Sacred Gifts Within Trauma

In certain surviving indigenous communities, symptoms that we in the West consider as manifestations of mental illness are taken as a signpost of impending illumination rather than disease.

It is often the case that those (myself included) who go through physiological intensity often become our future healers. Ideally these people would be treated with care, as they are on an intensive awakening and illuminating process before they can reach their generous understanding of the human condition. This transmission is to honour and treat with reverence our own periods of intensity and bleakness, as we salvage the gift from the debris.  It is VERY important that we do this.  In fact it is vital – to not attain the gift is to refuse the potential that was offered to us.