From Trauma to Treasure
For Someone Awakening to the Trauma of His/Her Past
A Poem by John O’Donahue
Everyone experiences trauma in their lives. There is no escaping it. Trauma can show up through micro-aggressions or through events that challenge our very survival. How we deal with trauma will determine the course of our lives.
It takes courage, and support, to move from “trauma to treasure” as I call it. In my own story in The Shaman’s Wife, I experienced traumatic events that I managed to survive and spin them into wisdom to serve others.
This poem by John O’Donahue, one of my favorite poets, from To Bless the Space Between Us: A Book of Blessings, speaks to the journey we must take to weave a new tapestry of our lives that includes our wounds turning them into forgiveness for past aggressions. It is truly sacred work to “be blessed with a compassionate guide who can accompany you through the fear and grief until your heart has wept its way to your true self.”
For everything under the sun there is a time.
This is the season of your awkward harvesting,
When the pain takes you where you would rather not go,
Through the white curtain of yesterdays to a place
You had forgotten you knew from the inside out;
And a time when that bitter tree was planted
That has grown always invisibly beside you
And whose branches your awakened hands
Now long to disentangle from your heart.
You are coming to see how your looking often darkened
When you should have felt safe enough to fall toward love,
How deep down your eyes were always owned by something
That faced them through a dark fester of thorns
Converting whoever came into a further figure of the wrong;
You could only see what touched you as already torn.
Now the act of seeing begins your work of mourning.
And your memory is ready to show you everything,
Having waited all these years for you to return and know.
Only you know where the casket of pain is interred.
You will have to scrape through all the layers of covering
And according to your readiness, everything will open.
May you be blessed with a wise and compassionate guide
Who can accompany you through the fear and grief
Until your heart has wept its way to your true self.
As your tears fall over that wounded place,
May they wash away your hurt and free your heart.
May your forgiveness still the hunger of the wound
So that for the first time you can walk away from that place,
Reunited with your banished heart, now healed and freed,
And feel the clear, free air bless your new face.
