Lately some old wounds and old fights have been coming up in me yet again. Evidently the scars are acting up, and it helps to remember that scars are signs that you survived the battle and went beyond it. I can think back to where those scars came from and the war that was so hard fought, and say it was successfully won. Survival of past trauma is not a small thing, it demonstrates tremendous strength. There may be times when scars act up, when deep wounds resurface, but that doesn’t mean that the battle was in vain or that you were not victorious, it just means there’s still some rebuilding to do. Sometimes it takes years to fully recover from past battles, to repair what needs to be repaired, and build from scratch what needs to be built anew.
Nonetheless, I saw recently how much I am still fighting old fights that are long over, and defending against people and forces that are long gone. Those long-ago battles were huge, and it was a major struggle to break free of everyone and everything that tried to hold me back, sometimes by force, that tried to prevent me from being who I wanted to be and living the way I wanted to live. But all of that is in the past. Like many others, I feel as though Mary Oliver’s poem “The Journey,” speaks directly to me. And yet there’s a time to let go of the past, a time when the fight is no longer needed.
When scars act up, the temptation is to revert to fight or flight. But as a friend recently told me, there is also “fight, flight, or light.” The light is to remember that sometimes scars act up and wounds resurface, but we can recognize what’s happening and remind ourselves that the past is actually behind us. We have a choice, and the strength that brought us this far is still within us. We can pause and let the reactive response inside ourselves settle down, we can remind ourselves of the life values we have chosen. Sometimes old scars twinge on rainy days, but that doesn’t mean we have to be controlled by them.
There may have been a time when it was necessary to fight or defend in order to go forward and have a chance to build a meaningful life, a life of love and spirit, but the past does not need to control the present. In going beyond the fight-or-flight reaction, we can choose our response rather than being controlled by the sting of wounds from the past. We can have a tender understanding of the struggle we went through and appreciate the strength that brought us this far. If the present demands that we affirm ourselves, fine. But if we are still fighting imaginary foes that are only shadows from the past, then we benefit from laying down our arms and letting ourselves rest from old battles. If we continue to react to internalized voices from the past, we are still letting those voices diminish our own light and keep us from being truly free. In our fight for freedom from anything that would hold us back from our highest light, we need to find a way to live that light in response to the present, not in bondage to reactions from the past.
© 2021 Shanti Natania Grace
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