Tantra 101: The Wound is the Weapon
In the practice of Yoga, we work to identify our “weaknesses” through inquiry and to understand, accept and integrate them. In doing so, we convert the wounded, traumatized parts of ourselves (quite consciously) into our points of strength. This process necessarily requires us to bring all of our broken and wounded parts with us on the journey of a life well lived, regardless of where we are in the process of healing. It is a process of alchemizing our pain and trauma in a way that “yokes” us to our past and supports us as we move into the future. It challenges us to engage with our lives fully without the demand for perfection (either of the past or future), and instead encourages us to bring the lessons of our wounds with us as we meet each new though often familiar experience. In this way, our wound becomes the weapon which we can wield skillfully as we meet our lives face-forward.
This approach does not require perfection or predictable outcome. It does not demand positivity or happiness. It does not require the external world to align for our safety or validation of our path. It does make us fully responsible for ourselves. It calls us to recognize the role we play in our victimhood and to be accountable for the feelings and responses that arise from our wounding. It demands of us the courage to act with conscious engagement from what arises, compelling us to acknowledge and feel and to be skillful in the response to what we discover. Alchemizing the wound into the weapon provides space for the truth of our pain and difficulty without feeling resistant to it. It can be most closely related to the idea of surrender not as release but as reclamation.
When we come to understand that every wound and scar is an access point to our own personal power and understanding, then Yoga begins. When we dare to yoke ourselves to our pain rather than remedy it, often healing is what results. Rather than wish our pain and wounding away, we can harness the experiences of our own suffering and digest them as pieces of our unique story. We begin to see that all that has been endured has shaped us, turned us, polished us like gemstones, alongside the damage and suffering it may have caused. With time and commitment, we can bring forth the spectrum of each experience that expands beyond the experience itself, and offers us the opportunity to give our content context.
Touching the wound to access the power of the weapon doesn’t mean making the pain and trauma positive. It doesn’t mean that what didn’t kill us made us stronger, it simply means that what didn’t kill us made us. Maybe it made us more cautious, calmer, more creative. Maybe it gave us access to empathy or rage, maybe it expanded our capacity for joy. Whatever the wound provided, it is a part of our story, and the only way to find power from it is to claim it. When we are faced with our own pain, we often desire to eliminate or annihilate it because to hold it is so uncomfortable, but the practice of transforming suffering into strength requires a capacity to sustain the discomfort.
The work of transforming the wound into the weapon is most difficult in the invitation to bring our awareness to the parts of ourselves that are difficult to see. Our unrecognized pain and suffering is the very source of our ammunition in the world. We are weaponizing our pain and desire to protect ourselves from its occurrence all of the time. But, when we choose to bring our awareness, our agency, and our choice into the process, the use of our weapon becomes graceful and even helpful. This is the proposition of a Yoga practice, to yoke ourselves to our pain and difficulty so that we can access the energy and power contained within it. Once we can do that, transforming our wound into our weapon is a process of skill and refinement.
When we resist this work, we often are resisting the requirement that we take accountability for our responses and become accountable for our actions, whether or not they are sourced in our woundedness or our healing. Awareness and consciousness provide a lens through which we can view our responses and reactions with agency and discernment. Our reactions and responses can then become conscious rather than involuntary, and they do not have to be perfect. From skillfulness, we wield our weapons with intent and the understanding that each swing and blow generates consequences.
As we call back the wounded parts, we begin to forgive our shortcomings and be compassionate to the moments in which our pain was running the show. Once that reclamation takes place, we can use our newfound awareness to assist in our decision making in ways that empower us to protect when necessary, but also to expand our threshold of risk and possibility when we feel we can. In this way, it’s the very wound of our unworthiness that might provide the inspiration or imagination to put down the burden of proving, and be with and as the one that is already worthy, loved and understood. In doing so, not only will we set ourselves free to be with and as who we are, but our frenzied behavior that affects those around us will calm. When we stop trying to avoid wounding, we give space for those around us to discover their own agency and choice, and step into their own autonomy as well.