The Power of Story

When Dr. Clarissa Pinkola Estés speaks about shame as “secret stories are … personal ones, embedded, not like jewels…but like gravel under the skin of the soul.” (para.3), I can’t help but think of the research on shame and vulnerability conducted by Dr. Brené Brown.

Carl Jung wrote that secrets cut us off from our unconscious and CPE calls that The Dead Zone. But like zombies in a apocalyptic movie, the secret will keep popping up and find its way out and the energy to plug those leaks compounds until “the woman who carries a secret is an exhausted woman”.

Secrets:

• Haunt
• Numb
• Isolate
• Constraint
• Wound… the Self, the Soul, and the Psyche

To Heal:

• Open the Secret
• Speak of it to Someone
• Write Another Ending
• RELEASE it – Wash it Away –

When we reach out to others a “woman calls up her courage from the soul bones, cuts herself a golden reed, and plays the secret in her own voice”. Our wild women sisters will hold us while we release and grieve and they can apply medicine in all the places that will slowly scab and heal and turn to scars of remembrance.

Clarissa Pinkola Estés challenges us to count our age in our battle scars rather than our years and she writes in a 2009 article that “Scar Clan is part of an ageless tribe of human beings, not defined by geography, racial color, national affiliation, nor language”. She goes on:

“– Scar Clan membership comes to those whose hearts have been carved deeper by registering fully, instead of turning away, who have been in the line of fire instead of protected, thereby being charged ever after to follow both a burdened and compassionate pathway for life.

— Scar Clan members bear pain in seeing how some fight to maintain the ruins of power rather than using bare hands to rescue the brilliant lights lying buried under the rubble.

— Scar Clan is a gigantic group of souls who are in the midst of healing self and others, who at least halfway have reset their own bones, who still move with standing-room-only heart, despite certain fragilities that come from scar tissue aching at unpredictable times, many years after wounding.

— Scar Clan in this tribe, despite stuns and harms to spirit, despite white bandages still trailing, despite shards in the heart, still stands. Still rise. Still carries warmth. Still will not be stilled.”

As I reflected on this chapter, I continued to hear the voices of Beautiful Chorus. May this song bring liberation, freedom, relief, and ease as you let go of all the things that no longer serve you.