healing the Toxic Father wound
Body Temple is a community that comes together to change the ways that we carry trauma in our body. And that really can only happen together. This isn't an individualistic type of practice or work. It doesn't even work when we're alone.
There's certain things that we really do need others to heal, and certain things that we need to be one one-on-one, especially when we're digging into attachment wounding.
When I went on my ancestral pilgrimage in Southern Italy, we were doing these rituals like worshiping the sun, grief rituals that included dance and drumming and chanting. One of the biggest, deepest griefs that came up for me at the end of this ritual that we did was my father, who was an amazing person. In many ways, he was very wild, and a lot of my great qualities come from him. He struggled with addictions, from when he was a teenager, like hardcore addiction, heroin cocaine…
The heartbreak was that my father didn't know that this was a part of his lineage, these songs and these rituals. He had no idea how much healing could happen. How I've perceived addiction and all of this trauma that we come into, we're trying to get our safety from something outside of us. That is usually the exact thing that is mirroring back how unsafe we are.
I went from being addicted to drugs and all these other things to just being addicted to ‘Who's not protecting me? And how can I try to get them to’? One of my biggest addictions in sobriety was looking for the person who was going to help make me feel safe.
My experience is that that person just didn't come and I really searched.
When I started to sink into a worshiping nature, worshiping the sun, the mother earth, the goddess as the earth, and worshiping, Kali and Durga and Lakshmi, all these frequencies of Divine Mother energy of the Dark Goddess, the Black Madonna.
To find refuge in the Divine Mother is what gives me the ability to then put my inner child back to sleep when it wakes up in anxiety and I feel like I'm not safe. But where does my adult get to go when the fear or abandonment comes up?
In Tantra, we have Shiva, this ever consistent present consciousness as a direct experience, a part of us that has always been there and will always be there, and it's a mystery. And it's as consistent as the sun. It's as life-giving as the sun.
How does this relate to you? How does it not relate to you? What intuition do you have around reclaiming this tradition of worshiping the son as the father?
Do you have any intuition around these ancient ways of reconnecting and reestablishing a relationship to the divine that might not fit into someone else's idea of what that means?
How can you trust that what arises within you is just as valuable as what arises within anyone else when any of us are on our journeys?
Use your own intuition and sit with this releasing of the victimization that we carry as a way of honoring it and releasing the patterns and Psyches of our fathers. Holding this space for letting that go, and pushing that out of our field as a way of being with the younger parts of us in the ways that they need. So we can better learn how to listen and relate to one another even amidst our challenges and differences and boundaries.
Finding these boundaries, and celebrating all of us by coming together in this way, and saying yes, to showing up, is so hard to do. And this process is also setting a really clear boundary energetically to your relationships.
To say ‘this is the wellness that I'm amplifying, and this is the wounding that I carry’. But the vulnerability is also wisdom, right? It's not just the wound that needs to be rejected or avoided. The wound is also giving me this same awareness and consciousness in a weird way, twisted way.
If you want to dive deeper into healing the father wound you can buy a recording of the full class here. Or come join us in the Body Temple community Dynamic Embodiment Program for weekly classes and offerings.
