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What The Soul Needs
We live in a wounded culture.
Robert Johnson claims that our secular culture has a poor relation to Dionysus, the god who teaches us how to transcend the rational. By day and during the week we carefully erect an Apollonic structure around ourselves that by night and during the weekend we feel compelled to tear down. But we are so far removed from Dionysus, his rituals, strategies, ceremonies and arts, that we do not know how to conduct this transcendence in a positive or transformative way. Instead we turn to the lesser rituals of the drunken Bacchus, or what Johnson calls ‘low grade Dionysus’.
— David Tacey, Edge of the Sacred
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“Everybody needs beauty as well as bread, places to play in and pray in, where nature may heal and give strength to body and soul”
— John Muir
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With practice, we can see that our wounded child is not only us.
Our wounded child may represent several generations.
Our mother may have suffered throughout her life. Our father may have suffered. Perhaps our parents weren’t able to look after the wounded child in themselves.
So when we’re embracing the wounded child in us, we are embracing all the wounded children in our past generations. This practice is not a…
