Healing the Spirits of Trauma

http://www.sbbh.net/?page_id=56

Dr Kharitidi is a Board Certified psychiatrist with a general practice of psychiatry and a specialty in working with and treating trauma. She has written many books on ancient and non-traditional methods of healing and personal growth and uses her extensive knowledge of alternative teachings and traditions in her practice of traditional western psychiatry. Regarding the nature of trauma as transformation and development, she has written, "Ancient cultures understood that human life is a journey with inherent transitions that are innately traumatic, and need to be managed."

She earned her medical degree at the Novosibirsk State Medical Institute in Russia and performed her psychiatric residency at the HCMC-Regions Psychiatry Training Program in Minneapolis, Minnesota. While practicing psychiatry in a number of traditional inpatient and outpatient settings in Russia and the United States, she has lectured and consulted internationally on a broad range of subjects, including the evolution of the human mind, the nature of subjective experiences, the reality of personal choice and its effect on the environment, and the healing of trauma and its aftermath. In addition to her practice of psychiatry and her many related interests, she is the founder of Cliffhouse Publications.

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Master of Lucid Dreams said:

I didn't have any expectations. I was just sitting there, looking at the fire, which soon became the focus of my vision. Only Sulema's face on another side of the fire was still visible to me. I heard her saying, "We love storytelling here. Can you tell me a story now? Tell me the most puzzling story you know." I thought Sulema asked me that just to help me feel comfortable, and I was grateful to her for that.

"Now?"

"Sure, why not?"

I thought about her suggestion for a while, and then suddenly the story of Hamlet, a story that had been puzzling me since high school, came suddenly to my mind.
"All right, I know such a story. It has been puzzling me for years since I never was able to find any final, complete, and unambiguous meaning to it. This story happened long ago.

"There was a prince who lived in a faraway land. His father had died recently. His mother married his uncle and the uncle became the king, and the prince lived in his kingdom. He wasn't a particularly sad prince and he wasn't particularly lonely. He definitely wasn't mad, until one day when everything changed and the prince began to change.

"That day, or more exactly that night, he met the ghost of his dead father, who told him a story of how the reign¬ing king, his own brother, poisoned him to death to get the kingdom and the queen. His father's ghost demanded revenge, and there was no more peace left for the prince after he learned that story.

"He invented a clever trick: he invited wandering actors to perform for the king and the queen with a play the prince created himself. The play was the story of his father's murder, played out by actors before the prince's mother and his uncle. He saw the proof of guilt in their faces as they watched the play, and then he became truly mad."

"He was killed, right? The prince is killed at the end of the story, right?" Sulema interrupted me without waiting for me to finish.

"Actually yes, he was. You know the story?"

"That ghost killed him, the ghost of his father." "Actually, no . . ."

"Actually, yes. He started to play by the rules of the ghost. He let the spirit of trauma in, into himself; he allowed the demon to invade his memory with the hurt of his father's death and to become a part of himself. He started acting from the spirit's command, so he had to be killed. He didn't become mad, as you say. He was just fighting the spirit of trauma. He lost, I guess. He didn't have any wife, did he?"

"No. But he had a fiancée with whom he was very tender at first, but then she killed herself because of his rudeness and madness."

"Whoa! Were there more dead people in this story?" "Actually, yes. The bride's father and . . ."

"Oh! A really hungry ghost he was, that father look-alike. That was a good story. The one who wrote it knew about the battle."

Sulema grew silent and her squinting eyes looked straight at me through the fire as if she was seeing through me. I saw her kind smile through the flames until they rose up again and her face became hidden behind the fire.

I started to feel how my bodily sensations changed. It felt as if some invisible power penetrated my tensed muscles and untied the old painful knots stored in them. Along with that, I felt my memory was liberating and changing itself into the same substance of which dreams are made, and soon a stream of images was flowing through my mind. They flowed in abundance, but there was no chaos to it; they were all connected by an invisible, profound order and my perception followed this.

The fire kept moving slightly, but its shape now was perfectly round as if the sun, by a miracle, were burning in front of me in a duplicate of itself. I stared at it for a while, until everything turned red, and the sun disk became black. I closed my eyes and felt how this little sun in front of me was pulsating and approaching me. I tried to stay still, very, very still, until I heard the noise, like a gate opening, and Michael's voice said:

"Fear nothing and remember that it is the Father who punishes and it is the Mother who forgives. I will be with you when you need me."

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"Can you tell me what, from your judgment and experience, you consider to be the source of suffering and unhappiness in the world?" ...

"Is it evil?" ...

"In reality, it is vice versa. When you distance yourself from the source of suffering, when you name it as opposite to what you want to be (I assume that you all want to be good, don't you?), you lose a chance to change it. Because it continues to live inside you, as part of you, making you make many of your choices, but you refuse to recognize it, so you remain in ignorant bliss and you continue to suffer.

"We call the source of unhappiness and disease `trauma.' And we believe that there are live representations
of trauma in all of us. In our tradition, we call them `spirits of trauma.' Whenever something hurts you and you
don't accept it fully as a complete part of your history, you create a gap in your memory; a gap which, when the hurt is strong or repeated many times, becomes occupied by a spirit of trauma. You don't have to imagine some fashioned freaky monster sitting on your back and sucking out your blood." A ripple of soft laughter went through the audience as an expression of relief.

"You can think about this in terms of neurocognitive science, if you like the term 'neurotransmitters' better than 'creatures of the night.' You may call them additional subjects; you may define them as unintegrated representations; you may choose whatever language and metaphors you prefer. It doesn't matter. What matters is the process. The internal psychic process, often extended throughout generations by the inheritance of patterns of trauma formed, perhaps long, long ago, when one of your ancestors went through an unbearable hurt.

"Human genes are much more flexible than we think. They perceive as much as they act. When a hurt reaches
the level of genes, it makes them behave differently and distort the memory, preventing the memory from becoming complete. The gap in memory is created, and a spirit of trauma houses itself in this gap, hidden from our awareness. ...

They learn to hide them from themselves and their children. They play hide-and-seek with spirits of trauma, and guess what? Most often they lose, because even when they don't remember, their genes—those unfailing memory units—do, and the hurt stays there until you heal it. ...

"The same mechanism works with smaller things. We start to gather up more personal hurts in the basket of our memory soon after coming into this world.

Every creature tries to survive. It is true for the spirits of trauma as well. They need to 'eat.' They are always hungry. They create 'food' for themselves by generating more hurt. Why does the 'Paradox exist, that victims of abuse become the worst abusers themselves? It is not logical, but it is perfectly reasonable for the spirits of trauma to grow in abuse victims through their hurts and feed themselves by re-creating those hurts. You may know this from your own experiences.

"How many of you did something in your life that you regret, that you knew wasn't the best thing to do, but still you chose to do it, bringing upon yourself unwanted cir¬cumstances? I bet you know the feeling. 'I don't have any idea why I did it.' I hear this often, and you probably do too from people you are working with. You don't have any idea because the impulse was initiated and supported by the spirit of trauma. You are not aware of it, so you follow it blindly and you end up hurting again and again. ...

The justifiable next question would be, 'so what?' "People adjust, they find their own means to cope, so why bother with looking deeper into it? Right?" Some of the heads in the audience nodded in agree-ment.

"Wrong! Wrong questions. There are three main points I or why it is vitally important for everyone to win in their battle with the spirits of trauma. First, because when you conquer them, it brings profound healing, reverses unhap-piness, and treats disease. Diseases are the means by which (in organism tries to fight the traumas on its own. So many Times, I've seen people get sick and look for help at very particular points in their life, moments when the spirit of trauma becomes activated in a person with incomplete psychic memory. That is why many healing changes fol¬low when you are able to eradicate the root of trauma.

"Second, we believe in our tradition that whatever we do directly touches generations before and after us. When you free yourself from trauma, you heal your ancestors and protect generations after you. I saw many people who would act out their traumas, essentially looking for help, when their children reach the age when they themselves experienced the hurt. ...

"It is not a 'concept.' It is a way of living your life, feeling its boundaries and borders. It relates to what you ultimately understand as 'self.' All knowledge comes to that understanding. But with any knowledge, the truth is that you can't obtain it just by making the decision to do so. You have to exchange your personal experience for it. "All of you in this room have created the wealth of your experiences in your own unique ways. Yet it brought you here tonight so you will receive this knowledge. I believe that without those experiences that prepared you, you wouldn't have come tonight. Your car would have broken, your friend would have called, and so on. It is true for those who didn't plan to come but who happened to be here seemingly by accident. Believe me, it was not an acci¬dent, but your experiences which strive to become knowl¬edge, that brought you here tonight." ...

"I am going to talk about death. It is not something many people like to talk about. Do you know why? There is a fear we all feel. They say it is fear of the unknown. I say it is fear of the known, but not realized consciously. When we go through life,'the traumas we experience stay in us as painful knots, and are tightened by the spirits of trauma. If we don't untie these knots during our lives, we are going to have this done after our physical deaths. It doesn't matter if we believe in the afterlife or not.

"One thing you need to believe is that, with death, the experience of time changes radically. To enter death is, in a way, to enter time itself, and there you'd better be ready. There are many accounts of light and bliss, but this is only a beginning. What comes afterward is also described, but it is just not as well publicized. Angry, malicious spirits come next; they come to suck your blood and torture you by all possible means, but they are your own spirits of Trauma. They will torture you until you untie the knots in your memory and become free. Again, it doesn't matter if you believe in the afterlife or not. I am talking about the subjective psychological process of restructuring your memory. Would it make a big difference for you to know that it all happens minutes after death, even though you may personally experience it as ages of torture?"

"Do you refer to the evil spirits from the Tibetan Book "Ihe Dead?" a female voice asked from a back row.
Some people turned to look at her, but there was no particular curiosity in their looks. Somehow, Vladimir had ( teated such an intimate atmosphere in the room that we a II felt connected to one another. Any question would sound like a question from the group as a whole, so it didn't matter who was asking it.
"I don't refer to that book. You do. But since you did, I agree that this is the most widely known description of the spirits of trauma. It is a powerful book, but it was created inside a particular culture which is quite remote from your culture, and therefore from you personally, isn't it? Now am going to make it more personal for you [...]

"The only way to pass through their gates [after death] was to look to them in their disguised faces and say, 'I know you. I know your name.' You do this, then they have to let you through. You fail, they tear your limbs apart, suck your blood, tear your flesh. If you recognize their names, then are saved from a second death, from annihilation, and your existence will continue. So what am I talking about?
"Any guesses yet? I expect that, at this point in my lecture, you will recognize who I am talking about. The spirits of trauma, of course, our psyches' creations, our representations of hurts and suffering which we have, accumulated, and which we didn't have a chance to heal...

"The only thing I can tell you now is that we all have the space inside of us where the healing work can be done and is being done all the time for each of us—even though we are completely unaware of it. This space is the space of our dreams, created to protect and heal us from our traumas and their spirits. This is the territory of the origination of magic. ... We work with reintegration of memory in the dreams, and we leave no space for spirits of trauma to exist in the memory when it is healed. ...

"The purpose of my talk tonight is not only educa¬tional. It serves to make some of the aspects of our work known to Western culture. The reason is that the critical time has arrived. I told you that the unhealed traumatic experiences which gain status of their own and become spirits of trauma continue their existence throughout generations. If they are not healed, they build up, connect, accelerate, enforce and support each other, and become collective entities.

"In traditional cultures, rituals of transition are very important. Before going to another of life's stages, a person must go through a deep initiation ritual, one that basically cuts off all traumatic knots from the past and clears a path for the future. Modern civilization, as you call it, has lost all its psychological rituals. It doesn't have the means to clear its members of traumatic memories. Therefore, at some point, these accumulate on the collective level and become very dangerous. This dangerous time has come. It could become many times more dangerous now than in previous times, when world wars were induced by the accumulated spirits of traumas. The purpose of my visit is to tell you that there is a great danger for all the people on the planet, but there are effective means to overcome it.

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Michael smiled slightly and kept talking.
"Good. You can get angry easy. It's good. You need to feel it even more. Because if you don't do it, the only other choice you have is to fall back to that dark, silent hole where you have been residing almost all the time before now. You ask me for meaning as you would for oxygen, so that you can take it and dive back into your deep, deep well, filled with your depression. The well surrounds you like a cloud on all sides, closes your eyes and ears, and numbs your feelings. As a result, you don't have to feel one basic truth anymore, one true feeling, and you try to bury it with all your games. This feeling is simple; it is called guilt. You wish to avoid feeling guilty."...

Michael kept talking in a slow rhythm. "If you let this point of hurt crystallize in your memory as an unresolved knot, it will become an incubator, a womb to rejuvenate and to nourish a hungry evil spirit that has been waiting in your genetic memory line for many generations of your ancestors for this chance. It will rise up from the collective memory of your ancestors and start a life of its own as a spirit of fear. It will poison your life." ...

When I approached him, he looked at me and said without preface, "This is the discipline that teaches one how to transform space by using time as an ally. Our fears are contained in spaces that are arranged in certain ways so that we believe that they are indisputable realities. When they—" he moved his head slightly, gesturing to the acrobat-boy who had just jumped to the ground near us, "walk on the cable, their space is transformed. They don't believe at that moment that they live on the ground; they believe they inhabit the sky. They live in the sky and leap to the ground, coming to the place of the past from the future. They change the past of the people who are watch¬ing them by bringing the energy of the future from the sky." ...

Our awareness has to be organized to achieve potential. Right and left sides of the brain have to be balanced and silent when necessary to be carried across another side of experience by the one in the middle."

"When you use the image of acrobats as a metaphor for brain work, what is the third one, the one who walks the cable?" I felt that Michael was close to telling me something very important.

"You are the scientist. You should know better. My guess is that it is the one who is responsible for balancing the spaces." Michael looked at me with no trace of irony in his eyes, and his response prompted me to think more about what he was saying. I covered my eyes with my hands to help myself think, and stood with my face cov¬ered for a while with thoughts flashing through my head. Of course he was right. Probably without knowing it, Michael had just given me a key that finally brought together many of my previous thoughts and ideas.

The limit of the asymmetry between the functions of the right and left hemispheres was now overcome by the presence of a third agent, the one able to coordinate their relationship and communication. I thought about the brain's anatomy and of one particular structure that has fascinated me since medical school. Suddenly, this struc¬ture gained huge significance: the cerebellum. A large part of the brain that contains the most neuronal connections, yet it is considered by medical science to be only a sub¬strate responsible for the coordination of bodily move¬ment.

I took my hands off my face, breathed deeply, and almost laughed from happiness when Michael's metaphor put everything in place. Of course, the cerebellum is responsible for external movements and is involved in the organization of internal spaces as well. And that includes spaces of imagination, spaces of dreams, spaces of memory. I remembered whirling dervishes who would spin for hours to generate an alternate state of consciousness. They definitely knew how to work their cerebellum. ...

Try to walk this as if it were a cable in the sky. Try to imagine that you are yesterday's acrobats and now you have to walk this cable." It sounded silly and I laughed. He laughed with me but gestured his head toward the rope, pushing me to accept his game. I put my right foot on the rope and didn't feel the rope's structure, it was so soft and flexible. I opened my arms wide and imagined that I held in my hands a pole with two heavy seats attached to it. I took a step with my left foot, putting it in front of the right one on the rope. Suddenly, I lost my balance. I had to swing my body from right to left to regain balance. Now I stood straight with both my feet on the rope and was afraid to take another step. Parallel thoughts went through my mind. I was telling myself that this was just a rope on the ground and that I couldn't fall anywhere. At the same time, I tried to keep the image of the pole with heavy seats in my hands as if I were really going to carry them across the cable. I also remembered that Michael was watching me, and I felt silly that I couldn't take another step. Finally, I pushed myself to take the next step and all my thoughts rushed through my mind, back and forth between inner talk and images, between the right and left sides of my brain. My body had to compensate for this intensity by losing its balance again. I felt I couldn't stay straight or walk straight across this imaginary cable. I had to pause for a while as my body regained its balance. Then without thinking, I simply moved my awareness to the back of my head, to the location of the cerebellum, and tried to experience it as a center of my consciousness. Then a fascinating thing happened to my perception. [...]

"When you are able to gain understanding in your direct experience, it always looks so easy that it is funny you could not see it before." I just nodded my head silently, for I agreed with him.

"That's why I think, Olga, it will be easier for you now, after you have experienced the difference between pure movement and movement complicated by memory burden, to understand our approach. In pure movements, all the energy you need is free and available to you. In complicated movements you have to carry, along with your body, a huge weight of mental constructs. That's why some experiences are very difficult to complete. They keep coming back to you because you can't accomplish the move¬ment since you have too much memory weight attached to them.

"In the case of a traumatic experience which generated a memory demon [spirit of trauma], it becomes an active obstacle, not simply an awful weight. It becomes a strange force in your body that actively opposes you as you go through the experience and attempt to complete it. This force lives inside you and generates painful circumstances again and again. You are bound to run in circles around this pain instead of walking away and leaving it far behind. It is almost as if another self lived inside you, of which you are not aware." [...]

You made your trip. Now you have to accelerate your anxiety and depression to complete them and be healed from them. Your feelings show that you h started real movement through your memory spaces, use the analogy of movement for the processing recorded experiences. Now tell me, why did you f depressed now? What did you remember?"

"Nothing important. Just a couple of images."

"Listen to me, Olga. There are no important or unimportant images in our mind. Their importance is conditional and they are created by our minds, often to mislead us. The image is the key to a certain space of your memory that is always connected to another space. We contain memory spaces inside of us in the same way your Russian matreshka doll contains many small dolls inside one another, embedded within one big doll. There may be spaces inside you infected with a memory demon that has learned to hide itself behind different images in your mem¬ory to keep hurting you. So what did you see?" [...]

"You are not sad about this girl, Olga. And you know that. She is one of the superficial covers which connects you with the space of hurt. There is something in her that serves as a key to that space in your memory where your sadness originates, but it is not her you feel sad about." [...]

"There are two basic ways we can react to trauma." Michael continued talking without paying attention to my anxiety, and it calmed me down somewhat. "They are often experienced together but, in fact, they represent opposite processes. They are depression and anxiety. There are two different types of memory demons standing behind these feelings, and they require two different types of healing.

"When you experience these feelings, depression and anxiety together, one of them is always primary and it is very important to recognize which one. In your case, the anxiety that you have been experiencing lately is your attempt to find healing for something that makes you very sad. The anxiety is your ally now since it keeps you alert and attentive to what is going on inside.

"The reason these feelings represent different processes is that the origin of their creation is different. We have two basic psychological processes which constitute all our experiences. Every experience we have is composed from action and perception. When I say action, I mean not only physical movements but internal movement as well—thoughts, ideas, intentions. Perception is external and internal as well. These two processes interact with each other all the time, creating our unique experiences through' their combinations. When we are hurt, one of these, processes suffers the most. When our perception is hurt, we feel anxious. It is connected much with how we are perceived by others and with whatever harm other people do to us. Depression results from hurtful action and it develops because of our imaginary or real actions or inactions that we believe were wrong.

"It is simple to describe it, but if you pay attention t this you will understand how these processes interact. You have just experienced what a pure action is. And soon after that your sadness came back. I can tell you right now that whatever hurt you keep in your memory is caused by you belief that something you have done or haven't done was wrong, and you feel guilty about it."

"But one of the main feelings I have now, Michael, is feeling irritated with you and being quite anxious because of all this." I was trying to be honest with him.

"And it is exactly right," he responded. You feel anxious and irritated now because I am influencing your perception to bring to it something you try to forget. My questions lead to healing. The real thing is your sadness and guilt."

I didn't feel like talking at that point. I felt there was much truth in his words. I also felt that I could have argued with many of his points. But at the same time, 1 expected that he would defeat my arguments easily and I would end up in exactly the same situation he wanted me to be—facing my unclear, disturbing feelings and trying to avoid them.

Since we had reached the top of the hill, I felt that I wanted to take a little break before walking any farther. The ground was dry and warm from the sun, and I sat on last year's yellow grass and looked straight out to the open valley below the hill we were on.

Michael sat near me and looked straight ahead for a while. Then he said to me in a very soft, soothing voice, "You have just experienced what a pure action can be. You can try now to experience what pure perception is. For that, you need to close your eyes." [...]

'You need to do almost the same thing you did with log across the cable. You need to make an effort to change your experience of self. Remember the acrobats? You are trapped if you are the one on the seat and somebody carries you through the height.

"You are in control when you walk the cable. They are different people. You can't jump from the seat to the cable.

You just needed to experience the other person in you, the one who walks the cable. You did it well. Now you need to experience the perceiver. Move your attention, not to the back of your head as you did with walking the cable, but closer to your face. The level of your eyes is where your perception is centered, and if you try to focus your attention on that level and do not allow it to jump back inside your head, you may experience pure perception, and you won't get lost in the spaces of your memories. Try it."

I sat with my eyes closed and noticed how many thoughts, associations, and questions were coming to the outface of my consciousness from the center of my head. I made an effort and moved my attention to my face, feel¬ing the level of my eyes strongly and intently. When I was able to hold that focus, I suddenly experienced myself as a self quite different from my usual awareness. I was the watcher, the being who lives in my eyes always. I was aware of all my surroundings and perceived everything as clearly as if my eyes were open and saw everything around. There was nothing hidden from my perception.

"Good, you are very good," I heard Michael saying, but toy reaction to his words shattered the balance. I fell back into my usual self-awareness. I opened my eyes and looked at the valley in front of me. It looked almost as if I my vision had greatly improved. I noticed a herd of sheep on the hill far away, but now I could almost perceive the smallest details of their gray, fat bodies walking stolidly through the grass. It was as if my eyes were the lens of a video camera that had been suddenly adjusted after ye of malfunctioning and I could now perceive everything clearly.

"When you experience sadness, it is a sure indication that the trauma is based on the fact that your action inaction was hurtful. To start recovering from it, you need to activate the opposite process. You need to heal that memory by working with perception. Now try to reconstruct your sadness one more time." [...]

"Now," I heard Michael's soft voice say, "keep this feeling of sadness in your heart and try to move your awareness to the level of your eyes. Leave the space of your memory where you can see the girl and become the perceiver again." [...]

Imade an effort and I became once again a being localized in my eyes, the being which perceives everything. The feel¬ing of sadness abated, but before it disappeared completely, Michael's voice prompted it to stay. "Don't let the sadness go away now. Be a watcher and feel this sad feeling in your heart simultaneously. Notice it there and continue to per¬ceive it along with all the other perceptions, but without falling back into it."

I felt how his words were directly reshaping my internal moves. He helped me to stay focused and maintain this simultaneous experience. Both the experience and my awareness of Michael's presence intensified. I felt his influence now without hearing him, without looking at him. A feeling of sadness rose gradually from my heart into my chest, filling my chest and making it difficult to breathe. I was registering it as it rose. [...]

I moaned. The images of dusty dry ground filled vision and froze in front of my closed eyes. It was unmoving as a stone wall. I couldn't avoid seeing it. I knew that my pose didn't change. I was still sitting on 14 ground with my eyes closed. But the picture that now held the focus of my vision caused an incredible pain. I felt pain in my hands; they burned from hurt, and I felt pain in my lips as they tasted the salt blood from my tongue, blood that mixed with my tears.

"What do you see now?" I heard Michael's voice very close.

My lips moved very slowly as I answered him, "I have a vivid memory now. It's a very remote memory from my childhood. I was maybe five years old then, but I remember it so clearly now." I grew silent as the memory contin¬ued to flood me [...]

"The story you just told me is the next layer that cov¬ers your sadness. It belongs to the same space inside you from which your sad feeling comes. You went deeper and recovered that memory. It was very important to do and well. It is not a child's story about losing her cat. vr t hat you were guilty for not saving your cat. V that you could have done something differ-. then the cat would have been saved. You probably know in your mind that a five-year-old child could do little in that situation, but it is in your mind. In your you believe that you are guilty."[...]

"The fact that the trauma is irreversible makes it more painful," Michael continued. "You feel powerless because of the finality of it. It hurts so much because you feel guilty for not preventing the death and because you can't change the death after it happened. This is a real thread to something that lies at the core of your trauma, something you need to remember next." [...]

Now let me tell you something else. It's not as final as your mind is afraid it is. The sense of finality comes from the limits your understanding faces when it reaches the concept of death. You don't have to be afraid of death here, though this place has seen a lot of it. This place is among very few where people have been working with
death consciously, and they have gathered some experience. They knew that the substance of death and dreams is the same, that the difference is only in the degree of intensity. They specifically worked with dreams here because it brought them closer to controlling death."

'People can't control death. It is not something one can control," I said.

"Of course they can. Death is a subjective experience. When you are scared of death, you are not scared of your body being in pain. You are scared of how you may feel what is called death. This is a purely subjective experience, and subjective experience is something you can control. After you have been trained properly. The same is true your dreams. You think you can't control them. But you know how? Do you know the essence of dream substance? If you knew, you would learn quickly how to do it. People in this place were very knowledgeable in this. Th knew how to work with dreams. They had knowledge." [...]

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Master of Lucid Dreams said:

"The only way to gain knowledge from this place through exchange. It has to be personal. You can't obtain knowledge by just making the decision to do so. You have to exchange your story for it. And you have to learn the stories of this place and of the people who existed on this land. This will be a part of the exchange for you here.

"The stories of the people who underwent transforma¬tion here need to be retold now, so their experience can become animated again, complete their transformations, ) and accelerate the transformative experience for the peo¬ple who will hear their stories. This land wants to tell these stories for the people in other lands so they can obtain knowledge from them. The psyches of ancient people need to come back to life to activate memory changes in the people living now.

"The traumas of people from the past continue to live in their modern-day descendants even though most of them don't have any awareness of it. Telling their stories will help to heal these ancient traumas and change something critically important in the lives of many mod-ern people. So you will have to retell these stories later, after you hear them from me and you return to your home."

He looked at me and when he saw in my face that I would rather hold back from any commitments, he added, "It is more a matter of responsibility than of choice. I often work for this place even when I don't feel like it, as if this ruined city was pushing me. But I know that I am among only a few people who can tell the stories of this place, and I have to do it. It is more difficult for places to present their stories, because only people can create and tell sto¬ries, so places need us to keep and tell their histories."

That said, he continued after a short pause, "This place is very old. It has layers of history. They connect; they influence each other, and continue to have a life, keeping a connection with us through direct lines of power trans¬mission. I am connected to the oldest face of this town, to the very beginning of what is now called Afrasiab. [...] He was a ruler of this place at the time of the Golden Time, the time when the world didn't know division. [...]

"By his god's will, sacred waters of life flowed from the top of the world mountain and gave birth to everything alive. His god was a woman, Great Mother Anakhita, and Afrasiab served her like a tiger. He was faithful and devoted because he knew her love. Women were equal with men then and power was distributed equally. Anakhita had both men and women priests who served her. Afrasiab was not one of them, but he built the temples of fire, serving Anakhit throughout his kingdom, and he protected these temples. They were called sufa, and you may still find the remains of some of them when you walk eastward through the ruins. [...]

You don't know much about Zoroaster and his teaching, but your psyche is still organized by the rules of division that he established. Awareness was moved away from the center of being by dividing everything into black and white, with shadows created on both sides. There are different ways to overcome dividing and to avoid the shadows. This is one of the things that can help you." [...]

"This is a very powerful symbol [a swastika] that can resolve the dividing of our psyches," said Michael, while I continued looking at this small fragment which easily fit in my palm.

"Its four arms connect the right and left sides of our brain, and by doing, they connect past with present. They also connect action and perception in a way that is different from our usual experience, so a sense of unity is created in the center of the symbol. This experience doesn't fall into separate memory spaces, but serves as a gate to the Golden Time, to undivided time.

"The image of the swastika is very important for the work that has been done in our tradition of dream healing. Its sides connect past and present, action and perception in a special way, and its center connects directly with all the memory spaces. When you know how to activate this symbol and how to work with it, the center of this
image serves as a gate that opens to the dream space. In that space, all the memories ever recorded are connected, and through that space they can be accessed and trans¬formed. The center doesn't have any shadows. It connects with each experience in memory directly.

"The center of this figure is an entrance to the dream space, and when you know how to work with it, it will give you the experience of particular types of dreams: lucid dreams, in which action and perception are united in a way totally different from our usual experience. [...]

sooner or later the memory demons become healed. Yet they keep coming back, and they multiply through different people in history, continuing to hurt the collective memory. There is presently a lot of work that needs to be done to heal them. So take this symbol with you to the hotel and don't be afraid of it. Come here tomorrow around noon. But please don't think about what to say tomorrow."Let it stay ahead of you in a space where your thou can't reach it yet and can't change it. [...]

I had time before noon the next day, and after havit breakfast in the hotel I walked outside and stopped in bookstore. Before the collapse of the Soviet Union, ma books were written in Russian, then the official language in Uzbekistan, and I browsed through them. I was trying to find the description of the tradition Michael was teaching, but couldn't find any direct references. Books oh Sufism were the closest, but their concepts were different. I couldn't find anything specific about the tradition of the dream healers. Before leaving the store, I opened a largo volume called Mythological Dictionary and opened it to "ch." The page had a short description of the word chiltan.

It said, "Chiltan comes from the Persian for 'forty peo¬ple.' In Central Asian traditions they are described as forty invisible powerful spirits who govern the world. Chilton; often are invisible to people, but they also can live as reg¬ular human beings among common people. Uzbek myth says that chiltans live on a remote island which no human can reach. They gather occasionally to discuss their busi¬ness in secluded places, near burial grounds, near ancient sites. According to beliefs of some Uzbek groups, chiltans were the first shamans and the first shamans' guardians. Sometimes they appear as forty beautiful young men and women, dancing at night." [...]

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Master of Lucid Dreams said:

Michael was standing on the other side of the well, and before I walked around it to come closer to him, he stopped me. "No. Don't walk here. Just jump."

I looked down into the well again. It was a dark tunnel without end, and its size was sufficient to let my body fly downwards to its bottom should I fall into it. "Thank you, but I don't feel like it," I said as calmly as I could, hoping that he would drop the subject.

"Why not?" He obviously didn't want to drop it. "Because it doesn't make much sense, and I simply don't want to."

"Do you feel afraid?" He was looking at me intently. "Maybe, maybe not. I don't even want to explore why I don't want to jump over this stupid well."

"Oh, you are even getting angry over it. Why is that, Olga? You are quite a nice person. Why would you resist this simple suggestion?"

"The way you ask it, Michael, it sounds like you know why I feel this way. Why do you think I don't want to do it?"

"It's simple. Because it would lead you away from the patterns of fixation. Fixation is a mechanism by which the psyche holds its separateness, and it is the mechanism that memory demons use to preserve themselves inside different memory compartments. When your energy flows, when your body is flexible, when you can jump over abysses easily, then your psyche functions differently and your memory lets go of all hidden and separated spaces easily—to become whole with the rest of your psyche. Plus, it's just fun to jump over wells."

This last phrase made Michael look like a boy who was having fun jumping wells, and I felt my initial anger dis-appear. I looked again down the well, but its depth made me uncomfortable.

"You know, Michael, I do feel afraid to jump over it," I said in a nice voice, hoping that, now that I had admitted it, he would drop the subject. [...]

"You can use it as an exercise," he insisted. "The best skill you can teach yourself is to learn how to switch perspectives, to change the position of your subject. This Is what you did yesterday with the rope on the ground, While you keep thinking about your action, your memory remains active and it pushes you from one point of fixation to another, and that complicates the purity of your movements. You look into this well and have countless associations going through your mind. If you try to jump in this state of mind, you may really fall into it, even though technically there is very little chance of it. But most likely you would, because your fear is so active that it would push you to fall. I don't want that to happen, What I want you to do is to try to position your attention so that it is unreachable by fearful memory, and then to jump with joy. Use as much space as you need to change your perspective. Look at yourself from far above. Experience your body from a distance. It may help you to experience your fears from a distance, as if they do not belong to you." [...]

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Master of Lucid Dreams said:

"After Afrasiab was made the Alive King of the Dead by goddess Anakhita here, this place became a battlefield. The separation of trauma from awareness in human mem¬ory was initiated here, and because of this, the potential for healing is also the highest in this place. Throughout the centuries people have been attracted to Samarkand because here it was easier to make their final choice to either be healed and transformed, or to give themselves completely to the memory demons which become very active in this territory. This place has seen a lot of hurt since the time of Afrasiab. People hurt others when they feel scared. That is the law. The more one hurts, the more fears one feels inside.

"The main reason for feeling scared is giving up the power of yourself. People won't give it up by their free will, but they do it all the time when they have been hurt. When they don't want the hurt to be a part of their personal memory, they, reject the traumatic experience altogether. They don't accept it as a completed part of themselves so a memory demon catches it and states, 'This is mine.' The memory demon gets the energy; the self loses it.

"The gap in one's personal story has been created and it is always experienced thereafter as fear. When we feel fear, we feel this gap between what we know as our accepted memory and what belongs to some dark corner inside us. The fear returns again and again to hurt us. And through us it hurts others, and through this it feeds its secret memory.

"There was another boy whose fate was connected to this city. I will tell you his story now because it needs to be told. You will take it with you and you will tell it to other people, and through that process the healing will be expanded. His name will carry the healing out to people who know his name. When they hear this story from you, they will participate in healing his past and in healing their own present. There are many stories about him in people's [...]

"It is true that when a person is filled with fears, he becomes vulnerable to any type of psychic influence because he has lost a connection with himself, the connection being the ultimate protection. [...]

You also think that because you failed to help that person, you can't help anyone, and therefore you can't heal people anymore. This is where the memory demon is trying to take over your power and to make you defense¬less, so you will get stuck in these feelings and beliefs, and indeed, never help anybody else. Tell me, Olga, who is that person? What was his name?"

I thought I felt ready. But later I understood fully how difficult, and often even impossible, it is to talk or even think about what had once caused pain, because every return to that memory takes the pain as actual and unbearable as it was months or even years ago. [...]

You know I know that death is not final. You should know by now that I have a very different understanding of time, and ofhow past, present, and future are connected—I hat I know it is never too late for healing to occur. [...]

If your memory gaps are not healed, if you reject your past, then you let the spirits of trauma in. Sooner or later, no matter how great you are, they come to torture you and to torture others through your actions. [...]

"The gap in the psyche I told you about before is a seat for a memory demon to anchor in to and grow. It is a parasite which tries endlessly to deceive you into believing II is an innermost part of you while it sucks your energy and makes you feed it with more fears. The gap is created any time something traumatic happens and the personality is not strong enough to accept it as a part of itself. The psyche takes it in as something foreign to itself. Then, when many of those experiences have accumulated, they become a nourishing substrate for another subject. Because it is brought up by trauma, one can call it the spirit of trauma. Everyone has it.

"More or less, we all carry these detached memories which become taken over by memory demons. They are inherited as the fears and traumas of our parents and ancestors. The spirits of traumas create yet more traumatic circumstances, again and again. They help people make excuses to avoid seeing them in the full light of day. They make people suddenly tired, uninterested, wanting to change the subject before the trauma's nature is uncov¬ered. Like your wanting to return to the hotel now."

"So you are saying that my choices are controlled by the spirits of trauma, and they are guiding me to avoid see¬ing this?"

"I think you are experienced enough to recognize that. Remember your patients, those who will do everything to elude real healing. You are not much different from them now. And one more thing, I told you about jealousy and how dangerous it can be. Memory demons are full of jeal¬ousy. They fight for your attention and are in rivalry with any gift a person has. They, will try to steal the gift and destroy it, so the person's attention will be occupied only by the fears the spirits create. In your case, this trauma is trying to steal your gift of healing to make you refuse to heal others who need it. That is the goal of your spirit of trauma, and you would serve it if you left now." [...]

"Everything partial is more likely to increase the gap and feed the memory demons. ... I can tell you that partial sex, sex without con-nection and understanding, does it more than anything else." [...]

"That's why many people feel traumatized after mak¬ing love. They look for love to fill in their painful gaps, but get stuck with partial sex, which, even when rewarding physically, ultimately hurts them more. [...]

"So you remember her suffering but you resist accept¬ing that she had been raped that night? You are a profes¬sional, and a good one, I may say. Don't lie to me that you can't recognize the trauma of rape. I bet you can recognize it in the first few moments of your conversation with a patient. And you did. I bet you did recognize it in Lara, but refused to accept it, giving it to a part of your memory you don't think is yours. Lara was too good to be raped. Rape doesn't happen to good women. This is your first gap, as much as it was hers. Face it now.

She lives inside of you; you have her image in your memory nurtured by years of growing up together. She is projected like an icon for you, one who is always pure, always strong, and to whom you can turn in moments of confusion. You feel great relief that an ideal exists and can help you to make sense out of reality when¬ever you need it. You provide therapy for yourself by hold¬ing to this ideal. You won't let it go, even at the expense of letting the real person suffer. You close your eyes and ears in order not to hear about the ugly rape; you erase it/ from her story. This is hypocrisy, Olga, a huge gap you need to heal. Lara was a live person and her suffering is no symbolic but real. You need to help her."

Warm tears dripped down my cheeks. I couldn't say what I wanted to say and kept nodding my head. I didn't have a handkerchief to wipe my tears away, so they kept rolling down, reaching my lips, making me feel finally free from something heavy and ill. I didn't feel hurt by Michael's unexpected harshness. I felt that his severity was addressed directly to something in myself that wasn't me, something that I wanted to be free of. He was helping me to get rid of that falsehood with his harsh but true words.

His harshness was gone when I looked at him, and I saw that his face was full of compassion again. His eyes were focused on me with attention and understanding.
"Do you remember how we talked about the metaphor of physical movements and moving through your mem¬ory?" he said.

I nodded.

"The concept of simple movement and movement complicated by the weight of mental constructs is true for moving through memory spaces as well. To walk through the spaces of your memory freely, you need to have as sim¬ple a movement as you can. You need to be free from fears, anger, and frustration to reach the point in memory that needs to be transformed. Right now you still have much frustration in the way of moving through your story. To me what really disturbs you before you continue talking about Lara." [...]

"When I think about it, I don't have a coherent mem-ory of her death. I remember only some pictures, scenes which I imagined from what others told me about her death. They are isolated scenes, and often come to me like stills from a movie, having a life of their own in my mind. I can't put them all together in one continuous story and tell it to you exactly, step by step."

"This is the traumatic gap, right here," said Michael. "You can't connect those pictures in your memory with previous experiences, and they stay isolated, having, as you said, 'a life of their own.' They have power over your-atten-ton, and can continue traumatizing you. Tell me what scenes you remember." [...]

"I am learning from you, Michael, about the memory demons, and the more I learn about them, the more I understand what Lara was going through. I now accept the spirits of trauma as a reality. I saw it in Lara. I now know that it is a real dimension, even though it belongs more to a psychological than a physical domain. And I believe that, exactly because of their intangibility, these demons can obtain power over our wills and take us over. [...]

When I was silent, Michael said, "I want you to know that there is a tremendous power in storytelling, Olga. Sometimes people can get healed from deepest hurt just through telling the story about it. You just did it and it will help you to move forward. Take a break now and listen to me.

"Our tradition cherishes the power of storytelling because it works with healing. We also believe that our dreams are the best storytellers, and through the stories of our dreams the deepest healing can occur. The nature of my work in our tradition of healing is to guard the gate to the dream space and, when necessary, to open those mem¬ories that require transformation. It is also to make sure that the memory demons that were healed and sent away through the dream healing never come back and stay iso¬lated from human memory. [...]

Remember how memory demons recreate themselves through generating the hurt. [...]

"I needed to tell you this story because telling it brings changes to the consequences of those remote events that continue influencing people in our time.[...]

"The major task for our dreams is to fill in the gaps in our memory. The problem is that when the memory demons have populated your memory already, they will do everything to protect their existence. The problem is that they are much more alive, active, and powerful in dreams than in waking life. So, unfortunately, when the dream space is not clear, quite often instead of healing, the dream brings an intensification of the hurt of the trauma. To beat them up, the memory demons, you have to be equipped with knowledge that can allow you to work inside th dream. It is worth the effort, since complete healing happens through changing the structure of the images, no simply their meanings. That is easier to do through working with dreams.

"It is more difficult to alter your waking patterns which are held mostly by beliefs implanted in you while you're growing up. Beliefs which tell you bluntly what is right and wrong, what deserves praise and what deserves punishment In dreams, it is so much easier because dreams don't allow separation of wholeness into good and bad, right and wrong, It is against their nature. In dreams, everything is allowed. [...]

"What you are about to do, shamans would call walk¬ing the soul of the dead. You can call it transpersonal transformation or whatever name makes you less anxious. The process is still going to be the same. The process of transformation will only happen in the reality where internal and external spaces are the same, where there are no longer any mental boundaries separating them. It is not exactly a dream state. It is a particular state which you can enter when your dream space and your memory space are open and clear and you can move through them easily. It will be up to your memory to choose what images to create to generate the healing. Your memory images will be carriers of transformation, but the effect of the changes will extend beyond your personal memory. [...]

It keeps you awake while you're dreaming, and at the same time it washes away all the ten¬sion knots in your muscles which are the bodily represen-tations of your memory knots. So your memory becomes, free for some time, and you are protected from your usual fears so you can experience your memories much more consciously than usual.

"Your experience will take its own special form. But the content of it will not be the main thing that matters. What matters is the process of change. And what matters is the process of finding the memory demon and conquer¬ing it to make it serve you and further healing in the future."[...]

"To make yourself feel better, just remember it is not the content and form that matters but the process of change. What you are experiencing sometimes is called the Hall of Separation. It is not the first place human attention can go after death. There are hundreds of different pathways of experience through which the individuality of a person who died can go.

"What you see here are remains of human forms and therefore the remains of human individual attention, because attention and form are highly connected. For most humans who stay untrained and uneducated during their lives about existence after death, the process of the physical body's destruction is accompanied by the destruction of individual awareness. Don't mistake awareness for soul. When you are told by spiritual traditions that the soul is eternally alive and infinitely present, that is true. But how many people know their souls during their lives? How many of them are able to identify their souls? Only a few. For the rest, regular awareness of the body is the seat of attention, and individual awareness goes through disinte¬gration along with the body.

"Since the ancient Mysteries which taught the practice , of healing in the afterlife and the correct transfer of con¬/ sciousness to the afterlife are now forgotten or hidden, the majority of people dying have to endure a very painful process of dismemberment by the demons of their memo¬ries. What you see in this room is the final stage of such disintegration, when sensations have been separated from1 memory, feelings from thoughts, faces from members. YouI meet on this final stage the essential manifestations of those sensations.

"In the case of this hall, the sensation is pain. You have to go through this hall to reach your goal. But there are other halls where different sensations are experienced. Don't be confused by your reason. The suffering you saw is not connected to a particular person anymore. But it has an individualized nature. It has to do with what their attention was mostly tuned to during their lives. [...]

"These are the physical 'islands of memories,' parts of the body which memory demons used to live in. Your cul¬ture would call it punishment for sins. The main attribute of sin, if we are to use this term at all, is not its moral characteristic, but its ability to stop further development, to block further movement. All 'great' sinners, as essen-tially the personifications of the memory demons and whatever wrong deeds they did, had one thing in common: their awareness was fixed on the subject of their sin, be it greed, lust, jealousy, or anger.

"These different qualities served as a dam built up against their development and transformation. And this is what started the process of segregation and involution. When they died and disintegration began, their awareness was stuck with only their sin and trauma, and they died a second death, losing their individual awareness eventually. Their individual selves ceased their existence after the second death."

I look around, trying to correlate the words I heard with the images I see. Severed body parts and a horrible sense of suffering interfere with my thinking. I can't come to any conclusion, but I know that the words I heard have entered my consciousness, and sooner or later they will come back to me, and I will understand them better.[...]

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"You, Victor, do not understand much about yourself. You never took the reality of your soul to be as serious al some stupid business lunch you still care about. All t lie things that have been happening to you are mere attempt* to turn your attention and to help you finally to realize yourself. What you are fighting for is not the real you but just some image you are used to thinking of as yourself, Don't hold onto it; let it go. You have all the potential to realize the truth now, so don't put yourself through suf¬fering anymore. And it's not your fault. You are the product of the time into which you were born.

"You were a being with no sense of real self or real free-dom, stuck between the ideas and ideals of people around you, trying to fit into them and going ever farther away from yourself and your goals. That's why you never learned any tools to change things other than anger and hatred. You despised violence in your city, but never knew any¬thing better than to hate those committing it. You were tired and exhausted by the endless competition in your job, but didn't have any means to deal with it other than to become more and more angry and to continue to hurt. You were an ignorant human being, but it wasn't your fault really.

"You can experience a different fate. You just need to see it and to accept it. It's difficult, for you were trained all your life that to be soft and compassionate is almost equal to being a loser, the one thing you never wanted to be. But that time is over. Turn around now. Look at these human remains. Try to feel that there are human fates associated with them, as well as mistakes, suffering, hurt, unforgiveness. Try to feel your compassion. The minute you feel it, you will forget your illusory battle." [...]

"You are being granted release," his guide continues. "This is a lake of forgetfulness. This is the highest release that can be granted to you now. You've endured a long journey to reach it. But it was always nearby, from the very moment when the car of that drunk driver ran you over. It was all in your mind, your own pattern of resistance and fighting back, that kept you walking from one space to another, endlessly seeking victory in a fight nobody had with you but yourself. [...]

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"Passages like this forest have a great advantage. They are tunnels connecting different dimensions, and as such, they possess the highest potential to liberate the dead from endless wandering and to help them enter the next stage of the afterlife. It is quite difficult to do this because the fear of death is the final basic fear into which all other possible fears can be incorporated the way pieces of a puz¬zle can yield a completed picture after they have been put together. Every fear other than the fear of death, however gigantic and total it may seem at the moment of its expe¬rience, is always partial, is always a piece of the puzzle. It always indicates the presence of some boundary, some crossroad. People experience fear every time they reach a line of demarcation between different states, and fear Is the basic reaction to the possibility of a change of state, The fear of death is always the last fear. It grabs you not with anticipation of death, but inside death itself.

"Lara was brave, but when she entered dying, she wasn't ready for that ultimate fear. The more one has these gaps filled with fears, the more difficult it becomes to achieve liberation in the afterlife. You have realized that the first gap which created your relation to Lara and defined your actions in the past was that `good women can't be raped.' That was your first gap as much as it was hers, and it kept destroying her memory. Now it's time to learn about the second gap.

"It is your belief that suicide is a sin, and therefore it is a sin to remember a person who committed it. That's why you were trying to push her away from your memory. But in your heart you know this belief hurts you and doesn't let you mourn the way you want. Let it go now; realize it and let it go, because you need to learn other things. Sin, in the way your mind understands it, is a con¬cept. Suicide is suffering. Don't judge it; help to transform the hurt it has left. So let go of your personal gaps to be ready to hear what I am about to say.

"I will need to tell you about sacrifice. A proper sacrifice requires the understanding of its proper time. This is very important, so please put all your attention into trying to understand this. The proper time is associated with the realization that death has happened. No one will ever escape the moment of realization of death after it comes.
And it will come to you, you know. So you'd better be very attentive now to learn something that can help you then.

"As soon as one realizes that it is the experience of death one is facing, one has time to perform the ultimate sacrifice and free oneself completely from all fears. He needs to surrender everything in himself, everything from his former life, every single memory which would be oth¬erwise indescribably dear to him at this crucial moment—surrender it to his real self, to the divine essence which has existed in his heart always and which is now ready to accept this ultimate offering.

"He needs to gather up his persona, his customs, wor¬ries, sadness, his desire to turn everything back and return to the world which is slipping away, and give everything he remembers about himself as a gift to the sweet and lov¬ing power concentrated in his heart. And the Great Mother who always lives in his heart because She gave him life will engulf him with Her loving presence, and he will be delivered from the fear of being inside death. She will continue his life forever if he remembers Her face and asks Her to save him. Lara hasn't completed this yet, but she still has the chance to do so.
"You have only a few hours left. Remember, there is responsibility in your path. ...

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It takes a lot of power to learn for yourself that the significance of real¬ity and experience doesn't depend on other people sup-Porting it, but is connected with the experience's ability to touch and activate the deepest patterns of transformation in you. ...

there are more important tasks for you in the future, but your success with them will largely depend on how you are able to translate what you have learned here in Samarkand to other people who need to learn about it. Your major obstacle can be your doubt ,.Remember what I said and don't let the spirits of trauma poison you with their doubts, ...

we are not guilty for the hurt that other people have caused in us. It is not our fault that we got hurt and it's not us who should be ashamed of it." ...

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Psyche said:

Healing the Spirits of Trauma is a concept from "Master of Lucid Dreams" by Olga Kharitidi, M.D., a book I would had hardly read if it was not because it was given to me as a present.

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Myrddin Awyr said:

Psyche said:

Healing the Spirits of Trauma is a concept from "Master of Lucid Dreams" by Olga Kharitidi, M.D., a book I would had hardly read if it was not because it was given to me as a present.

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Thanks for sharing this, Psyche. I've just ordered the books.

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