Wound or Wisdom
“We gave leaving a hundred names for when it goes wrong: dissociation, avoidance, numbing, checking out. But no names for when it is exactly what our bodies need to do. You probably have a whole vocabulary for the wound, and not one word for the wisdom.” ailey jolie on Substack
Our culture is exceptionally skilled at naming what is broken. We have an ever-expanding vocabulary for dysfunction, disorder, deficiency, trauma, and pathology. That language has its place, it can help us understand, communicate, and find support. Yet, I can’t help notice the tendency we have to focus on what is wrong, what needs fixing … rather than what is right or what something is guiding us toward.
How often do we ask:
What if this isn't simply a problem to eliminate? What if it is also an intelligence trying to communicate? Is the ‘symptom’ or ‘issue’ actually a healing already in progress, a ‘solution’ embedded in the ‘problem’, the remedy embedded in the issue? (German New Medicine directs us toward that perspective strongly.)
A fever is not the enemy. Grief is not a design flaw. Fatigue can be a boundary speaking. Anxiety may be a nervous system trying, however imperfectly, to protect us or redirect us. Even withdrawal, in certain moments, may be an ancient wisdom creating enough distance for something inside us to reorganize before returning.
This doesn't mean every response is healthy or should remain unchanged. Nor does it mean suffering should be romanticized. Nor does it mean we shouldn’t consider the perspective of a potential problem to resolve.
It does, however, invite us to become curious before becoming corrective. Invites us to open to an inner dialogue, to open to looking at it from ‘both sides of the coin’. What is the intelligence held in the ‘problem’?
Instead of asking,
"How do I fix this?"
we might first ask,
"What is this trying to accomplish? What is this experience protecting, preserving, or pointing me toward? What is this trying to ‘heal’ and what is the intelligence already showing us? What is the remedy or solution embedded in the problem or issue?’
That shift changes everything.
Many times it feels like purchasing products or services is based upon a sense we are somehow incomplete. If the story is that we are always lacking, then there will always be another product, another program, another certification, another technique promising to make us whole. Maybe instead we are simply using tools to calibrate ourselves through the experience of more and more deeply embodying spirit into matter.
But perhaps healing is less about becoming someone new than remembering what has never actually been lost.
What if our symptoms are not always evidence that we have failed, but evidence that our system is continually attempting to find equilibrium? Sometimes the invitation is not to silence the symptom, but to listen to its intelligence.
What if the body's first language isn't pathology, but adaptation?
What if what appears to be resistance is sometimes wisdom moving more slowly than the mind would like?
This doesn't dismiss medicine or therapy. They have transformed countless lives and remain deeply valuable. It simply asks us to hold another possibility alongside them:
That before something is treated as malfunction, it deserves to be met with curiosity.
Maybe our deepest work is not becoming experts in what is wrong with us.
Maybe it is remembering how to recognize what is right within us, and learning to trust the wisdom that has been speaking through us all along.
Maybe healing begins the moment we stop standing across from ourselves as a problem to solve and begin sitting beside ourselves as something worthy of innerstanding.
As we approach the body and the field not as something to be "fixed," but as something to be listened to, it becomes less about correcting and more about creating the conditions in which our own innate intelligence can emerge. That is a subtle shift, but it can change how we come to see ourselves, releasing judgment and opening to what’s possible.