finally, it is most important to do these while offering ourselves compassion.  If a loved one was suffering with an injury, we would want to help them in any way we can, so let us begin to treat our own pains with the same level of tender-heartedness.  Taking time for our own healing is not a selfish act, but an act of seeing the Divine Light working within us.

I came across a line in a poem that said, “We are wounded healers,” and it really gave me a moment of pause.  The poet had a point, we have all been injured in some way, from scraped knees and elbows when we were children, to broken bones, illnesses, or a mental health crisis as we moved through our teens years and continuing into our present adulthood. It is important to note that each hurtful event informed and shaped us, whether we realized it or not. Unfortunately, there are many of us who have and/or continue to suffer silently through multiple painful experiences and traumas, past and present. 

 Our bodies and mental health have limits. When pushed past our natural boundaries, our injury or trauma signals us with pain in an attempt to get us to take time to allow the body and/or mind to heal. Given certain situations, there are times, events, and circumstances in which we lack the power to grant time for healing. This is often the case in childhood trauma and abusive relationships.  

Other times, however, we prefer the quick-fix route–give me a pill and make it stop method–so I can move on with my life. However, quick-fixes don’t always create an optimal environment for healing. Instead, they tend to mask the underlying issue, allowing the injury/pain to fester in silence. 

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Wounded Healers ❤️‍🩹

This is regrettable because in those moments of injury, when we allow our bodies or minds time to heal and recover; we begin to bear witness to the miraculous creations that we are.  The same Source that created us is the same Source that can help heal us, in tangent with a healthy dose of prescribed treatment.  Our bodies and minds have been uniquely fashioned with astonishing proportions of resilience, strength, and fortitude.  We can be wounded, but we can be healed.  We are all, in the words of the poet, wounded healers.

Numerous writers and poets have written that our wounds and injuries allow the Light to enter us.  This Light enlightens us.  In fact, the more we have been scared by life’s injuries, the greater our understanding of the fragility and preciousness of life.  Further, our capacity for empathy with those who are suffering also increases, thereby granting us the added insight to words and actions that may provide comfort to those experiencing similar injuries and wounds.

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The Light within 🕯️

Our many wounds and scars offer us greater illumination from within. Our True Source of strength resides in those areas. Those old wounds serve as reminders of our survival, growth, and our own knowing.  The knowing of how it feels to truly hurt, and the full joy of knowing what it means to heal and recover.  There is the additional  knowing that healing can sometimes hurt as tissue and mental faculties are fashioned together in a new, often more durable manner.  And there is the ultimate knowing that nothing, not injury, not pain, and not even us, lasts forever.

Therefore, the next time injury, pain, or suffering comes calling, can we challenge ourselves to allow it?  Can we learn the lesson it may be offering us? To be sure, the process is not easy, and it requires patience as well as a heaping portion of trust, especially when the other side of healing may not mean a pain free life. However, in the same way sunlight can illuminate even the smallest of cracks, we too can hold tightly to the faith that the Light, our True Source, can heal and shine through our wounded selves. 

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Birdsong: A Harbinger of Hope

by stephsimply, posted in Simple Observations and Musings

“Faith is the bird that feels the light and sings when the dawn is still dark.” –Rabindranath Tagore

It is typically during the seventh hour of the day at some point in February, when there is a noticeable shift in the time the sun rises, that I become aware of their return.  Upon first hearing their growing morning melodies, while walking into the school in which I am an educator, their sweet sounds encourage me that winter will not last forever. With the arrival of March, there is a gradual shift in the start of their chorus as it begins earlier like the daylight.  As March melts into April, and April fades into May, their symphonious soundings continue to advance, in sync with the brightening of the sky.  Softly their voices appear, as darkness begins lifting its veil, until the cacophony of their songs reaches full crescendo with the rising of the sun.

“Birdsong brings relief

to my longing.

I am just as ecstatic as they are,

but with nothing to say!

Please, universal soul, practice

some song, or something, through me!”–Rumi

As one who rises well before dawn, but does not necessarily enjoy such premature risings, I do, nonetheless, appreciate the moments before the brightening of the sky:  birdsong.  These hopeful melodies, it seems to me, offer praise and thanksgiving for the arrival of the new day.  Birds sing regardless of the temperatures, whether there is frost or dew on the ground, or whether there is a bitter bite of the wind or the air is utter stillness.  Their animated voices echo among and around the hills of our area, playing a sort of hide and seek with the give and take of the various songs of each species.

I once read that because King Solomon understood what the birds were saying in their chirpings, they often remained near him.  Supposedly, St. Francis’ presence was so calm and reassuring that songbirds frequently alighted upon his shoulders.  While I am not sure that either of these accounts are much more than lore, they are certainly lovely images to contemplate in the midst of a morning birdsong performance.

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This year, it seems to me that the birdsong of sunrises is a metaphor not only signifying the arrival of spring, but also life after the pandemic–at least for those of us fortunate enough to live where those affected by COVID seem to be decreasing.  Like a great collective exhalation, the birds’ songs reflect the hope and freedom that is life after quarantine.  The freedom for humans to flit, flutter, and fly from place to place, as if riding on the wings of these birds, seems as welcome as the spring weather.  Of course, I would not yet throw caution to the wind, but it does seem, at least for now, the worst is behind us.

This weekend, for the first time in months, I met a friend, and we walked together on a local walking path.  In spite of the early morning chill, the give and take of conversation while exercising felt as victorious as the first blossom of crocus emerging through a crust of white snow in late February or early March. As we walked and talked, birds offered a euphonious soundtrack, better than any store muzak, as they chattered, called, and chirped from limbs, lines, and landscape, tilting their small heads this way and that; our great guardians of the walk.

As the birds awakened my later weekend slumberings on the morning of this writing, I couldn’t help but wonder, as I wiped the sleep out of my eyes, at the birds’ optimism.  Even in the darkest days of quarantine, those harmonious fowls kept up their song.  In fact, they never ceased, not for one day.  No matter the restrictions, the overwhelm, the confusion, and the fear that existed among the human population, especially in the early stages of the pandemic, the birds held fast to their habit of daily, lyrical praise.

There is a scientific theory loosely held by a few scientists that the songs of birds, especially in the early dawn hours, vibrate at an ideal frequency to promote plant growth and yield.  It is theorized that when exposed to bird song, the stomata–the mouth-like opening found on the bottoms of leaves–open wider.  This widening allows for a greater exchange of air–expelling more oxygen–and also permits greater absorption of water and nutrients.  

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I can’t help but wonder if that is what the birds are likewise trying to do for humans.  In an act of Divine Instrumentation, a bird’s song is not only to aid in the growth of plants, but likewise in the swelling of the human soul.  Perhaps, those songs occur, in the birth of the day, when all is fresh and renewed from a night of rest, at an optimal time to widen the human heart, providing a greater opening for an exchange and absorption of optimism and aspiration from these winged creatures.  

In fact, one could think of each lifted note sung by feathered friends as a harbinger of the positive possibilities each gift of sunrise brings us–if only we allow our souls to remain open to them.  Working symbiotically with the oxygen expelled from the stomata of a plant, we too, can increase our own personal growth and yield by remaining unrestricted to the promising potential each day offers.  Even though the sky is still dark, the birds faithfully start their singing.  We can choose to do the same. 

 “ . . . . Birds make great sky-circles of their freedom.

How do they learn it?

They fall, and falling,

They’re given wings.–Rumi

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