Even if our primary interest is in spiritual transformation – enlightenment, awakening, union with the Divine, realizing our True Nature – there’s a direct link between spiritual, trans-personal realization and the path of personal healing.These are not two things. They are two currents in the human body and psyche which interweave, interpenetrate, and twirl together.The latter involves an embodied tending to the wounds around love, which are relational and go to the very core of our sense of self. They manifest in a variety of ways, as forms of soul-betrayal, including attachment and narcissistic injury, profound failures in empathy, and the tragedies of an inadequate holding environment.These wounds are carried by the orphans of psyche and soma, a group of pieces of soul who have become crystallized in the time machine that trauma is, tucked away in limbic and bodily circuitry, stored in implicit memory, outside the reach of our clear, cognitive insights and discoveries, as well as many of our spiritual experiences and realizations.They’re just not all that moved by those. They’re not impressed by our fantasies of sustained transcendent awareness, the rising above our embodied vulnerability, and capacity to wiggle into some spiritual state.They long and spin and twirl for something more tactile, more embodied, a meeting in the Heart – to be contacted, heard, held, and for fields of safety through which they are able to return Home.From within the psychic and somatic underworld, they surge from time to time – especially in the context of our relationships – not to harm or take us down; not as obstacles to our path, but as emissaries of the very path itself. As its representatives.If we attend only to the part of us that’s Pure Spirit or Pure Awareness, which is tempting, there’s a way that aspects of our embodied humanity, our relational nature, and the lost ones are denied entry into the temple.Instead, they are banished into the shadow, a temporary holding place from where they ache, burn, and grieve, as they make their attempt to reach out once again.They’re relentless in that way and never really give up, seeking us out in whatever way they can: through our dreams and waking fantasies, unexplainable physical symptoms, unexpected moods, irrational reactions, and through the ever-creative manifestations of the “Other,” as seen and unseen allies of integration.