The Energetics of Healing
What I love about being a trauma therapist is that it is all about working with energy--the fascinating paradox is that when we start to work directly with the energy of trauma, it unleashes incredible forces of potential.
In these current times it seems we are faced with our limitations to make sense of it all. We can only make sense from what we know, and as in all times of great change, we are being propelled into the unknown. What I find in most media and popular discourse is that the main driver of our world is left unseen—that is the drive of evolutionary impulse. We tend to fall into two camps—one is that everything is falling apart and entropy is really the only driver of life as we know it. The other is that things are all love and light, that if we just stay in a state of love and hope, everything will be okay. The first is nihilism and feeds all kinds of human dysfunction, and the second is most often denial and spiritual bypassing. I propose instead that there is an another possibility—that there is a drive of evolutionary impulse dancing between polarities, plunging us into the depths of human suffering while also emerging us back into an ever flowing Presence. The drive to evolve is actually pulling the suffering INTO the present so that it can be healed. The energy of suffering—our personal and collective traumas—are fixed patterns in an unobstructed flow of life. Wherever we feel snagged, that is our work.
This is not a new idea. It is part of all contemplative faiths and shamanism and indigenous ways of knowing before that. Nowadays we are using quantum mechanics to make sense of these basic energy structures of the universe—reality is both particle and wave, both fixation and flow. I like the idea that our human reality is a dance between vortexes. The trauma vortex pulls us into fixed whirlpools—we feel this as contraction, addiction, obsessive thoughts, feeling fragmented in our being. Like a stone thrown into a pool of water, it ripples out, fixated in dysfunction that is felt intergenerationally and across lifetimes. We live in an upside-down world, where we believe the world of trauma vortexes is our true identity, with our egos forming hardened shells of protection. No wonder our nervous systems are frayed, most people are addicted, and we walk around feeling wired and tired, susceptible to all kinds of manipulation.
As all life is in duality and inter-relationship, there is a polarity to the trauma vortex, and that is the healing vortex. This is the counter-energy that spins out toward expansion and belonging. It is the things that authentically grab our interest, not from an addiction, but from the unique and personal spark that we are in the world. Like the air that we breathe, it is our basic birthright and is always, always here. However, we have to train our minds to orient to these currents. We can feel this in our bodies—where is our body lighting up with an impulse of desire? What if we follow it? Most have shut down communication with their bodies other than those sensations that give us survival information. It is a revolutionary thing to claim the birthright of sovereignty and belonging—to be uniquely and freely ourselves while also in relationship to all life around us.
The road to healing is a path we walk our whole lives. Even if we get to a place that we feel our personal work is done, I find that there is a spiraling back to go deeper inward, and that usually involves cleaning up birth and perinatal traumas, mis-attunements, and ancestral lineage, as well as the outward journey toward deeper connection with the collective and the transpersonal realm. This is an ever-present journey back to our right to be, to belong, and to evolve. With practice it becomes more and more clear how these energies are moving throughout our being. At any given moment we can note the movement of our energy—is it present, in flow, is there spaciousness? Or is there contraction, and if so where? Is it in thoughts, is it in our bodies, our emotions? When we are in the trauma vortex we will feel it. We don’t feel all here. We feel disjointed, our thoughts tend toward negativity and extremes, but we can surf these energies instead of being pulled down into them. In small moments, little by little, we can ride the energy of trauma, bring it into the present, and back and forth until we are riding the wave of freedom. And that feels something like the longest, most releasing sigh of ahhhhhhhhhhhh…yeeessss…I’m here.
Peter Levine, Waking the Tiger: Healing Trauma
Peter Levine, In an Unspoken Voice: How the Body Releases Trauma and Restores Goodness
Thomas Hubl, Attuned: Practicing Interdependence to Heal Our Trauma—and Our World