Some Notes From Matousek

 

Notes From When You're Falling, DIVE by Mark Matousek

Carl Jung “Only the wounded healer can heal”

At 15 Dr Rachel Remen's personal healing work began with a diagnosis of Chrohn's Disease, an auto immune disorder attacking the intestine. At the time of her diagnosis. it was untreatable and extremely painful. She endured several surgeries and had to wear an evacuation bag under her sixties peasant blouse and said she was furious at the disease for a long time and finally exploded, losing the job of her dreams. She struggled with feelings of loss and anger until she realized one day that her anger and her will to live were connected – that her anger was her “will to live” turned inside out. After this epiphany, her fierce will to live made her feel like Zorba The Greek!

Remen says...

There is a place for anger in our lives. The point is authenticity. Such authenticity signals the deepening of soul that occurs when untrue things are burned from our lives.

This is how we begin to awaken. The beginning of loss is also the beginning of compassion. We realize that there is a a larger power operating which can be trusted to sustain us. That trust in mystery carries us forward. An awareness of something larger breaks through and there's a core identity shift, not just in ideas about ourselves but also in how we see our worlds.

The process of wounding actually awakens us to our strength. It shuffles our values and the top priority is never what we thought it would be. It's never about perfection or power. It always turns out to be about LOVE .

It's easy in life to forget that there's a flow in things – to forget to get out of our own way.

In the way we move through difficult circumstances and not the absence of circumstances that enables us at the end of life to say “ You know, this has been a great ride.”