Your shadow and wounds are often the most honest and real part of who you are.
– Alan Watts
We often think that wounds are different from our truth. Looking back, this seems like the biggest myth or illusion I have ever held in my life. It is a general thought process that wounds are something to heal, something to eradicate, something to fix so that we can call ourselves healed, perfect, good. This belief to fix ourselves is fed to us continuously from outside, that there is something wrong with us. There are 10 different types of trauma, 100s of ways you are not healed yet, there are so many ways you need bit adjusting. The entire self-help industry, mental-health culture, and even spiritual gurus are built around this obsession: how to get rid of your darkness, your shadow, your fear, anger, jealousy, anxiety, shame, guilt, lust, and how to fix yourself.
You can see it in yourself, the moment any societally unacceptable emotion rises: the mind often thinks, “How to get rid of this? How to fix myself so that I won’t feel this anymore?” We spend years, even decades, running in circles trying to get rid of these feelings. We want to fix our emotions, solve our emotions. We read books, watch videos, go to therapists, attend workshops, only to find ourselves facing the same anxiety, fear, the same ache we have tried so hard to run away from. Because what we call healing is often just a form of running away from those emotions, our shadow, a part of us which we don’t want to face, and the so-called spiritual journey becomes a sophisticated form of escape from what we don’t want to face.
But one day, I hope you see that the wounds, the darkness, the shadow side of who you are, have always been the most honest part of you. It was always trying to show you, guide you, and awaken you to your truth.
Your anxiety was never there to disturb your life. It was always trying to tell you where you had drifted away from your truth. It shows you the space between who you are and who you are pretending to be. Between what you really know you could be and what you are willing to settle for.
Your fear was never an enemy either. In fact, it is the most honest part of you. It always whispers what you love the most. You can only tremble in fear of losing something that you love so truthfully that it is nothing but your pure truth of who you are. When you think you will not achieve what really, really matters to you, only then are you looking at blank walls at 3 am, wide awake in fear.
Your anger, too, is sacred. It reveals what feels unjust to you, what violates your inner sense of justice, truth, and how life should be. Every experience that angers you is a mirror to your inner sense of honor that this is not right, it does not align with who I am.
And jealously we are often told to be ashamed of. It shows what you really long for, what you secretly know you could embody. Jealousy does not make you less of a person, but it is a mirror saying, ‘Look this too belong to you in some form. This is what you truly long for.’
We always misread these signals. We call them our wounds, flaws. We ask therapists, spiritual teachers, mentors, ‘Why am I like this? Why do I feel broken? Can you help me, fix me, heal me?’ But these shadows, these emotions were never really meant to be fixed. You are not a half-life that needs fixing. They were never against you. They have always been guiding you towards your truth – to what truly matters to you. They are there to awaken you to what is truly alive in you and the truth that you have ignored.
The myth of the mental health industry is the assumption that wounds, traumas are inflicted by parents, society in childhood. They are inherited. In a way, true, but here is another viewpoint. Imagine you were born to parents who were poor. They did not have enough to give you everything you wanted, and they carried shame for that. Their wound might have been about lack — about money, status, survival, security. But also, their wound was conditional love as well; they thought love must be earned. So they loved you when you behaved as they wished, and withdrew when you didn’t. Their love became conditional, a reflection of their own sense of love and presence.
Now, most would assume that their child would inherit the same wound – the shame of not having wealth, constantly trying to fill that void of not having enough. But life is not that linear. You could easily grow up entirely different, never really caring much about wealth; only earning to have a good, secure life. Never really running after money. Maybe wealth or status never felt meaningful to you – the real you. And yet deep down, you might have another ache – the wound of lack of unconditional presence. You might carry the deep longing to be seen for who you are, to be loved without needing to earn it, without conditions or performance. Your wound might not echo your parents’ shame about poverty; it might echo your own truth, the truth that love, not money, is what your soul values most.
That is what I mean when I say: the wounds you carry are your truth. They do not belong to your parents or society. They belong to the essence of who you are. You don’t always inherit the wounds; you are almost always born into the circumstances of your parents, culture, and society that was against your truth of who you are. Your parents, your culture, the world around you, they didn’t truly wound you. They simply created an environment that could not recognize your truth. What you experience as wound is actually your truth trying to surface. It screams through fear, anxiety, jealousy, rage; not to disturb you, but to be seen and acknowledged by you.
So wounds are not a mark of brokenness; they are signs of awakening to your truth. To feel restless, fear, sadness, and anxiety is to feel that the life you have been living does not align with something deep in you anymore, with your truth. So healing is not about getting rid of the pain, anger, sadness, jealousy, fear, and all the emotions that society has told are wrong, bad. Healing is to sit with them, understand what they are trying to show you, to acknowledge them, acknowledge the truth that they are showing you. So healing is simply about not running away, not fixing those emotions, but simply sitting and listening. Listening to your own truth.
And one day you will realize they were never enemies, they were the parts of you that are most honest, most real, unapologetic – pushing you ahead to your truth, to your aliveness.
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