When the wound becomes a womb

Wounds that keep us safe

This wonderfully positive conception of what a wounding could mean comes from the American scholar and mythologist Michael Meade.

We enter the world as newborns, a living embodiment of light, life and love.

Our fragility meets harsh reality and our innate intelligence tells us to bend and contract in response, in order to defend, adapt and survive. We all have to do this and these patterns are designed to persist and keep us safe, until we mature.

Protect but obstruct

As adults we have the capacity for agency and also the potential depth and breadth to revisit the wounding experiences of the past and to integrate them back into the whole - but we need a healing context in which to do so. These old patterns are like wounds, they serve to protect but they also obstruct the free flow of life and creativity.

But miraculously the symptoms we feel are also a direct doorway to the origins of the wound itself and the material with which we work to integrate the experience back into the whole.

A rebirth into the whole

So in this way we can hold that attending to the wound with care, is like a re-birth back into the capacity to embody the whole of life. And, if you’ll allow me, doing so is like channelling the life energy of a newborn, but from an adult perspective.

There’s nothing new in this notion really, it’s just realising that we all have the potential to come full circle, back to light, life and love.

This is part of my work as a craniosacral therapist, we treat the wound as a womb and see what wants to be born.