I am not what has happened to me. I am what I choose to become.*
Carl Jung

But true healing and transformation come from being able to sponsor the wound, sponsor the demon, sponsor the shadow.**
Robert Dilts

We too easily dismiss parts of our lives as unimportant,
Or undesirable,
Or unpleasant.

We hide them away,
Not wanting to afford any light to these,
For our own sake,
And certainly not for others to know of them
or to see them.

It’s not the strongest of the species that survives, more the most intelligent that survives. It is the one that is most adaptable to change.^

There is the possibility that we are limiting our story –

a story is an account of a character, in a set of circumstances, facing choices, who undergoes change^^ –

The possibility that our largest story involves making a space for our wound, our demon, our shadow,
To hear what it wishes to speak to us, or to show to us, or simply to hold us in.
Beyond it’s clumsy and crass way of catching our attention.

We each carry within a wound and a gift.
Sometimes our wound is our gift.

We may first need someone to be our sponsor,
Or be this sponsor to ourselves.
Without judgement,
Curious, listening, inquiring, allowing for transformation.
Making it possible for us to unwrap our larger story that is our unique version of life-in-all-its-fullness.

*Quoted in Ken Robinson’s Out of Our Minds;
**From Stephen Gilligan and Robert Dilt’s The Hero’s Journey;
^Charles Darwin, from Brian McLaren’s God Unbound;
^^From Bernadette Jiwa’s What Great Storytellers Know.