What came first, the trauma or the healer?

I am yet to engage with anyone that identifies as a healer of any kind who does not believe that their purpose, that their gifts were born out of the ashes of their pain.

With this in mind, and my own experience of having no choice but to learn how to breathe life back into myself, I would often ask spirit, “what came first, the chicken or the egg?”

“Am I healer because I was traumatised or did my trauma serve the function of breaking me open, waking me up to the power that lay dormant within me? Which came first?”

I have sat recounting how these voices, sensations and visions, literally saved my life and always wondered if I created the archetype of a healer out of pure survival instinct. According to Jungian psychology we all have two dominant personality archetypes, what we are, and what we present to the world. I took one of these online archetype tests and found it rather interesting that I was classified as both ‘wounded child’ and ‘wise old man.’ It was as though the former was a reflection of what the trauma I experienced had created, and the latter, who I had to become to protect that wounded child.

When I sat in a reading with a psychic medium, she introduced me to two of my spirit guides who I would realise perfectly fit the ‘wise old man’ archetype. The one was a Native American shaman and the other, an Ascended Master called Melchizedek. I was able to make the connection, that the shaman had been 'visiting' me through various experiences with hawks and eagles, while Melchizedek had first come to me through Paulo Coehlo’s ‘The Alchemist.’

As I grew a more conscious relationship with these guides, something started to feel very familiar about them. I would find myself in moments, deeply aligned with the highest parts of me that have an awareness that there is no separation, no ‘your ancestors’ and ‘my ancestors,’ that the illusory split between ‘them’ and ‘us’ serves as a means for the human mind to digest the great I AM without completely floating off into space or being committed into a mental asylum. Sitting with these downloads on how we are mosaic pieces of the same glorious picture, all of us, various expressions, echoes, ripples of this single spark of consciousness, it dawned on me that my spirit guides, were me. They were projections of aspects of myself, guiding myself, back to myself. They were my higher-self leaving me a map to find my way home.

So again, I would ask spirit, “did the trauma make the healer or did the healer precede the trauma?” Spirit’s response was non-committal, always leading me in the direction that concluded, both conversations are always taking place at once.

They said, “Your trauma did birth you as a healer AND you were born a healer. Don’t worry, you’ll start to understand soon enough.”

And soon enough, I watched the movie ‘Tenet,’ written and directed by the hierophant, Christopher Nolan. This movie would put into perspective why spirit held that both realities are true, by grappling with the concept of destiny.

Everything that has happened, has happened.

Though we have free will and should not resign ourselves to being swept away by the waters of life without being agents of our own experiences, it’s already happened. But happened in a sense that we’ve made it happen, with our reactions, the quirks of our personalities, our nurturing as well as all that we perceive to be unbalanced in our worlds and the fire this lights under us. We have made it happen simply by BEING, by becoming what we are.

Seeing that I now had a handle on these simultaneously existing realities of a pre-destined life and a life made up of a chain of events that could go in multiple directions, spirit said to me…

“You were destined to be a healer but if that big traumatic event did not take place, you would’ve been an architect. Had your antagonist ‘been’ something else, you would have been set on a whole different path.”

“But, what had happened, had happened.”

“He became what he is and you would become what you are.”

“A healer.”