We don’t “transform” emotional pain. Rather, we are transformed “by” it. It’s not a mechanical process; it’s an alchemical one that begins with receiving that pain.
Believing that we transform emotional pain is a patriarchal, fix-it paradigm. Once it has landed in us, trying to fix emotional pain usually makes it worse.
We fix physical wounds and broken bones. This is a linear, archetypal masculine process. Emotional work is the opposite: we have to fully accept and embody what we are feeling before it can clear. In the process, it transfigures us.
This is a circular, paradoxical, archetypal feminine wisdom largely lost on our modern age. Allowing our pain, past and present, to change us is how we integrate it. It’s “magic” precisely because we aren’t fully in control of it, and we don’t “do” it or determine how long it stays.
This way we become more than what we can think or imagine—because it’s not our mind that does most of the work. We surrender to what feels like a power greater than ourselves, in our bodies. This contrasts with deliberately seeking magic via beliefs in other, disembodied, fantastic realms.
The little bit that we “do” is to gently enter and discover our heartbreaks—the abandoned old and just rupturing new—so we can surrender to feel and move through them, which requires some skill and wisdom. This is how we spark transformation, while the fire and rising from the ashes happen unbidden in the dark, hidden chambers of our bodies—on their own time.
This wisdom is the heart of death and rebirth from trauma: clearing what impedes us in order to rebirth a more beautiful present—for ourselves, others, and the planet. It is the generation and evolution of embodied love.
Image: Iona Miller, 2017
