“The most beautiful people we have known are those who have known defeat, known suffering, known struggle, known loss, and have found their way out of the depths. These persons have an appreciation, a sensitivity, and an understanding of life that fills them with compassion, gentleness, and a deep loving concern. Beautiful people do not just happen.”
~ Elisabeth Kubler – Ross
What if the challenges in our lives and our suffering are not the things that we have to just get past in order to become the person and create the life that we sense we were born to be and live?
What if the traumas and losses in our lives are portals through which we can enter into a profound transformation that takes us closer to our true nature. The wounded ego – or Habitual Way of Being as I call it – tells us something else entirely as it braces itself against the pull of the opening to try to keep things the same.
Beautiful people do not just happen.
There is nothing easy about these times we are living in. There are global and personal challenges now that are in many ways more complex than our current consciousness and capacity to handle them. The conditions are ripe for profound transformation, as we are being compelled to develop and become women who are a match for this world. You could say we have a kind of evolutionary tailwind to awaken a more expanded consciousness and cultivate the leadership capacities needed if we would just stop resisting the changes.
But that means going toward the very wounds from our past that are getting triggered by the stresses of our lives today…the very pain that we don’t want to feel, that was too overwhelming then and today we would rather just shut down, numb out or run away than have to feel those feelings.
This is what it means to be an emerging Mysterial – it is about being able to be with our own suffering as a gateway to revealing our true nature. And it is our true nature or essence in all its uniqueness that the world is hungry for right now.
Beautiful people do not just happen.
Dr. Gabor Maté, a Hungarian-born Canadian physician and expert in trauma-informed care said in a podcast I listened to recently:
“And so people could be wounded in all kinds of ways, and especially a sensitive child can be wounded just because his feelings are not understood. Or his needs aren’t exactly met, or because the parent is too busy, or because the parents are stressed, and the child takes on the role of protecting the parent from the stresses by suppressing their own feelings. So there’s all kinds of ways in which people can be wounded. So trauma is not just a wound, but it’s a wound that’s not healed. So it causes a defensiveness. It causes more pain.
Also, what happens to wounds is that they scar over. And if you look at a flesh wound that’s scarred by the scar tissue, it’s less flexible. It has less feeling in it. It doesn’t grow. It doesn’t develop. It’s a protective covering, but it doesn’t have the flexibility and the vitality of real flesh. And so people who are wounded are limited and constricted in their capacity to respond to the world. They become separated from their own feelings, sometimes from their own gut feelings, in fact, often from their own gut feelings. They develop a view of the world that’s tinted by pain or distrust. Or they lose their sense of security. They don’t know who to trust. Sometimes they trust the wrong people or they don’t trust the right people. So trauma has many implications and many consequences. And it doesn’t take horrific events to traumatize people. That’s what the big misunderstanding is.
Now, again, you have to understand, trauma is not that bad things happen to people. Because like the Buddha said 20,000 years ago, life brings suffering. So that’s just the norm. You know, people die, your pet dies. People might reject you. Somebody you love may not respond positively. You might suffer illness. This is painful. So life brings pain, but pain is not the same as trauma. Pain becomes traumatic when that pain isn’t resolved, when it doesn’t get the support it needs, when it isn’t metabolized, when we don’t learn and grow from it.
Trauma is not what happens to us. Trauma is what happens inside us.”
Beautiful people do not just happen.
We need the ‘holding environments’ now that we did not have earlier to allow what could be traumatizing experiences in the chaos and disruption of today, to be transformational in how we live our lives tomorrow. The first holding environment to install is our own loving presence for ourselves. To be gentle with ourselves in these uncertain times. To wrap ourselves in our own loving arms and acknowledge that the path of development is not easy. We are breaking a new trail for women in the future to be sure that they can welcome all of their Feminine and Masculine essences. We are doing this for ourselves and for the women of future generations.
“Imagine a world where women are unafraid to express the fullness of themselves, joyful and sad, afraid and courageous, chaotic and ordered, beautiful and ugly, autonomous and interconnected—the whole paradoxical mix of being real.
Imagine a world where we don’t take ourselves too seriously and yet are deeply serious about those things that matter most to us.
Imagine a world where women are at ease with uncertainty and paradox and can remain present and peaceful as leaders in the midst of it all.
Imagine a world where women bring their deep multi-dimensional knowing into expression through fierce candor, delivered with compassion.
Imagine a world where we are dynamically guided by women who are partners with The Great Mystery and who know how to unfold the emergent, revealing breath-taking beauty and harmony.
Imagine this world and then imagine yourself shaping it!”
~ The Way of the Mysterial Woman
We are the ones who can hold the vision of a world that breaks free of the ongoing cycles of trauma and becomes more wise, loving, powerful and inclusive of all beings, Gaia and the cosmos itself.
And it all starts with each of us right where we are, truly. It starts when we allow our wounds to take us toward the shadow places in ourselves that block the light. Our hearts open, our minds become unstuck from old limiting beliefs, our bodies thaw to reveal true wisdom.
Beautiful people do not just happen.
This deeper call to wholeness is rippling to us all. Do you hear it in your life?
