Trauma, injury, illness and waking up

It’s strange how it works, or maybe it’s not, but trauma, injury and illness can truly be passageways to waking up and it’s not generally appreciated at all in western medicine which seeks to suppress everything and thus stop that process. Tragic really.

Illness/trauma etc as initiation and/or passageway to waking up is also not appreciated by most spiritual communities (fundamentalists to new age, really) who like to project the idea that illness is a sort of moral and/or spiritual failing. Given our bodies will all die one day this view is inherently ludicrous. Our bodies are imminently temporary. What enlivens them is another matter altogether it seems. Consciousness and awareness are perpetually in the now, young, fresh and alive.

It seems that most illness is embodied, non-felt/un-processed emotion (complicated by a whole lot of other things – remember EVERYTHING MATTERS. That includes that which we are born with…transmitted via epigenetics. Epigenetic imprints of trauma that was never met by our parents and their parents and their parents. It might also be called Generational Trauma. It also includes the current state of our sad world and planet. It’s quite reasonable to be distressed about the human species and what is happening here and now. We’ve got a lot of work cut out for us. Being balanced in this world simply doesn’t always make a lot of sense.

I never tire of the succinct and brilliant quote by Jiddu Krishnamurti: “It is no measure of health to be well adjusted to a profoundly sick society.”  

Recently “God” on twitter said the same thing a little differently (I suspect he stole the idea from Krishnamurti — I quite liked the variation, in any case!)😍 :

It is useless for a society to blame a person’s “mental health issues” when that society itself is insane.

— God (@TheTweetOfGod) February 14, 2018

 So yeah, we might think twice about who we’re calling mentally ill. We live in a double-speak world as we catapult ever more deeply in that direction. Coming to peace means moving through a lot of muck.

For us to heal we must meet our own trauma, our society’s trauma and that of our ancestors too. Shamanism has always understood this which is why being in touch with the ancestors is so important in Shamanic systems. They are in our bodies/our DNA. We are in touch with all humanity from the beginning of time in this way. Finding ways to engage in community and community building is, thus, also key and another difficult hurdle to contemplate while moving towards changes.

Healing doesn’t mean always mean curing. Our bodies cannot always heal completely and that is never a failure. We do the best with what we’ve got. We can grow even as our bodies remain challenged. Moving through trauma and that process might be called Post Traumatic Growth. That has been my experience even while I am still hurting in many ways, sometimes badly.  Mercy and compassion for ourselves as we move through the process is very important. When we can truly love and accept ourselves everything eases even while perhaps our bodies remain challenged in sometimes very significant ways.  See: Loving-Kindness Meditation

Healing from trauma as well as the waking up process, in general, is often experienced as an unlayering process too, so as things change in our bodies and psyches so does what makes sense to us in terms of healing. Learning to trust and surrender to the changes and moving with the flow works for me. I’ve talked about “mindfulness in trauma flow.”

We thought we could cure everything, but it turns out that we can cure only a small amount of human suffering. The rest of it needs to be healed and that’s different. – Rachel Naomi Remen

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