Today’s offering is a practice to help us to befriend the wounded parts of ourselves, those raw or vulnerable spots that we often push away because they’re painful or bring up shame.
Perhaps you’re noticing a wounded part of yourself for the first time, or maybe you’ve been caring for it for a while.
Perhaps sometimes you’re able to be tender with the wound, but maybe today you notice yourself wanting it to just go away, or you’re tired of it, or you’re angry with it. These days happen to all of us, even if we’re sometimes able to befriend the wounded part. Sometimes the wound is just too much or we don’t have capacity that day.
On those days, a meditation like this one can be helpful. My intention is to help bring an energy of tenderness and love to your raw spots, to hold them with you, with this practice.
As you read this, see if you can allow yourself to be held and soothed by these words of compassion. You can also imagine me holding out a hand, palms up, as a gesture of befriending and accepting these vulnerable places in you.
Sometimes it’s overwhelming or too much to befriend our own wounds, and we need others to befriend them first, to show us tenderness and acceptance so we can soften to them ourselves.
So just imagine me holding out my hands to you in a friendly welcoming gesture; or if it feels right imagine me holding your hand, or even holding you in a gentle hug.
It’s okay that there is a raw spot here. We all have wounds and vulnerable places.
We all have parts that have been burdened by shame, by fear, by the experience of not being accepted for who we are or the behaviours we’ve done.
It’s also natural for us to have Inner Critic parts that push away those vulnerable parts, that want them to go away.
In this moment, you can practice being understanding and tender with your own Inner Critic, too. Notice if you have a part of yourself that’s being hard on you. Notice if there’s self judgement or self aversion coming up in the mind. Just name that, gently. We can befriend the Inner Critic, too, because it’s actually just trying to keep us safe, although it’s doing it in a way that may not be helpful in the long run. But it’s trying to protect us.
In this moment, try putting a hand over your heart and just saying to the part of you that’s being self critical: “I see you’re just trying to protect me in some way.”
Breathe slowly around and into the heart space, softening the body in tiny, tiny amounts.
Whatever is here, we can be tender with it together.
Even the guarded, harsh parts in us, we can meet those parts with tenderness.
And sometimes when doing this practice it’s really hard and we just even can’t find that tenderness coming in enough…
If that’s happening for you, you can say “this is a moment where it’s really hard for me to be tender and loving with myself. This is a moment of suffering.” We can even just validate that it’s really hard, or not possible to do at this moment. Validating where we’re at can be enough, to soften just a micro amount.
Befriending our wounded parts can be a lifelong process if we have trauma. Over time, our wounds become scars. The truth is, they never fully go away. They don’t disappear. But with ongoing care and healing, they become places where we also grow in awareness, resilience, and compassion for self and others. As the poet Rumi says: “The wound is the place where the light enters you.”
May we keep coming back to practices of bringing the light in, and befriending the dark places, again and again and again, together.