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The Body as Portal to Healing ~ A Personal Account of Healing
15 April 2019
Whatever our biggest challenges are in this lifetime, we can be sure that Life will present us with the appropriate "obstacles" to make us face them.
So, if genuine self-love is one of your core lessons, situations will arise, often via the most immediate and important vehicle to us, the body, to implore you to learn how to love yourself.
When I had a serious riding accident nine years ago I broke my coccyx and badly damaged my sacrum - in essence, my root chakra was cracked and opened, and it has been an ongoing journey since then to heal from the pain and immobility.
However, that experience also brought me face to face with my body - that poor, harshly treated beast who, at worst, I had loathed, and at best, I had neglected.
Then, a few months after the accident I had a powerfull emotional and healing dream, where I was shown an image of a beautiful big red heart placed exactly above the injury to the base of my spine. The heart was pointing downwards as if it was pouring love directly into the crack and I saw my spine vividly depicted. I woke up in tears and also full of love for myself and my vulnerability.
This dream and the ensuing days and weeks of initial, very painful recovery were completely infused with a very deep sense of vulnerability. I was no longer able to escape by doing any of the day to day things including care for my horses. All I could do was learn how to properly look after myself, and this involved learning to love myself in all my fragility rather than my can-do, strong persona-self.
Now, many years on, I am able to tune into my coccyx, to feel into it and send it love. I tell it: "I love you", while gently stroking my lower back. I say sorry to my spine. I ask for forgiveness for all the pressure and shoulds I've castigated it with over the many years.
That accident was a wake-up call on so many levels, but the most immediate and important thing it gave me access to was the ability to love myself for the first time in my life. Not to try, or just say those words without meaning them, but to actually FEEL love for myself, as well as compassion and forgiveness.
After years of blaming myself for all my problems and pain and struggles I was brought intimately into a relationship with my poor human body, and through my body to my bruised soul too.
Imagine my surprise and sense of awe when I read this in one of Marion Woodman’s books: “The word "Sacrum" comes from the latin word "sacer" and “means both “holy” and “cursed”. Known to anatomists as the os sacrum, literally the “holy bone”, it was given this appellation, according to one legend, because it was believed to be eternal and so the “seat” of the body’s resurrection”. 1
This experience with my body has been the portal into my ability to give myself genuine self-love and compassion; truly a spiritual journey made possible via the body. Without it I wouldn’t be where I am today, as it deepened my level of sensitivity towards myself and others, allowing compassion to flow more freely now that the tightly held onto, jammed-up base of my spine had been opened. Now the Kundalini energy could begin to flow at last.
It was truly an opening for resurrection to occur. For new awareness and consciousness to enter me via my body's wound - As Rumi says: “The wound is the place where the Light enters you.”
©Angela Dunning, 15th April 2019
References:
1. Rosen, Richard, “The Holy Bone,” Yoga Journal, cited in Woodman, Marion, Bone – Dying into Life, P.198