Why “Musa the Wild”?

Finding the true narrative that heals...

I was born on Easter morning in the middle of Africa. My dad was set to preach; they weren’t quite planning on me coming that day. Childbirth is not an easy thing to arrange for from what I understand. My life was wild from the beginning. My parents were exploring going onto the mission field and were living in Kenya where my mother also grew up. She would become a third-generation missionary, which is quite a legacy. Her dad's parents were also missionaries, and she was raised in the bush in Kenya. Her grandparents had been missionaries in China but were kicked out in the 1950’s as communism took over.

Being born in Africa, and my mother's deep connection to Kenya, prompted my parents to give me a Kenyan middle name, Musa, which is Swahili for Moses. As my dad tells it, “There was a young man who worked with Kuka and Nyanya (my mom's parents, Kuka and Nyanya are Swahili for grandfather and grandmother) in Nairobi whose name was Alfonso Musa. He was amazing, kind, honest, humble, and hardworking. He sincerely loved his wife and children, treating them with much love, which was unusual in Kenya. When your Mom and I lived with your grandparents in Kenya, we became friends with him, his wife, and two little girls. He was a man of unusual character. So as your Mom and I discussed names for you, that friendship and his exemplary love stood out. It would remind us all of our love for Africa..”

Like all of us, where we grow up profoundly impacts our perspective and worldview. I spent most of my childhood in Kenya and Uganda, returning to the U.S. at 17 for college. My deep roots in Africa shaped who I am.

The “wild” part is a longer story that intersects with the purpose of this blog, which is to explore how to live a life at the intersection of faith and healing and find where they align. It is to explore God's purpose for us here on earth, which I believe is to show us love, through a process of healing for which we were designed.

Humans are storied creatures. Our minds work through narrative, and stories are how we make sense of the world. Neurologists have found that when we are given a story with gaps in it and then we are asked to retell it, we will fill in the gaps without noticing what we are doing. It’s a natural process in our brains, part of our design.

I’m sure most of you have seen memes that misspell words, or only give part of the spelling and ask you to see if you can understand what is being said, and maybe you’ve been surprised to see how easy it is to read those lines with missing letters or words and understand them. That's the power of our narrative minds.

Over the last few years, I have reclaimed the word “wild” for myself. This is key as I heal. You see we are each given a narrative about ourselves that we don’t get to choose. Our narrative is shaped by our parents, culture, and our environment, all outside of our control. It’s based on many other factors as well; like our personality, the beliefs (religious or otherwise) that our caregivers embody, and maybe most importantly what we experience. I was called a wild child, not only by my immediate family but by my extended family as well, even those who lived far away on other continents. The label was so prevalent that even at 45, my cousin whom I haven't seen or talked to in more than 10 years, who is 8 years younger than me, and who has a mischievous two-year-old turns to his older sister and says, “I hope we don’t have a little Daniel on our hands”…. The reach of these narratives is astonishing and shows the pervasive power of the stories told about us.

Wild, rebellious, troublemaker, and out of control were all words used to describe me. Even after all the work I’ve done, it is painful for me to write this out, because they missed me and missed seeing who I was. By giving me these labels, they failed to see me and that kind of pain is something a child is unable to bear. It becomes overwhelming and traumatic in our lives. In essence, we are forced to believe something untrue about ourselves, so we grow distant from ourselves and who God made us to be to belong in our families of origin. Another way to say this is that we unconsciously hide the truest parts of who we are deep inside us so they can be protected to emerge at another time.

Belonging is a hugely important concept because belonging is one of our basic human needs. We can’t survive without it and we aren’t able to turn that base need off. As Dr Dan Siegel, famous for his work in interpersonal neurobiology says, “We are hard-wired for belonging.” Much of the “wiring” in our brains can change and move, which is called neuroplasticity. Belonging and survival are however hard wired into the fabric of our being, without belonging we will die. To survive as children, we must belong, and to belong we must adapt to the environment we grow up in. This adaptation means adopting, believing, and living out the narrative that we are each given as children. This isn’t a conscious choice, this is a biological process that happens naturally. It forms us, our belief systems, and how we live. At least until we are old enough and wise enough to see.

I have come to understand this as a beautiful and amazing process, designed by a God of love. I’ll go into that further and deeper later. I want you to know that this process we are designed for and don’t have a choice in, is a powerful system that I believe is intended to let us heal and grow into love, joy, delight, peace, and happiness, becoming the very person that we were designed to be.

Let’s circle back to narrative and its impact. We adapt to survive, which is also a powerful, uniquely human trait. Animals can adapt in small ways, but adaptation in this way is a purely human trait. We can survive in any environment on earth. We can endure the most horrific atrocities, be born with monumental defects, and still survive and even thrive. To survive, we take on the narrative of our childhood and live out that narrative until something happens, a transformation begins to happen. For most of us, that comes somewhere around our forties-sixties, when we finally have enough safety and stability in our lives to begin, when we have enough failure and juxtaposition to know things we couldn’t have known before, and when we start to lose the incredible energy of youth, which is required to carry any false or untrue narrative. The process of healing can start much earlier, however, depending on the lives we have lived.

By design, who we are meant to be wants to come out and be set free. All the pain that we have endured from having to live outside of who we are or from the abuses endured takes even more energy to suppress. It takes a tremendous amount of energy to keep pushing down our sadness, pain, anger, fear, and grief. It becomes all-consuming the older we get because it’s stacked and stacked and stacked, like water rising behind a dam. As we continue to grow and understand more of who we are, we create little cracks in the dam, which takes more energy to hold back. At some point, the dam breaking becomes inevitable, or we double and triple down on self-contempt, shame, and the beliefs that shore up the walls of the dam.

Many call this a midlife crisis; others call it the midpoint of two halves of life. Either way, it is the beginning of living in a new way. Many wise men and women have written profound words about this stage of life. Richard Rohr is one of my favorites. His books helped and guided me as my dam started to fall break. He says that transformation takes place through either great love or great suffering. He explores this concept in beautiful ways in his book, The Naked Now (you can order it by clicking on the link here, if you do it through my link it pays me a small commission, which I greatly appreciate).

Great love happens when someone or a group loves you so much that they guide you into transformation, gently and tenderly walking with you as you journey towards love. Great suffering is when something happens, a death, an accident, a loss of a job, or something that causes deep pain in your life, and you are forced to begin to transform because what you did before no longer works, you can’t hold the walls of the dam back and so you adapt and begin to transform.

For now, let me say that the path of transformation is filled with pain regardless of whether it comes through great love or great suffering. Learning to embrace pain is a critical part of learning to heal, instead of running from it, continuing to stuff it behind the walls of our dam, and spending all our energy shoring up those walls. When we learn to embrace pain, we gain some freedom and space to heal. In other words, we move from a life in survival mode to a life of healing, living out of who we were made to be with meaning and purpose.

That is the crux of my work with my coaching clients.

Musa the Wild is me, Daniel Musa Herron, reclaiming the truth about me. Telling the true narrative of my childhood, instead of living trapped in the narrative that I was given. This allows me to tell the truth about myself and who I am, to write a more honest narrative of my life.

There is a wildness to me, but it's not what my parents or environment thought it was. I'm not rebellious, I am ever questioning. I'm not out of control, I'm hypersensitive, which isn’t a fault it's just the truth. It means I feel deeply, it means I have misophonia, it means that as a child everyday life was often harder for me than it was for others because I was feeling so much that it frequently overwhelmed me. I acted out to get relief from the overwhelm. My parents, through no fault of their own, had no idea what was happening. Words like hypersensitive, and misophonia didn’t even exist or barely existed at that point.

Claiming myself as wild is reclaiming the most misunderstood and misrepresented pieces of me. Notice those words both begin with the word miss. I was missed, unseen, and unheard. So many of us are. However, I am one of the lucky ones. While I was missed I was still loved, and my parents worked hard to love me. That's not true of blatantly abusive environments where the parents are trapped in their trauma and living it out on their children. I know and have worked with so many people whose parents were physically, emotionally, sexually, and verbally abusive in horrific ways. And some of those were purposeful and organized in their abuse of their children.

The beautiful thing is that God designed us to heal. My PT said to me just today as I’m struggling to recover from Vestibular Neuritis, “Stay positive and trust in your body's ability to heal.” He reminds me of what I already believe so strongly. God has designed us to heal, the great physician, and all our lives we will feel a gentle pull in the direction of healing. We can resist for a while. However, if you are reading this blog, chances are you are already on your way. I hope to encourage you and me to keep going. The road is not easy and yet it is well worth the journey. Writing for me, helps me to heal, to work out my thoughts and feelings, and to release old hurts and pain.

So I claim Musa the Wild as my mantra for healing. I am a man who loves the wilderness, the wild places, the hard and painful places, and journeying with people through those wild places.

I wonder what you would reclaim in your life?

I’m grateful for any of you who choose to journey with me, it's a gift to me, and I hope my words can be a gift back to you at times. Subscribing and sharing both help me immensely.

Warmly,

Musa The Wild