Traumatizing experiences often block access to our Wholeness and feeling internally resourced
On Trauma
When we grow up in a traumatizing environment, we often feel separate and alone in our experience. Ironically, we may even grow up with parents who are loving but are carrying their own generational burden of grief. It may not be a traumatizing environment at all, but the markers of past trauma may still be held in the bodies of well-intentioned parents. As children we absorb and mirror these markers of past trauma in our attachments to them.
This experience fragments us. Growing up without the resources of loving adults or a way to process what we are feeling, we reach the conclusion that “it’s all my fault” and we feel even more separate, alone, and in despair.
Trauma can leave us in an unprocessed state of shock, a state of disbelief. Shock is the body’s way of helping us survive an event, but it needs to be released and processed to have access to the deeper experience of an event. With the skills of somatic processing, we can process trauma.
The Realization Process offers a powerful, precise and effective method for releasing trauma held in our thoughts, feelings, and physical sensations deep within our body, psyche, and nervous system. By going to the source or origin of the suffering, the release is deeper and potentially permanent. Dr. Judith Blackstone created the Realization Process, a method for spiritual awakening to one’s deepest nature and undistorted identity as Consciousness.
On Transformation
What are Transformational Moments?
For some people a transformational moment is so common that it isn’t even seen as transformational. Ordinary learning becomes transformational when it changes our experience of ourselves and the world. A simple example is our childhood experience of beginning to learn to read. At first there are letters on the page. As if by magic the letters become words. By looking at the letters D then O then G, suddenly there is an understanding of the letters as the word dog, the animal dog, the image of a dog. What’s remarkable is that this “magic” can be understood and replicated, again and again, to create more learning and more transformational moments. One of the essential keys to replicating the transformational moment of learning is allowing a natural curious openness to take the lead, a sense of wonder.
Recognize and live within your transformational moments
Most of us have experienced a feeling of internal aliveness and exhilaration while watching an exciting sporting event. As observers we vicariously join in the athlete’s transformational performance. Exceptional athletes can appear to somehow move outside of time, transcending the usual constraints of gravity.
We watch basketball players who move with fluid grace and who seemingly can’t miss the hoop, gymnasts who move through space as if held by and suspended in space. We often call this the zone or flow. Moment to moment, this becomes a flowing movement. These experiences serve as a reminder that transformational moments are accessible to each of us and are a key to our fundamental happiness and wellbeing.
-
Marilyn is my friend and tennis partner, and we frequently enjoy playing doubles against people younger and stronger. She has a joyful curiosity that results in her frequently being ready with a story, and the attitude “I wonder what will happen today?”
I love the story that she tells about visiting Venice Italy in the 1960’s with her husband and young children.
It was a nasty February, and their hotel had poor heat and was cold and damp. The layout of the rooms was such that the bathroom was at the end of a long shared hallway. After teaching her children how to knit in the frigid hotel room, she was cold. So she decided she wanted a bath to get warm. Only to discover the bathtub had no faucet to fill the tub; however there was a sink next to the tub.
She went to the front desk to inquire about filling the tub, and was told the person who had the tube to connect the sink to fill the tub was not there until the next day. So she went back to her room and noticed that there was a hollow curtain rod in her room, and she remembered “ah! I have baggies and rubber bands in my suitcase!”
She then asked her children “do you want to help me fill the bathtub improvising with the curtain rod, rubber bands and baggies?” They declined. On her own, she went down the hall and rigged up a flow of hot water from the sink to the bathtub with the curtain rod, the rubber bands, and the baggies. Now she was able to have a warm bath and get warm.
Now, hearing the story ask yourself, if this were your situation, where would you likely get stuck or stopped? Would you give up? Would you yell in frustration at the person at the front desk, or your kids for not helping? Could you happily wait until the next day? I think if Marilyn hadn’t found the baggies and rubber bands, she would have adapted and waited.
Seeing our potential for agency through our transformational stories
Often our movement into transformation includes some struggle. In fact, you may find that your sense of agency is more engaged when people block you, or you have a deadline, or you must explain yourself. For other people, having these obstacles leaves them stuck or disconnected from their agency.
When someone or something in your life got in your way, what did you do?
Did you accommodate, withdraw, or concede? Did you get scared, angry or resentfully collect a grudge? Did you fall apart?
Did you get creative and adapt to find a solution to get your needs met without having to compromise the original intent of the goal?
What are some of the key stories in your life where you met and overcame obstacles, and experienced transformation?
These stories have the potential to inform and reveal how you see yourself, and how you meet the world.