This Thou awakens us to Selfhood through inflicting suffering and struggle. This is the encounter that from a dramatic story perspective is where the Thou appears as the villain disrupting the pretty picture. This Thou throws our feelings into a chaos, an abyss, a death. It has the significance of the Easter Mystery. Or the wisdom Goethe offers when he says "Die and Become."

There are several modalities for the essential woundings. I will work with three in this message: Punctures. Mirrors. Abandonments.

Punctures painfully poke holes in our emotional attachments to our illusions, pretenses, excesses, identities and defenses. Ouch! But these wounds allow us to release these toxic soul substances, to let them drain away, creating the space for the beauty of Selfhood to fill in the now open soul spaces, making our feeling life whole.

Mirrors reveal familiar forms that have failed to evolve and therefore lack emerging beauty. Our souls flourish in the ever-present birthing mood of Nativity and wither in a morgue of dead patterns, rigid habits and fixed perspectives.  These mirror wounds encourage us to excise the deadness and allow for new life-bearing beauty to form. We feel blessed surprise at the strange and luminous Selfhood that appears in place of old and familiar.

The wound of abandonment comes from a Thou that throws you away, drops you into oblivion, casts you into a strange land beyond the horizon of self.  This is the Thou that causes us the pain of of not belonging to outer or inner states.  They challenge us to find for ourselves a solitary path to a new core Self and a coming home to I Am.

The Thou's who we encounter as wounders are very powerful companions. Recognizing the Thou gesture in one who seems to lack love for us requires an inner equanimity in our feeling life.  We step away from the dramatic response of anger, fear, and sadness, the feeling of injustice and being wronged. In equanimity we see that without the wound our I Am would never have become a Self-healer, able to restore, sustain and evolve wholeness in our feeling life.

Who are the Thou as Wounders that you have encountered in your journey toward wholeness?