Healing the Father Wound
A big part of who I am is based on what is missing from my life. Maybe you can relate. The blank spots on the canvas are sometimes more powerful to the overall picture than the myriad of shapes and colors that tell the story more obviously.
If each of my parents hadn’t been so profoundly collapsed in their roles, I doubt I would have pursued this path of healing with the kind of sustained passion I’ve brought to it for all these years.
Once upon a time I tried to fill my deficits with other people.
But that didn’t work. (It never does, does it?)
Some of us try to fill our deficits with work. With substances. With food. With busy-ness. With new clothes and shoe collections and the latest product that promises to make us better.
Some of us try to fill our deficits with our children or our pets. With never ending home renovations or constant moving.
The real trick to filling a deficit though is to take your focus off of it, genuinely. Then you will see: it fills itself, like a magic trick. It becomes level with the rest of the land.
As long as we’re hustling to fill a deficit: it’s got us. As long as we’re running from it, it owns us. As long as we’re unconsciously defining ourselves in terms of missing something, lacking something, needing something: we are living outside of our Souls, our true selves, instead of being planted firmly within them.
Our peace and our self acceptance comes from being planted in our own Souls.
When you live from your Soul, your disappointments and losses feel like teachings. They feel necessary. You come to understand Life as a series of karmic unfoldings that you are meant to bow to and trust, not control. You no longer see the dichotomy of deficit vs wholeness. You see everything playing out the way it has to for the sake of actualization. Not just on the personal, individual level, but as an interconnected species.
This perspective is the shift toward real liberation. It’s the shift from Victimhood to Empowerment. It’s the acknowledgement that our caretakers are not the ultimate determiners of our lovability, our worth, our fate.
If commercial holidays like the one we’re hosting in the US today (Father’s Day) are particularly triggering or upsetting, see if you can tap the wisdom of your own Soul to ground and comfort yourself.
Light a candle, set an intention and follow the rhythm of your own breath for a few quiet moments. This is Life, breathing through you. This is how powerful of a conduit you are. You don’t even have to think about it or tell your body to do it. Your body just knows how to breathe because it’s plugged into a Universal Intelligence that can perform the task for you.
What other tasks could this divine intelligence perform in your life if you would just hush your resistance for a minute and give it the wheel?
I wonder…
See you next time :)
