By what men fall

I came across the most beautiful quote the other day. It is from the Kularnava Tantra, and it goes:

By what men fall, by that they rise.

This is so true, and so powerful. Our nature as human beings is to struggle - with ourselves, with our environments, with each other. But this isn't without meaning or hope. We may not know it, but we chose this life, we chose to struggle because that is what makes us grow, what brings creativity and consciousness into being. And it is no accident the kinds of struggles we encounter in our lives. Each one of us has specific lessons to learn, and it is our own unique path of struggle that brings us to this lesson.

As healers, we learn to transform our wounds into healing. That's because there is energy in our wounds, and if we want deep change we have to look for something that runs deep within us. Each one of us has traumas that make us who we are today, and we can either let those stories limit us or we can use them to empower ourselves. Sometimes it's just a small shift from one frame of mind to another. Sometimes it's an entire healing journey that takes us deeper and deeper until we are restoring our very soul. No two people are the same, yet everyone can experience this same healing.

The healer's role is not to do the healing for us but rather to support us on our own journey, to be a sacred witness that will watch for us until we are strong enough to see for ourselves. How many of us have experienced someone standing up for us, or loving us, and thus learned how to stand up for ourselves or love ourselves? So this is how healing works - we pass it from one to another, in a long lineage and onto the next generation.

Aho.