Unhealed wounds leave us vulnerable to manipulation. At their extremity, unhealed wounds are portals through which ideologues and fundamentalists (of every stripe) recruit, program, and weaponize people to serve their own agendas of dominance and control.

Healing is a pilgrimage — one that liberates all of us who undertake it and liberates the communities to which we belong.

Your healing heals your ancestors, your peers, and your descendants. When you restore your own wholeness, you heal our world, not least by making it impossible for someone else’s ideology to become your guiding star.

And yet, if you hold trauma in your body (as most of us do — we live in a world lacerated by the violence of our own species) you cannot make healing yet another demand on an already fragmented energy system without inflicting further damage.

Acceptance is the first portal to wholeness. Acceptance is a soul quality; it places you firmly in the power, presence and embrace of your soul, and the soul of the world. This is where you begin your pilgrimage to healing.

Accept all of who you are, all that you’ve experienced, all that you feel and know, all the choices and actions that have led you here. Accept the truth of things as they are, without demanding change — even as you hold, in your heart, a radiant vision of wholeness.

Let your heart break — it was made to shatter and be restored to wholeness over and over again. Know your desiccated, exhausted, traumatized, wounded personhood as a fractal of our beautiful, wounded world. Know yourself as a fractal of the Sacred, whole even in the midst of fragmentation.

Create an energy field filled with the power of radical acceptance. Place your wounded inner selves in it, gently, with all the love and care with which you’d cradle a newborn in a warm bath of purest water. Let the field of acceptance, and its multidimensional allies, enfold you.

Feel the way your body lets go, releasing tension, striving, fear, and the heightened alertness that is one of the hallmarks of held trauma. Feel your heart soften, your twisted nerves resume their organic shape.

Feel the movements of energy in your body, breath, feelings and thoughts. Feel the radiant patterns held by your soul, reorganizing your energy body back to its natural state of wholeness.

Do this as a daily practice. Do it before you need it. Do it because you have been given the immense privilege of loving and caring for all life, including your own.

Then, when you encounter the everyday violence of demagogues, you will stand as the chalice of your soul, the clear flame of truth your voice, your gift, your magic.