Find Healing by Embracing Your Wounds

SPECIAL NOTE: I’m on book tour in October and may be in your area. I’d love to meet you! If interested, see details at the bottom of this post.

Being human means being wounded. 

The world is beautiful and deadly. Life is wonderful and painful. Simply existing eventually leads to hurt. 

The question is this—how will we choose to deal with our wounds? Richard Rohr rightly said that those who do not transform their pain transmit their pain. Hurt people hurt people. It’s up to us to acknowledge our wounds, grieve well, and use the experience to deepen our becoming.

But how can we do that? Each of us must find our own path. Therapy can help. Talking vulnerably with trusted friends can help. Prayer can help. Serving others can help.

Ultimately, we must allow ourselves to feel our pain. We can’t stuff it, avoid it, sanitize it, or numb it. We must face it. Experience it. Go through it. 

Author and teacher Henri Nouwen put it this way:

You have been wounded in many ways. The more you open yourself to being healed, the more you will discover how deep your wounds are…. The great challenge is living your wounds through instead of thinking them through. It is better to cry than to worry, better to feel your wounds deeply than to understand them, better to let them enter into your silence than to talk about them. The choice you face constantly is whether you are taking your hurts to your head or to your heart. In your head you can analyze them, find their causes and consequences, and coin words to speak and write about them. But no final healing is likely to come from that source. You need to let your wounds go down to your heart. Then you can live through them and discover that they will not destroy you. Your heart is greater than your wounds.

As you encounter your wounds, take a breath. Face them. Name them. Talk them through with your trusted circle and your Higher Power. Allow yourself to feel them deeply. Then take their lessons and let them go. If you do, you’ll find growth and healing, and you’ll take another step toward Becoming Yourself.

SPECIAL NOTE: I’ll be on book tour with my author wife Lisa McMann from Oct 11-26, 2024 with events in Arizona, Pennsylvania, Michigan, Colorado, and Texas. I’d love to meet you. For details, see the graphic below or visit my website HERE.

As featured in the Daily Meditation from The Henri Nouwen Society. Text excerpts taken from “You are the Beloved” by Henri J.M. Nouwen © 2017 by The Henri Nouwen Legacy Trust. Published by Convergent Books.