Illness may initiate transformations of soul

Today, Family Nurturing Tree Blog reprints Sonia Osorio's "The Transformative Power of Trauma – From Damaged Goods to an Empowered Life" that appears in Massage & Bodywork magazine, April-May 2001. Osorio quotes Thomas Moore:

"Soul pours forth from our wounds ... [The places of our] punctures and violations are areas of potential intimacy between us and those we love, even though on the surface they may seem to be precisely the areas of mistrust." Thomas Moore wrote these words in his book Soul Mates (Harper Collins, 1994), and the lines remind us that, after a wounding, sometimes the most difficult thing is to allow life to flow back into the very place where it once hurt us the most — to trust and open our body, ourselves, once again. The areas where we have been cut into, opened, bled, bruised, torn and otherwise hurt physically or emotionally are not places we immediately return to, much less celebrate, though the stories that emerge from there often redefine who we are and how we move in the world. They are the places where, once we return, we rediscover what it means to be truly intimate and open with ourselves, with another and with life. The body is restructured — and we are redefined — by such experiences, as much as by any physical therapy received."

Osorio shares individual stories of "participants of a workshop in which they follow a guided visualization and meditation, and each person draws or paints what they feel when they re-enter those places in their own body. With the body as canvas, the drawings are then repainted on the original scar or area of change, bringing the imagery and colors of each person’s experience to the surface, making the vibrant energy of their individual story visible. Trauma sometimes washes out the color in life. Exploring the trauma allows, as Moore wrote, the soul to pour forth so that life is re-experienced. These are the ways people have been transformed."