Next month I'm honored to be a part of an amazing international healing summit Healing Ourselves, Healing
Our World. Interviews with 17 healers, writers, artists and pioneers explore how to heal and support the healing of our world.
I am seeing so much trauma in my healing practice—everything from responses to long-ago events to current collective suffering—that I've decided to share a few of my
thoughts with you this month. Transmuting—changing the nature of—personal and collective trauma is a complex process, and is essential as we try to heal, dream new dreams, and create a world we want to live
in.
Transmuting Personal and Collective Trauma
Trauma is a self-protective, internal process that happens in response to experiences of abuse, danger, or addiction. The deepest pain is mute, and can result in feelings of emptiness, detachment, grief, and chronic illness. When trauma is severe, people may dissociate or split off parts of themselves. This process protects you in the moment, but if you don’t take care of it, your compromised functioning perpetuates the wounding and misadaptation, which spirals out to all your relationships. You cannot be present.
Collective trauma, which is unfortunately building in our fractured world, magnifies the effects of personal trauma to affect whole communities and countries. Big scars from pandemics, racism, ancestral experience, multigenerational legacies, genocide, war, forced migration, and
colonialism challenge our collective ability to end reactivity, integrate the wisdom, and acknowledge how hurt the world is. When the past is undigested and imprinted without being seen, the results are separation, fragmentation, blame, and rigid thinking. Our hearts don’t have a chance.
However, we can heal personal and collective trauma. By coming back to ourselves and slowing down with breath, we can make a choice to be in this moment. By replacing the triggering image or experience with different
images and experiences, we can shift our attention back to the present. By feeling heard and held—relational experiences—we can let go of feelings of scarcity and not enough, shame and grandiosity, inferiority and superiority. The power of me-feeling-you-feeling-me helps us experience the relationship that transmutes the pain. When we can truly experience that “I am another yourself,” the Mayan saying, transmutation can begin.
Shifting Your Consciousness
All the links you find here are focused on the many threads of consciousness-shifting. Besides my book, online courses, blog, YouTube and personal sessions with me, you'll find many exciting inquiries and ways to learn from others below. Enjoy!
