Medicine for the Future: All Hands on Deck

Utilizing all the tools you resonate with to map your personal journey and heal our world

Wound Mapping Practices

The practice of tracking what is going on in our bodies, hearts and minds comes in many forms.  There is no one right way to do this for every person. One way to go about it is to try a variety of  different methods and see how they fit you. Another way is to do it intuitively, with the guidance of your ancestors and spirit guides for support as you navigate the depths of your psyche-being-body.
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We are like sponges, absorbing nutrients and information from our experiences no matter what route you take in your life path.  As with any practice, trust, immerse, dissolve, release, rebirth and return your focus again and again and again. As I have mentioned previously, mindfulness, meditation and a beginner’s mind is a helpful base structure that will provide strong roots for you to continue to grow and thrive no matter what curve balls life throws at you. Continue to breath and return to this home base as you go deeper within, spiraling deeper in cycles to discover and map your treasures buried there.

About a century ago, the energy of the feminine consciousness began to be re-animated after a period of dormancy - ironically by men steeped in the patriarchy who channeled and questioned and descended deeper into the un/sub-conscious realms, advocating for women during a time when it was taboo for women to even discuss their personhood let alone sexual life-force energy.  

“The mind is like an iceberg. It floats with one-seventh of its bulk above water.”
― Sigmund Freud

First, Freud and then his student Reich, and others following down the line from teacher to student; Jung, Neumann and Campbell, among others. They all have shared with the world such rich and potent discoveries about the mind, breath and body that served to awaken a hidden world within. It is called the feminine dimension, and she has contained layers upon layers of information that has always been available to us beneath the hardened numbed shell of our restricted conditioning.  We have come light-years since the dawn of patriarchal psychology, almost full circle, to connect with the indigenous history of shamanic spiritual knowledge and the development of multiple pathways to restore flow and connections with our inner life, including somatic therapy. Immerse yourself in the resources available to you. Libraries loan books authored by each of these men, and more and more women more recently, who have shed light into these hidden areas, the depth psychology of the feminine.

The key for you to know is that our core wounds, the founding developmental childhood experiences we had, are held not just in our thoughts and help to define our personality, but the energy of these experiences can be stored in our very physicality and musculature, creating our postural alignment of dis-ease and imbalance or stagnation and depletion when this energy is stuck or hidden and not flowing nor integrated into our body-being-psyche.  This is one of the main reasons I prefer an uber holistic approach to medicine; one that allows an individual to investigate and approach a point of focus from an array of modalities and methods to help gently unwind the subatomic knots and support healing in every way her body’s wisdom guides her to. That might look like, for example, using acupuncture to treat back pain, getting a chiropractic adjustment to assist releasing an acute misalignment, while doing yoga to maintain the release and strengthening and stretching the musculature to support the balance of postural alignment, all the while working with a therapist, shaman, reiki practitioner, herbalist, nutritionist, pelvic floor specialist, etc, support team of any or multiple kinds to do the deep work of uncovering the psychological and physiological root causes of the back pain, working with the core wounds of betrayal or trauma to release the grip of the fight or flight response of the sympathetic nervous system upon the back body, gently engaging the parasympathetic nervous system to restoring a sense of peace, health and vitality of the immune system.  In all these ways, we map and reweave the existing environment of our body to create new conditions for continual healing and sustainable health.
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In doing all of this work, you may find as you map the places you visit within - both literal body landscapes and the more esoteric landscapes of your psyche and spirit - that you discover grey areas you cannot visualize or know.  There is no awareness there, or numbness, or gaps in memory - all the wonderfully protective armor that was put into place for you to survive the life or past life you endured. Working with the breath you can be guided to allow energy to move and stir in these tight areas, increasing blood flow, releasing muscular tension and eventually emotional energy as well.  You may find yourself weeping or enraged as some memory is released during the gentle movement of your breath and body. As the body is allowed to be lovingly held without judgement, the body begins to trust its safety to feel what was too frightening or overwhelming to feel before.

One of the various ways to work softly with and view this aspect of the body in that moment of deep feeling is to tune into her as the child that you were.  What age do you feel? Trust the number that comes up.  What does your inner child want you to hear, know, see, understand?  What is she wearing? What is she doing? Where is she? Look around and see.  Is this overwhelming memory-feeling from another lifetime or ancestral experience?  Allow the imagination to access that deep inner feminine brain, the one that knows.  If you tend not to sense visually, use the senses that are your strongest. Scent, touch, feeling, color - whatever comes is information you can add to your map to bring to consciousness what is ready and wanting to be seen. 

This work can go very deep and may be best to do with a skilled practitioner. Trust and discern what you know you need. If you are working with someone, or have worked in the past with someone and have resources, there is no reason why you cannot continue to do this work on your own as well.  

How you choose to map is up to you.  Again, as many ways as there are people.  You can choose a method someone prescribes or follow the whispers within.  I’ll share a few ideas to get you started: write if you’re a writer; draw or paint if you work artistically in that way; dance your story, mapping the story as you move these parts of your body and expressing the movement of energy with your breath; sound and map your wounds with your voice, write songs of your wounds and sing them into a map of sound - record them and listen to them and journey with them; take a walk in the woods and collaborate with nature and discover your map drawn in or built upon the earth and photograph it to develop a continuing dialogue and relationship with what messages you received … be creative, be courageous, be bold and adventurous, and most simply, be your beautiful self.  You can record your dance-maps and revisit those as well.

Another way I learned to work with mapping in my womb awakening apprenticeship is to create a wound mandala.  Riffing off this method, you can draw or print a template mandala, put on music that calls to you and journey within, visualizing travelling around the clock of your womb and draw what comes forth in the directional quadrants of your womb: south/earth, west/fire, north/air, east/water.  The womb is wise and will guide and inform you. For men, this area is also known as the hara. It is the lower dantien, the place of creative power for us all. You do not need a physical womb to do this mapping practice.

You can work with dreams in this way too, making inquiries and engaging in conversation with the elements and symbols of your dreams to interpret their messages.  It is the same with what you are doing when you begin to map your inner world: you interpret the messages your body is communicating to you. Mapping the patterns you see emerging, connecting the micro dots, you begin to get a sense of these parts of your experience inter-relating and functioning as a whole system.  You are mapping a whole unified world and gaining insight with each exploration, an adventure of discovery for you to understand what you could not know before. As you do this more and more, you will have the sense of an expanding awareness, moving beyond the body, physiology, mind and psychology into a macro understanding of being a part of an even larger unified multi-dimensional field traversing beyond time and space.  You can map that too.