alchemizing pain into love

healing begins when we stop abandoning ourselves

frida kahlo, la venadita (little dear) 1946

the wound repeats until it is witnessed.

i have been writing and speaking about how learning to follow our intuition is like learning to access your b.s. radar.

it’s a bit of a joke, as what i really mean is cultivating the ability to feel what is true beneath appearances. it’s the ability to sense when something is off, when words and energy do not match, when someone’s mask is speaking louder than their soul.

i have been thinking about that a lot lately, especially after traveling to spain with my kids recently.

the trip itself was a lesson in intuition. it was one of those experiences where i could feel myself listening inward, trying to hear what life was asking of me next. we are going to move there next year.

it is no small undertaking as a single mom and widow with my four kids, two dogs and two cats. yes, i am blessed to have the resources to do it. and it is still a huge undertaking! it will take courage and trust in myself, much as my healing journey thus far has required the same.

once you begin healing, our ability to start an inner listening becomes everything. it becomes less about performing your life and more about actually living it from the inside out.

and i think that is where authenticity begins.

so much of life is a school of hard knocks. pain comes for all of us in one form or another. disappointment, betrayal, heartbreak, confusion, loss, illness, rejection, family pain, endings we did not choose.

the question is not whether life will hand us hard things, because it will. the question is how we meet them. to me, that is what separates a person who grows more authentic from a person who disappears further into a mask. because i have come to believe that many people are living behind masks they had to create in order to survive.

but if you cannot be true to yourself, how can you be true to another person?

if you have never sat still long enough to feel your own pain, then how can you show up honestly in intimacy, in friendship, in leadership, in love?

i do not say that with judgment, i say it because i have watched it happen in my own family, friendships, communities, and on the larger stage of the world.

when being real feels dangerous, many people learn very early to split off from themselves. they learn to become who they think will be accepted, who will be safer, who will be rewarded, who will have power, and over time that fragmentation becomes so practiced that the persona starts to feel more real than the person underneath it.

but underneath it is pain. it is where the wounded child sits sad and alone in her darkened room. it is the child who learned some version of:
i am not enough.
i am too much.
i am not lovable.
i am not safe.

i have to become someone else to survive here. that is the part i keep coming back to in my own healing. and it’s not in a cliché way, for there truly is a younger part of us still waiting to be seen, still holding the old stories, still carrying the feelings we were too overwhelmed to process when they first landed.

as children, we carry the pure expressions of our soul in everything we do and say. we cry when something hurts, we laugh when something is funny, we create, we rage, and we feel. because we haven’t learned how to turn it off. so, through it all, we move energy honestly.

but then, slowly, the world teaches us otherwise.

don’t be so sensitive.
don’t be so loud.
don’t be angry.
don’t be needy.

don’t tell the truth, if it makes others uncomfortable.
don’t be fully yourself, if you want to belong.

and so we begin to dent inward. we bruise and fragment in our personality. it’s as if our signal becomes full of static. and instead of being round and full like a little orb we become jagged and cracked in many places.

however, ultimately, it is through these cracks where the light shines in.

last week i spoke of it like a flower getting stepped on. the petals are still there, but they have folded in on themselves. because, beyond our bodies, we each have an energy field that has taken hits and so we start forming protective shapes around the bruised places.

those shapes become built up identities, coping strategies, false personas, and subconscious defenses, and then we live from there, often without even knowing it. so for me, healing has meant becoming willing to feel what is underneath the persona.

it’s not just in theory, but in real life situations that require practice. i do it on airplanes, while enveloped in grief by family betrayal. like what happened to me on the trip back from spain.

but it also happens in all the little moments, when something gets triggered and i can feel an old story trying to rise again.

on the flight home, i had just received some news connected to painful family matters i have written of before. never in too much detail, for i cannot speak openly about all of it yet.

it brought up something very old in me. i could feel the little girl, with all her wounding, crying out underneath the pain i felt in that moment.

it was the part that learned, long ago, to translate harm into shame.

the part that concluded, if this happened to me, maybe it must mean i am not worthy of love. for that is how these wounds work. especially when trauma happens early, the child often turns the pain inward because it gives the illusion of control.

if it is my fault, then maybe i can fix it. if i caused it, maybe i can stop it from happening again. that is one reason shame takes such deep root.

but of course the shame is a lie. still, the body remembers and sometimes the old feeling rises before the conscious mind can even catch up.

so there i was on the plane, tears sliding down my face, my kids beside me watching their shows, and i knew enough not to run from it. where would i go on that crowded metal shipping container with wings and stale air, hurtling through space?

at the end of the day, healing is not becoming someone who never gets triggered, or someone who is above pain. it is becoming someone who can sit with what rises and say, i see you. i am here now. you no longer have to carry this alone.

because the world trains us to avoid this kind of feeling. it offers us endless distraction, endless consumption, endless noise, endless shopping, scrolling, numbing, performing, chasing attention, chasing validation, reaching for the next thing that might temporarily make the ache go quiet.

but the ache does not leave by being avoided.

it only begins to loosen it’s death grip by being felt.

that is the paradox, as the only way through is through.

once i really understood this, i began to understand why certain patterns had repeated in my life for so long.

the wound repeats until it is healed.

we call in the same lesson through different faces, different jobs, different friendships, different relationships, because some part of us is still asking the same unanswered question.

am i lovable?
am i safe?
will someone stay?
will someone choose me?
will someone see me clearly and not use me?

until that wound is met inside us, we often keep reaching for it outside ourselves. we look for people to fill a cup they do not even know how to fill in themselves.

and because we have not fully claimed our own worth, we keep accepting crumbs, mixed signals, masks, confusion, inconsistency, self-protection and domination dressed up as love.

we keep handing ourselves back to what hurts us.

at some point, part of healing is simply telling the truth about what happened to create this pattern in the first place. it is having courage for the truth.

there is a quote i love from byron katie about the biting dog. if a dog bites you, are you going to keep putting your hand back in front of its mouth?

that image has stayed with me, because we know the dog bites, but we let it bite us again and again, as we feel this is all we deserve.

but eventually we must learn that compassion does not require self-abandonment, and understanding someone’s wounds does not mean volunteering to be wounded by them over and over again.

you can recognize that someone is acting from pain and still walk away. you can wish them well and refuse them access to your body, your spirit, your time, your peace.

everyone deserves to eat. but not everyone deserves a seat at your table.

that has become one of the deepest lessons of my adult life.

for years i would get confused when someone’s words said one thing and their energy said another. i would doubt myself and i would override what i felt. i would believe the mask because at one point in my life it had been safer to believe the mask than to face what was happening underneath it.

but healing has sharpened my inner knowing and what i call my b.s. radar.

now, when something feels off, i pay attention. and it’s not because i am hard or because i am closed. it’s because i am finally learning how to protect what is sacred in me. and what is sacred in me is the same thing that is sacred in you: the authentic self beneath the conditioning.

it’s the part that was always there before the world told us who to be. the part of us that still knows how to love, create, grieve, feel, imagine, and tell the truth.

i think this is the real work.

to sit courageously with our pain, to stop abandoning ourselves in search of love, to stop asking wounded people to confirm our worth, to stop confusing familiarity with safety and to stop calling repeated harm fate when it is actually an invitation to choose differently.

this is how pain becomes wisdom, heartbreak becomes discernment, and, ultimately, wounds become medicine.

this is how we alchemize.

and we can’t pretend pain is beautiful while we are still drowning in it.
so i am not talking about spiritually bypassing. lord knows there are enough people doing that already. you can’t perform empowerment, though so many try.

we must learn to sift through he mud long enough to find the gold.

i believe that is what so many of us are doing right now.

we are living through a time when the masks are slipping in public and in private. inside institutions, systems, families, politics, churches, communities, relationships and so much of what was hidden is becoming visible.

and while that can feel terrifying, it is also part of the great revealing. for what is false is harder to maintain now, while what is unhealed is getting louder.

and this is allowing for what is authentic to come forward.

those of us who have done even a little of this inner work can feel it. we are being asked not just to survive this moment, but to help shape what comes next. through our writing, our speaking, our art.

and it’s happening through our parenting, our friendships, and our leadership.

the media doesn’t want us to acknowledge it, the powers that be thrive when we forget.

but the power of our presence, once it become rooted in self-love becomes a fire where others can come and warm their cold and weary souls.

and as we heal, we become more real.

we begin to take responsibility for what hurts in us instead of flinging it onto everyone around us. we begin to love the parts of ourselves that were never properly loved. and finally, we begin to allow the pain to become compassion instead of cruelty.

and we do it all by refusing to keep living as fragmented versions of ourselves. because the world does not need more masks, it needs more embodied truth.it needs more people willing to sit in discomfort without turning it into harm and more people willing to say:

yes, this hurt me. yes, i broke open. yes, i had to crawl through mud, and yes, i found something sacred there.

that is the kind of love i believe in now.

love as a verb.

it’s the kind that has lost people, left tables, told the truth, and kept going.
it’s the kind that says: i will not let what hurt me be the thing that defines how i love.

this is what alchemy is all about.

this is what true healing is all about.

it’s how we become a lighthouse on a stormy sea, shining our light so bright that another might find their way home.

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i am a writer, speaker, and musician devoted to healing and embodiment. i share essays, poetry, and original music through venus consciousness. i’d love to walk this path with you. 💞