We all probably over do it. Thinking. I was re reading Peter Levine’s book on restoring goodness after trauma In An Unspoken Voice yesterday. It was the chapter that dealt with how part of our evolutionary development as a species has seen us sacrifice in many ways the life of the body for the life of the mind. Instinctive and instinctual impulses that guided us as predators on the plain that were also preyed upon, now are not able to be used in quite the same way and so we look for a sense of aliveness or thrill through all kinds of substitute means. When our bodies suffer the traumas that have ensued from human kind’s impulse to over think, over do, over possess or over achieve our instinctive bodies become trapped in a storm of consequences of this trauma that are difficult to undo or escape.
The traumatised body is a body we often dissociate from. We cannot quiet bear to feel the painful symptoms and reminders of a vital aliveness and connection that got cut down or lost. Often in trauma we become paralysed with thoughts and memories laden or saturated with fear. We replay disaster scenarios over and over again and in the replaying or over thinking hope to keep ourselves safe, while also trapping or locking our spirits deeper in a cage or prison of suffering. Our entire being becomes gun shy and we lack the propulsion to live full of fear of a present moment that could provide us with more suffering.
We also abandon our bodies. We cannot quite bear to feel the exquisite and at times painful or naked feelings that true vulnerability brings. And so we escape. We escape into addictions or into social media. We escape most often into our minds and in doing so we can so often abandon the life of a body that then feels betrayed and tries to get our attention in all kinds of ways.
This morning I woke up over thinking. I met with my Mum yesterday to help take her to an appointment and once again she showed disregard to painful feelings I have from things in the past. As usual the focus was on her and her own suffering. It was almost as though all the painful things that I went through and suffered at her hands were invisible to her. But my focus was not on that. It was on the pain of how my brother had failed to help my nephew and then in denying that pain my Mum had made me question my own thinking and gut responses. I truly was in a bit of spin and my body was all over the place. But it was only by propelling to move my own body forward this morning that I was able to throw off all of those thoughts. I just got focused on taking actions in the day and slowly my body co-operated as I left the world of my mind and feelings alone for a time.
I then sat down to write this post and lost the entire thing. The first post I wrote was entirely different to this one. What this has shown me is that my thoughts are changeable. My thoughts also though provide a focus. But at times my thoughts run on repetitive feedback loops which are not helpful to me. These feedback loops ran become like gravitational force fields that suck my energy down and rob it from the present moment. When they are focused on the pain of the past I am not in real time in the present. I have literally sacrificed the life of my body for the life of my mind and thinking about that is the gist of what Peter Levine talks about in his book.
In trauma we loose touch with our body. Our body becomes to us a fearful place, full of the painful sensations of trauma that in hurting drove us away while at the same time capturing us in a tortured personal underworld. We are then driven by instinctual hunger gone rogue, perhaps repressed or buried, often mistranslated.
Unless you have suffered significant trauma yourself you will not understand fully the pinning aspect of this dark work experience. Energy is captured by the pain of what transpired. And try as you might with all your will you cannot ‘get over it’. You can not even get out from under it (which is more apt) without help to understand things that happened that so long ago were lost to your mind, happening in a body that then got cruelly sacrificed or had to be shut down, chilled or numbed out with addictions. God forbid that we could feel the naked power and pain of the intense vibrational charge that got stored in muscles, organs, hearts and cells, cells, heart, organs and muscles that literally began to burn and sing with the stored vibrational charge or agony fire burn of trauma/anxiety.
Life in death, death in life and the singing vibration of being a being that is alive though feeling so dead, that is the legacy of trauma, longing for life but aching from it, desiring it so strongly but pulling away or staying trapped or barricaded in fear of feeling the very things that feel so good but in taking became so bad and painful and barren, that too is a legacy of trauma.
So much of what happens in trauma cannot be fully articulated, most especially in a blog. It is beyond words, it is a lived and felt experience full of sensations that need not to be run from or dissociated from but mined and unpacked through full engagement and presence, but in trauma this is what traumas sufferers are so often denied. Instead we are shunned or labelled and misjudged or more aptly feared as an all too painful reminder of what might happen to others!
The process of healing is hard to articulate but if you suffer from trauma I do recommend a read of Peter Levine’s book. I want to re read the book myself at greater depth as in it he deals with what I see as a most powerful split between mind/thinking and body/sensation/feeling that in becoming so problematic for our culture is also asking of us a revolution in the way we live with, through and as a consequence of traumas which have themselves come about as a consequence of this split. More than that I don’t have the energy to articulate today. For the life of my body calls me asking me to live and ground in life not cyber reality at least for the next present moment.
To be embodied means that we are guided by our instincts, while simultaneously having the opportunity to be self aware of that guidance. That self awareness requires us to recognise and track our sensations and feelings. We unveil our instincts as they live within us, rather than being alienated from them or forcibly driven by them. These facts of life make living in the now a formidable task. When embodied, we linger longer in the lush landscapes of the present moment. Even though we live in a world where bad things can and do happen, where unseen dangers nip at our heels, we can live in the now. When we are able to be fully present, we can thrive with more pleasure, wonder and wisdom than we could have imagined.
Peter Levine, The Embodied Self, In An Unspoken Voice : How the Body Releases Trauma and Restores Goodness
Emerging From The Dark Night 