Peter Levine and Thomas Huebl (who works more with collective trauma rather than individual) discuss healing trauma and spiritual growth:
- healing trauma is not spiritual growth, but it can open pathways to it.
- trauma doesn't necessarily have memories associated with it, but it does have symptoms. Working with symptoms may help to recover specific memory, but can vary in the time it takes to get to it if at all.
- perception of time is different where there are unhealed traumas.
- healing trauma is one thing, but changing the associated personality can be a lifetimes work.
- uses an analogy of waves created when a bunch of pebbles are dropped into water and where the waves intersect is where the trauma response is and there is blocked energy disrupting connectedness with self and others. Healing trauma allows the wave to move on unimpeded.
- discussion on collective trauma and how the narratives may be different, but the trauma is pretty much the same.
53mins
Thanks for sharing. I've added a few additional notes as that was an interesting talk. Never heard of Thomas Heubl before.
- Trauma, at the deepest level, is not being able to be in the here and now and can be seen as, or looked at like a wave, whose energy has gotten stuck in traumatic events where that motion is locked/blocked and needs to be released.
- For those who are traumatized, meditation can be hanging around in dissociated spaces and that’s not what you want because in the dissociated space, we are not able to evolve our energy. Our energy can only evolve when it’s connected. When there is disconnection, there is no movement.
- Daily experience is our practice time. Inappropriate relations creates a lot of trauma, so appropriate relations are healing and one of the fundamental spiritual practices.
- They talked about Contraction and Expansion – Light and Darkness – has to be held together. Because it’s not all light and that’s one of the gifts that trauma transformed, offers. You learn how to hold polarities in experiencing the non-dualities of existence.
- Working with the core and essence of trauma, the person is eventually able to say
I’m alive and I’m here, I’m alive and I’m real. So the process of becoming more alive and more embodied is - at a minimum - a life's work.
- The past is not what happened yesterday, the past is what has stayed from yesterday and has gotten stuck.
- Question about cycles, healings, dimensions of patterns IRT trauma: Somebody who is stuck in the fixity/grip of trauma, wherever they look, every person they meet, every relationship, they are banging into their trauma. As you work on it for a while, that sharpness starts to smooth out so that you are eventually able to rub up against it but move along and through it.
-Healing is about developing relational capacities enough to create an environment of healing
-Answer to a question about how to handle someone who doesn’t want to let go of their trauma: To transform trauma is easy, to transform a personality takes a lifetime
- Why does it take so long to remember non-verbal trauma? The word memory is used in a narrow way. The types of memory involved in trauma cannot be remembered in the same way a declarative memory can. They are remembered not as memories as we normally think of it, but as reaction patterns in the body and emotions that erupt seemingly out of nowhere.
- Know how to meet and bring those unconscious memories into greater consciousness which can be formed into a healing narrative/make sense of it.
- If someone can help you track sensations, you’ll eventually be able to access these memories.
- Q: How to know if the trauma is personal or tapping into the collective? A: Doesn’t matter. Do you have to have a memory to work on it? No, everyone has a symptom, behaviour or haunting and that’s all you need (to work on it). Start with your pain and symptoms, what’s close to home and work out from there. When you are more stable, becoming more aware of the world and the collective.
- Lot’s of discussion of surfing on the energy of the moment. You’re not interpreting but rather observing how it flows. That’s the best tracker to unravel the question between individuals and collective issues. Need to work on yourself before working on the generational. Sometimes, individual trauma can be entangled with a generational process but that’s more complex.
- Trauma is primordial and the key is being able to feel those sensations and emotions as gently as possible, the trick being having our frontal cortex alive and working, receiving it’s information from the senses within the body. Allows us to have enough distance to not dissociate or suppress them – the most primitive and the most conscious held together.
