I ask because increasingly more people have been reaching out, talking to me about their emotional pain, because they feel the world is at a critical juncture, making more visible the need for addressing the root causes of ancestral and collective trauma.
For them, healing trauma has never been more urgent.
If this is you, I have a message for you:
You are the embodiment of the self-healing mechanism of humanity.
Consider this:
When you sit with someone, maybe to have coffee, you share your inner experience of life, and so does the other person. Through this relating, you come together to a synchronic space, where you listen to and feel each other.
You have an inner rhythm which you share with that other when relating. Together, you create a rhythm of your own: you speak, you listen, you give, you receive, you contribute to each other.
When we share from the parts we have made aware in ourselves, the parts we feel alive, this rhythm flows harmoniously.
When we share from the parts where we feel numb or hyperactivated, then the flow is replaced with disruption; the flow gets interrupted and the numbness or hyperactivation takes over.
When the flow gets interrupted, we feel isolated or reactive, distant, misunderstood. This interruption of the flow highlights where we feel disembodied, where we have experienced and stored past trauma.
Trauma can be experienced directly, through an individual event. It can also be experienced indirectly, when we inherit it from our ancestors or when we pick it up from the collective we belong to.
When this disruption in the flow happens, we are not able to participate in relational space anymore. We stop seeing each other and start projecting from our trauma instead; we don’t respond, we react.
What to do?
Meditation can help you focus on the sensations in your body. As little as 15 minutes twice a day focusing on your posture, your breath, where you feel tension, the sense of the chair you are sitting on, can make a difference.
1:1 work can help you focus on your emotions and learn from their natural changes throughout your emotional experiences: shame, anger, sadness, joy, love. Where do they inhabit your body? Or numbness, how is it for you?
Both meditation and 1:1 work can help you look at the state of your mind: is it busy? Is it calm? Does it feel open and expanded, or tight and caught in repetitive patterns? Is it spacious or crowded?
Focusing on how the awareness of feeling your-Self feels, for you, is also an important step: how conscious are you of thinking your thoughts, feeling your emotions, sensing your body, witnessing your-Self through your inner space?
Regular exercise can help your nervous system restore balance by burning off adrenaline and releasing endorphins through movement.
Developing healthy nutritious habits –prioritizing healthy foods and limiting inflammatory ones, supplementing with vitamins and minerals, replenishing with healthy gut bacteria, and reducing stress– can be a game changer when healing from trauma.
And also, energy healing can help you release blockages in each layer and speed up natural homeostasis.
If you are new to my Trauma Healing integrative work, this understanding may be useful for you:
When you experience your thoughts, emotions, body, and presence, you are experiencing inner coherence. As these flow, you can inhabit a unified space within, and consequently in the world around you.
Unintegrated trauma, when triggered, takes us away from inner coherence and into inner fragmentation or dissociation, where synchronized perception and awareness is not possible.
That is why actively listening and consciously responding becomes so difficult, why we become reactive.
Part of Trauma Healing includes observing the shadowy inner landscape you have created, usually in order to survive a very difficult event, where resulting beliefs that may be hindering your development and experience of life as is have been installed.
It is important we do this observation process because when trauma happened, you shut down part of your mind, your emotions, and your body as you activated your survival mechanisms.
Staying dissociated has a positive purpose: because it helped you adapt to the situation and got you here, you set that place as your baseline.
By integrating traumatic experiences, you will be able to reset that baseline and stand in a different position: one of understanding, where body-mind-emotions-spirit are aligned and working in coherence while flowing through your nervous system to bring about inner experiences of freedom, happiness, and joy.
This is how you change your world around you: by changing the understanding you have of it.
This is what you came here to do, in your own, unique way –the more you heal and integrate trauma, the more positive the impact you will make in your environment.
You are an important part of us, we all need you.
~ Luciana Stiglich.
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