In this time humanity can be compared to a man cornered up, back against the wall. The choice is between solidifying old walls of defence and re-create old trauma or go deeper to feel and let go of repressed pain. Pain he was unable to feel when it happened.
So what happened? In this text we will dive into this question.
If you have the courage.
The intention is to shed light on and put the current situation into perspective, and in this way broaden options for action, avoid unnecessary re-traumatization and not least: Open us up for all the good that are coming. Like at the dentist the road is through feeling the pain.
Probably a big relieving sigh will be heard, when the pain is relieved and the world presents itself in a completely new light. The light is there. The world is here. The task at hand is to take life in – fully. So lets do this 🙂
However, a precise diagnosis is needed for healing to take place. You will be the judge, whether this text qualifies to do this. For me it feels quite good in the stomach. And we need to reaquaint ourselves with the intelligence and will placed there. The instinct is there and protects us against danger – when we listen to it – and make sure that the wise cycle in nature is honored.
When a child is being born, a completely new quality appears in the world, which this specific child brings. An opportunity for healing. A child connected to its instincts will change the system it is a part of. Change it from the inside out with the strength of the sprout that cracks hardened cement. The cement will attempt to keep the familiar form, and apparantly often succeeds in suppressing new qualities. And yes, on the surface this is the case. However, behind and beneath the seemingly solid walls in the system, the new is molded, weaved and shaped. Until the membrane is pierced and the new breaks through.
Always as a blessing.
Always as a joy.
Culture is not your friend
From Gabor Mate, who is an important source of inspiration for many people who work with trauma release, we hear that ‘in this culture something really powerful happens to alienate you from your true self, because the world could not stand who you really were‘.
This is a quite bold statement from the friendly elderly man. What we will see is that it is spot on.
‘Culture is not your friend‘ is the – a bit more mild – expression, used by Terence McKenna. What is going on? .. with significance for our common good, children and future. To put it mildly.
This journey of healing which you are here invited to partake in, starts with a premise that takes a certain kind of maturity to accept. Namely that the consciousness currently reading (and writing) this text is traumatized. Deeply traumatized.
Maybe you think that this does pertain to you. That other people can have deep soul wounds, but that you are healed to such an extent that you would at least know if you were traumatized. Leonardo DiCaprio in Shutter Island also felt that he had his ‘shit together’, but was that the case?
That we all without exception, have experienced a trauma that have caused us to be alienated from ourselves, nature, our work and other people, might seem like an exaggeration.
It is not an exaggeration.
Piously, the explorer of myths world wide Joseph Campbell, points to the fact that people is living inauthentic lives as the root cause of the sufferings we experience on the planet today.
Inauthentic means that we do not live in full accordance with who we are. We are missing the mark slightly. The hebrew word ‘hata’ for sin, means to miss the mark, to go off the path. Sin is not that we are stealing cookies and deserve punishment, it refers to a state of being that creates disorder in cosmos. Disharmony in the world. Suffering in the world. Could that be the case?
Yes.
To miss the mark
A text written on a leather scroll, marked by wind, weather and sand, appeared in 1945 in the desert close to Nag Hammadi. Some of the text was:
In the beginning you knew
Then you pretended to forget
Then you forgot you pretended to forget
Then you forgot you pretended.
… and hidden in the last of these lines (if we dare to look, and we do here), there is a hint of a significant shift. A shift where the voice of the world resounds more clearly than your own inner voice. This, apparant subtle, shift is deep and traumatic: Something in us give up and joins the choir of the wolves, which seems to be too overwhelming.
The traumatized consciousness reads this, and carefully considers if this could be the case, and after careful consideration maybe arrives at the conclusion that, yes that sounds reasonable.
The healed consciousness roars.
Deeply.
Maybe as deep as the theologian Lars Bo Bojesen did in his book ’Dæmoni og mening’ (The Demonic and the Meaningful), where he writes that yes indeed there is a meaning, and meaning arises on the terms of the demonic. On the terms of separation.
After the separation, after the trauma, the world is experienced quite differently. Dissociation steps in. Disorder in cosmos steps in. How did you experience the world as a child? Few adults remember: It is like a faint dream from a time long ago.
Dissociation is a way to deal with the unbearable. A fantasy world is created and used for shelter, while the separated part of the consciousness is tied up in the traumatic event. The ability to be present with the world, yourself and the surroundings are lost. Where there before the trauma were a unity between realization (knowing), identity, memory, perception and will, there is a separation between these after the trauma. They operate separately. The consciousness becomes fragmented.
Listening to the traumatized voice
A friend of mine lost his twin brother, who committed suicide. After the suicide of his brother, he himself had been on the verge to follow in the footsteps of his brother. However, he kept his faith and his light, despite the trauma he had experienced and keep his faith and the light to this day.
One of the first times I met him, he was sitting on the backseat of a car talking in a – what seemed to me to be – disorganized and confused manner. One moment he was talking about a movie he had seen, while the next moment talking about ancient scrolls. My focus was on the conversation I had with the woman driving the car. We had been on a prelonged weekend diving into astrology, chakras and other esoteric subjects, so we had plenty to talk about.
While I talk to her, he continues to talk about this and that from the back seat, and in a way it seemed harmonic, like the wind outside the car seemed harmonic and not disturbing for the conversation I perceived was going on between me and the woman driving.
Suddenly she tells me ‘this one is for you‘.
My rational mind instantly created the thought of what the heck she meant by that sentence!? But in the same moment I understood that she was referring to what my friend was talking about from the back seat. She had been listening to him in another way than I had done. What he said now was for me without him being conscious of it. She understood that he was channeling and could make me aware of this fact. Something clicked in me in a deeper way, as I now listened to him, so whether his channeling was from his own soul or from somewhere else, there was healing in the proces.
The experience in the car can be seen as an image for the conscious self, the intuition and the traumatized consciousness, driving a car together. We need each other.
And like the dynamics changed between the three of us on that car ride, likewise the dynamics in our common car is about to shift. This is not without challenges however, as the man on the back seat is not being listened to. Why? Because it opens to something that we have placed a heavy lid on.
Trauma of separation
I received a gift that day, from my friend on the back seat who was talking about this and that in a disorganized manner. The gift of listening. Deeply. A gift that helped me to break the habitual suppression of who I really am.
The same has the 89-year old writer and former spokesperson of the danish organization that help children, Per Schultz Jørgensen, done. Given gifts. Through a long life his work has contributed to improve the conditions for children in danish homes. Recently he shared in an interview about an experience he had when he was 10 years old, where men in uniforms knocked on the door and took his father with them. The father was escorted to a concentration camp in Germany.
That experience could have had the consequence that he suddenly believed that “the world is stronger than my father”. That something “out there” was stronger than the safety he felt in his own home. Such a belief could have the consequence that he would “give up” and do what the world told him to do, because “nothing matters anyway”.
The opposite happened.
The experience molded him, and the seed for the belief that it always matters to fight for the good found a fertile ground in him.
The mother gathered the six children and made it clear with her words and actions that they would not be broken. They would hold their ground. It was not easy, but it was worth everything. The belief that things would turn out well, also in hard times, became a deeper part of their identity.
A belief, a conviction, means something to the extent that you believe in it. Examples are ‘everything will eventually turn out well’ or ‘the world is stronger than my father’.
It matters what we choose to believe in.
So what if we believe that there is something stronger than love? What is the consequence of this? One consequence is that we in some situations choose what is not kind, but what we attribute to be more valuable than the kind and loving. For instance it could be to force a child to sit still while eating (because the child is scared) or force shoes on the child, when it would rather run around in bare feets.
Beliefs are connected to culture. A kindergarden can have a culture that gives a shrug with the shoulders if the children take off their shoes and run around in bare feets, in another kindergarden it might mean that the child is being punished. The culture in the kindergarden, like in the home is forming the child, and if the child at some point automatically puts on shoes even though the body is telling that it would rather run around in bare feets then “the world” have gained a foothold. A foothold that with the perseverance and eagerness of the one struck by fear will continue to expand its influence, because “the world can not stand who we really are” to use the words of Gabor Mate.
The world is here understood as the inherited beliefs about how things should be. A belief that is unable to gain a foothold in a child in contact with its own body and instincts, so something needs to be done seen from the perspective of the world, because what this world fears most of all is the child connected to its natural instincts. The contact to nature reveals the emperor for what he really is: He does not have any clothes on. And this mirror the emperor will do anything to avoid taking a look in.
What happens if we follow the IDEA instead of what we FEEL?
So what about the parent who has the opinion that the child is not allowed to play on the freeway? Is that opinion also based upon fear? Here it is necessary to distinguish between our idea of the world, and what we feel about the world.
Is it the idea about what is right, that makes doctors cut the umbilical cord shortly after birth and in this way hinder the child to obtain important stem cells from the placenta? Or do they do it because they feel it is the right thing to do?
Is it the idea about what is right, that makes the man in a uniform tell the mother that she is not allowed to breast feed her baby in public? Or is the restriction given because he feels it is the right thing to do?
Is it the idea about what is right, that makes parents deliver children to institutions before the children are ready to let go of the mother and out of their own initiative go out and explore the world? Or do they do it because they feel it is the right thing to do?
Is it the idea about what is right, that makes adults keep children in school systems where they must sit in line, do exactly as they are told and obey a bell? Where the focus is more on making the child ready for school than making the institution ready for children. Or do they do it because they feel it is the right thing to do?
Is it the idea about what is right, that makes adults punish children physically or verbally, when they do not do as they are told? Punishment where the verbal scolding is often experienced as much worse than the physical. Or do they punish the children because they feel it is the right thing to do?
Is it the idea about what is right, that makes parents tell their children that they can not play on the freeway? Or do they do it because they feel it is the right thing to do?
In none of the examples above, except the latter, do the adult feel that it is the right thing to do. Their arms, legs and voice are animated by the idea about what is right, and in the moment of the deed dissociation is experienced. They can not feel their body and do not have normal contact to sensory perception, because if they had they would emphatically feel that their behaviour is wrong. They are seized by the trauma. A trauma that they themselves experienced as a child and are now on the verge of passing on to the next generation.
Traum – Dream
Trauma is via the german word ‘traum’ connected to dream. When reality becomes unbearable we create (or buy into) false beliefs about the world, which means that the world is not experienced as it is (that is too painful) but via the rose colored glasses we are wearing. A dreamstate begins.
The price for wearing the rose colored glasses is the opposite side of the coin: A constant work to hold on to what in the beginning is floating timber in a turbulent sea, and then – after years of work – a more and more solid raft of convictions about what the world is. And is not.
In this field of tension the ego is created. The pearl spoken about by all wisdom traditions. The odyssé worth it all. God awakening in creation.
The ego is not the neurotic raft, where rules and regulations about the world by all means must be followed otherwise ‘all hell will break loose’. And the ego is neither the rose colored glasses shunning away from the realities of life, because they are too painful to feel fully. The ego is conscious about both of these extremes and moves between them.
Whether the birth of the ego is pleasurable, tough, painful or easy depends on the perspective. But in any case it is intense. Like life.
Do we feel a resounding YES towards this birth? Are we willingly moving into new territory? Or do we prefer the darkness and regress into a wellknown – and lifeless – condition?
When a child is born, connection to a deeper will is established than the mother have known so far. If the woman giving birth, have had a disney princess identity, then this disney princess ‘dies’ during child birth and the archaic primeval woman awakens in the process of giving birth. The child AND the mother is born. Nothing is lost – everything is transformed. A transformation which may not always go as intended, but is always healed in time.
In the greater cycle, where we in the Kabbalah tradition hear about the ‘cosmic catastrophe’ and where the gnostics speaks about ‘the fall of Sophia’ and the path of healing – odyssĂ© – this initiated, deep healing are (finally) blooming from inside. And in this process the hardened cement breaks open.
The cosmos is giving birth, transforming and in a state of pregnancy. All the time and everywhere. All of us is a part of cosmos. The brand new is being born all the time.
Just like the princess-identity during childbirth can whisper to the woman, that this is way too much and way beyond what we can handle and give in to resignation, depression, medicine, surgery, regression, then there is a similar temptation for men, when the inner birth is about to start: To resign into the seemingly safety of the uniform. An inner uniform that can manifest as an outer uniform knocking on the door.
But there is also the other voice we can listen to. Where the princess becomes a woman. And the boy in the protective uniform becomes a man.
And this is where magic arises.
This is where miracles are born.
Joyfull will,
Johan Tino
Spicy Chocolate 