On Healing With Wonder & Curiosity

"The wound is the place where the Light enters you.” - Rumi

While the role of Wonder in inquiry is well understood, Fear is its under-appreciated twin. Fear can either kill Philosophy (as when the Athenians killed Socrates) or it can act as a turning point and initiation into a wider “window of tolerance”^⁠ for the pleasure/pain of full participation in life. 

The intensity of healing trauma is innately aesthetic. Born of terror and existential threat, trauma is healed by facing wounds and causes, gradually transmuting ingrained Fear into Wonder and Curiosity. To heal it is to feel it and allow it to transform.

Our flight, fight, freeze, and fawn instincts are consciousness shortcuts, or long-reinforced synapses, trance-like in their tunneling speed and efficiency. At one point in evolutionary history, they were intentionally selected from multiple possible responses, and much slower “on the draw”. Once experimental, repeated success has now wired these responses into autonomic systems which we perhaps unfairly diminish by calling “sub-”conscious or even “un-” conscious reflexes.

These ancient strategies ensured survival in all our ancestral species, at least back to lizard-kin. That survival eventually bought humans the space to reflect on existential threats, and eventually the ability to predict, or project our fear out into the world. 

Arguably the work of civilization has been the ongoing development of buffers between us and the wonderful/terrifying “outside”.

Perhaps this was the nature of the Fall - the knowledge of “good” and “evil” as a knowledge of wonder and fear - that has both differentiated us more and more from other species and in the process divorced us from our would-be paradise. Perhaps we are beginning to realize that our buffering has exacted too a high cost; we seem to be arriving at a dead end, numb to the world, in perma-crisis (inducing freeze) and starving for wonder (a sort of fawning). We seem to see now mostly terrors around us, regardless of your politics. 

So here we find ourselves - a traumatized world (human and otherwise). We are nearly all, to one degree or another, starving for Wonder and paralyzed by Fear.

I’ve heard therapists say that everyone has some degree of trauma, which seems increasingly obvious in our post-pandemic era. This therefore is the initiation that our time requires - the turning inwards of our populations to face the fears we’ve buried deep in our hearts while designing environments that hide any triggers; our total safety over the excitement and danger of living life fully connected with ourselves and each other. And like any true initiation, there are real risks here. Very few of us have faced the depths of darkness that lie buried in our psyches, foundational, if now overdue for bringing-into-consciousness, for updating, for gentle rewiring.

In the same way that a loving Mother will listen deeply to their child to recognize them as their own unique being, so too must we develop deep listening skills to our own discomfort, pain, and dissociating triggers; to all the things within us we find intolerable. This is the path to our own healing, to understanding our needs, which hide behind those wounds.

This is not an intellectual exercise. It is full spectrum - physical, emotional, mental, spiritual. It is Yoga - the reunion of Body and Mind, the re-yoking of what has been broken apart. Expansion happens in the process. 

When the Body starts responding in a language that is entirely personal, there is nothing (at least in my experience) more wonderful. The joy and beauty of discovering my own inner wisdom and divinity, my needs, wants, desires, states of being has been the most wonderful, empowering, and life-giving experiences of my life. Each success (markers of a deepening relationship) inspires me on. It is beautiful, even when also excruciating.

I do not mean to discount the pain, and the near-constant confrontation with Fear. Those are there too. But the beauty drives me on, like the intrepid explorer I dreamed of being as a child; only it is now inner worlds in which I wander, curious and guided by the burning questions “Who am I?”

Inward seeking does not mean fully solitary or isolationist. There are a multitude of relationships to tend within, and each of these corresponds to something “external”. How we love and enact presence, or set boundaries as the case may be, remains constant across all planes. 

The relationship between Place and Body has long been noted. Just as land has been dominated, boundaried, subdued, so too the Body, especially those that are deemed “deviant” in some way (which is most of us at this point). Deep listening to the “Place” of our own physicality eventually manifests the receptivity needed to deepen relationships with the Other, including humans, geological space / land, and other beings.

Pain is the lure. Pain and the associated fears must be faced, looked at, held, listened to. Not fixed or solved (domination), nor denied, but nurtured, honored, and energetically resourced so that they can heal in the best way. These woundings hold our wonders and our nascent organs of (supra-) perception. 

We cannot go back to the way things “used to be”, back to before our wounds were created, but these wounds are the sentient gateways to our mutual transformation.