I was enjoying a beach walk last week, and I began thinking about the topic of scars. We show our age in many different ways, but one of them is through the accumulation of life’s scars.
These scars can be physical or emotional, raw or (mostly) healed.
My left hand bears a scar from when a dog bit me as a child. I never really think of it, but it sits there as a signpost to a trauma I went through when I was 6 years of age. At the time, it was significant.
But as the years have rolled by, it’s receded into the background of my memory, until it’s barely noticeable (physically and emotionally).
When I was 28, I was married to my first husband.
We loved exploring the boundaries of life. “Anything goes,” was our motto, “so long as we do it together”. And we lived a very passionate and exhilarating life together, choosing adventures that most people would never dream of, walking both the dark side and the light side of life.
We laughed, we experimented, we loved, we failed, we learned, and we grew.
But when that relationship had run its course, and for my own physical and psychological wellbeing I chose to end it, my uncle questioned me. This was my father’s brother, a man who was incredibly dear to my heart, and more like a father to me than my own father.
I valued his opinion, and I wanted him to understand my motives. So I wrote him a very long letter, and was completely honest about all aspects of my marriage – the good, the bad and the ugly. It was a purging for me – a way of articulating all the many pushes and pulls that went into making that decision to leave….culminating in some physical violence which was the final trigger.
Yet rather than meeting my outpouring of thoughts and emotions with compassion and care, my uncle’s response was to write to me, and tell me that he never wanted to speak to me again. My letter had caused him such heartache, he felt it was better for his own heart health to have no contact me with again.
Despite me begging and pleading, and trying to understand what on earth could have brought our deep heart-based connection to such an abrupt halt, his decision was final.
I never saw or spoke to him again until my father’s funeral, many years later, when my uncle treated me as if nothing had every gone wrong between us.
Yet of course, it had.
This is a great example of an emotional scar.
It left me in total bewilderment as to how love could suddenly end like that, and it set up some patterns I’ve revisited at other times in other relationships.
So with the rolling hand of time, our body and Soul reveals its own very personal accumulation of scars.
Yet for those of us seeking Universal Consciousness, these scars are merely the lessons we’ve come here to learn – tough lessons, but ones we are here to grow through. They are a trigger for our personal evolvement as a Soul.
These things are happening “for us, not to us”….no matter how ugly, no matter how painful.
And when we embrace our life’s challenges in this way, we see them as a dark cloud with a silver lining. These are our “Silver Scars” – the hurts that, through accepting their challenges, make us greater, and help us shine brighter than we ever did without them.
It’s utopic to think of a world where only the bright and beautiful is given to us. We would shine, and never dull. Yet that isn’t the world that we live in. Instead, we are in a world of polarity, of duality…and in this world, both light and dark exist in perfect synergy.
And in this world, if we cannot fully embrace our darkness, nor can we fully embrace our light.
If we choose only one pole in this planet of duality, we are like a tightrope walker attempting to walk that rope on a 45 degree angle. Inevitably, the immutable law of gravity will dictate that we will fall.
But just as we have silver scars, we also have golden scars.
The golden scars are the people and experiences that have touched us in such a powerful and life-enhancing way, they have lifted us out of darkness and into light (even if just for an instant).
Why don’t we think of these experiences as scars? They leave a mark on us as inevitably as the challenges do, so they are indeed a scar….albeit a positive, bright scar, something to be treasured.
They are our Lighthouse when we find ourselves sinking – the memories and truth we can turn to, which help us to navigate our way out of the quicksand of our life’s journey.
A month ago, my cleaner and friend Jess came up to me and asked if she could talk to me. I stopped what I was doing, so that I could be fully present with whatever it was she wanted to speak to me about. I thought it would be a concern, but in fact it was quite the opposite.
Jess shared with me how rarely people give each other truly genuine, positive feedback. And she wanted me to know how much she sees and feels my Spirit. And she then proceeded to give me the most beautiful and honouring feedback that I have ever experienced in my life.
When we are here, being ourselves in our journey, it’s impossible to understand how others see us.
Whenever I’ve been asked to describe myself, the word that comes to mind is “multidimensional”. I have so many facets to my Being, that I don’t fit into any one box.
Most people only get to see a few of my facets, so they might describe me as caring, kind, inspirational, intimidating, controlling, spiritual, dedicated, or even crazy!
Jess went beyond all those descriptions, and her words spoke straight to my heart. I knew that she was seeing me beyond the aspects of my personality. She was seeing deep into my Being, and reflecting that back to me.
And that was my Golden Scar.
There have been many Golden Scars throughout my life. I’m sure you also have accumulated your own treasure chest of them. They are not better nor worse than our Silver Scars…..but they are special.
Where our Silver Scars lead us towards our inner darkness and wounds (teaching us about our Light through understanding our darkness), our Golden Scars carry us directly to the Lighthouse within.
Thus our Golden Scars have the ability to anchor us into the bigger picture of our life, to see beyond the visible, to see our greatness beyond the various stumbles and the one-way streets of our life.
They help us meet the depths within ourselves, and to know that we are – indeed – on the perfect path, and exactly where we need to be.
