We Have Always Been Falling
The problem begins with the first lie we are fed: that as children, we are innocent.
We are innocent: a clean slate, untouched, pure. Thus everything we do and everything that is done to us, every phenomenon and experience, can only be experienced as a fall from that childhood grace.
Little girls are presented as ethereal beings, unbodied in ideal: and thus the traumatic nature of physicality is experienced as a rot, a worm, a degradation from some Primal perfection.
Every aspect of our lives is judged according to its relationship to a state that does not exist.
Little girls are cruel, scheming, vindictive, filthy. They do not fall from spiritual innocence, but from an open embrace of the trauma of the flesh into one that endlessly questions it.
The feminine path of initiation is a path of trauma. This is difficult to speak about, as people are quick to reject discussions of this as a justification for trauma. But this is only a sign of how whitewashed our spiritual consciousness has become. It has always been traumatic to be a woman. It has always been traumatic to live, to be an enfleshed, fleshy being in a fleshy, enfleshed world; a world where pain is more common than pleasure. Yet we deny this. We seek to shore ourselves up in an imagined hyperreal world of pleasure, of sanitised experience. But pleasure itself is inherently traumatic (and dirty). To be a woman in a patriarchal world, to be a feminine presence in a world of masculinity, means to tread the path of trauma, and to seek to learn from it. To discover the mysteries that lie in the spaces of pain. This is not to justify pain nor to propose trials as some kind of necessary spiritual experience. It is rather to state that everybody necessarily experiences trauma and we must understand this as the starting point of our spiritual journeys, not as some bump to be overcome along the way.
Women experience the beginnings of growth as a fall. It would be nice if this were not so, if we lived in some grand matriarchal world where women were respected and feminine initiation rites were encoded safely etc etc…. except our bodies themselves deny the existence of any such prelapsarian paradise. Menstruation is messy and painful; childbirth is experienced with more pain in humans than in any other animal. To be human, to have this large brain capable of human thoughts, is to come into the world in the midst of trauma. It is to continue the line through trauma; to be human is traumatic Our problem is that we have rejected trauma as a spiritual experience. We have sought spirituality in white light, in safety, in stillness, in serenity. But spiritual growth is none of these things. It is dark, fleshy and rotting. It is mold and worms and a compost heap. We are no different from the Earth around us, and like the Earth we rot and are reborn. Christianity tells us of a fall from grace. Countless books have sought to retell the story as something that was stolen from us. But, in truth, we do fall; or rather, we must dig and tunnel and bury and find our way back to the center of ourselves, to the center of the world, to the center of our mother wound, our mother’s womb. Thus the fall truly is only the beginning.
I hear it again and again from women I know and books and religious stories. The innocent girl is exposed for the first time to sex violence, to the trauma of the skin on skin, the trauma of the eyes of the other. She experiences this as a destruction, as a replacement of her purity with putrefaction, as blood and light poured out and replaced with a thick black bile. As a worm that rots the core of the apple. She does not know, for we have forgotten how to teach her, that it is from this rotting, from this putrefaction, that the seeds of womanhood are grown.
How dare I suggest that trauma is necessary? How dareI state this to others, will this not justify their traumatic behavior? These questions are the neurotic equivalent of potpourri on the back of a toilet. Women have always experienced the greatest share of trauma. There is no justifying it, but there is the Justice that comes with remembering what this used to mean, and how we used to understand. The myths of descent that we find throughout our various cultures, these myths of the goddess going down: these are the feminine path of initiation. They begin with sorrow, they begin with trauma, and they transform these things into something great, something powerful, something godly. For us there is no castle perilous in the dark night of the soul. For us the whole path is shrouded in darkness. But lo, from this darkness comes something far more powerful than any attempt to shore up the light.
If we can truly understand the initiative nature of traumatic experience, the potential for godhood hidden in the enfleshed nature of humanity, then we will be a true adept. For an adept is not he who sits uninterrupted for a hundred years but she who slaves day after day and can still find a reason to smile An adept is not he who, shored up in his white tower, can dream up marvelous visions of the universe; no, it is she who in the midst of blood and shit and piss and sweat, tears forth new life each day. The greatest mystics are the midwives and they bear no illusion about the traumatic nature of physicality and creation. They bear no illusion that humans are somehow better than animals. They know that it is the very thing that makes us human, these great big heads of ours, that cause women such horrifying pain, such potential for death. It's why our babies are born wriggling and squirming and defenseless and we must carry them and care for them for another year outside of the womb/ Consider how much trauma that leaves space for: the death of a child is the greatest horror of the modern world. Yet is this not a natural thing?
We have forgotten how to talk about trauma and God. We have forgotten how to understand, how to work through and grow through horror. We are obsessed with horror movies and violent TV shows and yet never more than now have we been unable to deal with our own trauma. There is spiritual growth for the woman who has lost a child and there is spiritual growth for the woman who has been raped and assaulted. Our power does not come in denying and escaping trauma, but from delving into it; from understanding the intimate ways that pleasure and pain are entirely entwined. We know this, sometimes. We know that white and dark are two sides of a coin, and one cannot exist without another. So why do we forget that it is trauma that is the condition of our joy?
It is a horror to be a fleshy thing, and it is through this horror that we find God.
