Wounds vs. Patterns

Photo © Namee Baijal

This think-piece raises but will not answer that question…

Recently I started thinking about the difference between a wound and a pattern. Spiritually and Energetically. 

I was trying to make a decision about whether to work on a spiritual wound from childhood or whether to work on a pattern that has shown up repeatedly in my life which I think is connected to that original wounding. And it dawned on me that I actually don’t have enough knowledge to make an informed decision. Sure I can and will follow my gut and intuition but my curiosity was piqued. 

This is where I have arrived. A wound is in our unique form. If our soul were a slab of clay, then wounds are thumb marks on that clay, which give our clay dough its unique shape. Years ago someone (I think my grandmother) explained the concept of sanskara (often also spelled as samskara) as grooves on the soul which were acquired in previous lives. 

 By this analogy, a pattern would be the way our uniquely shaped dough interacts with the world. But what is a pattern energetically? When I ponder this question, what pops up in my mind’s eye is an image of of multitudes of shimmering firefly like particles between two uniquely shaped dough people that move and vibrate as the people move. But I feel I am not as clear about a pattern as I am about a wound and I am still definitely not clear about whether one should work on a wound or a pattern. 

To heal a wound, one needs not only to grasp that this whole existence - Life with a capital L and also our life (or lives) — is all just maya, a dream of Vishnu, an illusion; but also to be able to pull that idea down into one’s psyche and integrate it into one’s corporeal spiritual self — where it becomes a constant lived and felt belief rather than a thought which is at some remove from us. (I use the word maya here in this sense — “Māyā is also a spiritual concept connoting “that which exists, but is constantly changing and thus is spiritually unreal”, and the “power or the principle that conceals the true character of spiritual reality.” (Definition Source:Wikiepedia )

How does one heal a pattern though? And why do patterns keep repeating in our lives? To take that clay dough analogy to its logical conclusion, why do other dough people with shapes similar to each other keep showing up so that the vibration patterns between us keep repeating themselves? I am completely in stickiness here. So I am going to put this question to the universe and also to some actual people I deeply respect. if I find any answers, I will post them here.

 — — — — — — — -

Ideas that have informed this piece: Besides the concepts of maya and sanskara, some other ideas that I have recently been exposed to have also influenced my thinking. In particular, when I was writing this, I thought of teachers James Kemp who talked about how the work people do forms their mental body and Tom Bentley Fischer in whose class I first heard about Yat Malmgren’s concept of figure eight - how interactions between people are a continuous flow of energy almost in a figure 8 formation that mimics the infinity symbol. The question itself was inspired after watching a whole series of videos by the elegant Krishanti Wahla

Read on Medium