Many talk about awakening and trauma these days, which is very good. It’s an important topic.
I see two broad categories in my own process.
AWAKENING AS A SAFETY VALVE (?)
One is that I suspect trauma had something to do with the initial awakening shift. It happened when I was fifteen and with a good amount of teenage angst and trauma. I suspect the awakening shift functioned as a kind of safety valve. Something had to shift, and that’s the direction it went.
I remember Douglas Harding talk about something similar. I think he said that “Douglas became unbearable” so there was a spontaneous shift into headlessness. Something similar may have happened with me.
My system may have been primed to go in that direction anyway. (At a conscious level, I was an atheist with no knowledge of or interest in it.) And the stress and psychological pressure made my system “break” so my nature recognized itself.
AWAKENING DOESN’T MAKE THE TRAUMA MAGICALLY GO AWAY
There is another side to this, and that is how awakening influences the trauma that’s here.
The short answer is that it didn’t make it magically go away.
And it did shift my relationship with it, as it shifted my relationship with everything within content of experience.
It’s easier to see it as something that happens, like anything happens. It’s an expression of life. It happens within and as the awake space that’s here, that seems fundamental to what I am.
This helps notice and explore it, relate to it in a more intentional way, and also invite in shifts and healing. It still a long process with many layers, at least in my case, and it’s not always graceful.
TRAUMA PRESENCE IN MY PROCESS
The first ten years into the oneness shift was a honeymoon. The center of gravity had shifted into Big Mind, and the human was generally more in the background. Human hangups were still there of course, and my wounds and traumas did color my human perception and life, but it was all more in the background. I did work on it – through shadow work, exploring projections, therapy and so on – although a lot seemed distant, dormant, and difficult to access.
Several years ago, I asked life (the divine) to “show me what’s left”. Within a week, an overwhelming amount of trauma surfaced in my system. For the first nine months, it was so strong I could barely function and I was lucky to get one hour of sleep a night, usually early in the morning. I would walk for hour in the forest listening to Adyashanti during this time, along with trying to work with people only who had experience in working with trauma and dark nights. What had been somewhat dormant and hidden came to the surface, and I did not always deal with it gracefully. It was a very human and humbling period. This lasted for years and it’s still here to some extent, although at a more moderate and manageable volume than before.
HOW I HAVE EXPLORED TRAUMA
I have explored trauma in a range of ways – talk therapy (limited usefulness), tonglen, Process Oriented Psychology (more interesting), dialog and parts work (Big Mind Process), inquiry (The Work of Byron Katie), sense field explorations (Kiloby Inquiries), Ho’oponopono, Tension and Trauma Release Exercises (TRE), energy work (Vortex Healing), and so on, in addition to nourishing body-centered approaches like Breema, Tai Chi, and Qigong.
These days, I seem to be drawn to a more intuitive and direct approach. I sense the contraction. Bring awareness into it. Notice it’s all as awake space (AKA the divine) taking that form. Rest in and as that noticing. Notice shifts. And so on.
Trauma sits in the whole system, is part of a network, is based in painful beliefs and underlying assumptions, is often collective and intergenerational in nature, is a part with its own experience of the world, is rooted in separation consciousness, has bodily and energetic components, has a lived component, and much more, so it makes sense to explore it in many different ways.