The word for breath and spirit are connected and in her book The Power of Your Spirit, spiritual teacher Sonia Choquette reminds us that at any moment when we can choose to connect into our breath while attuning inwardly to listen to the voice of our spirit and its messages. This may sadly be a skill we are never taught to do in an excessively outwardly directed culture.
It is a sad part of modern living that so often we find our breathless or holding our breath, running around in a state of emergency or finding it hard to self soothe and self calm. This is something that is even harder for trauma and neglect survivors to do. For me this has been a huge part of my PTSD and Complex PTSD freeze and holding/paralyzed response, it is also a response to being terrorized or terrorizing ourselves or others or being overwhelmed by larger traumatizing forces.
Last night and earlier today I got a lot out of listening to Lisa Romano talk on uncovering the narcissist.. All of us are on the spectrum of both narcissism (self focus) and co-dependence (intense outward ‘other based focus’) and as she she points out both ends of the unhealthy aspect come out of shame and are the result of emotional neglect or inter-relational attachment trauma and relating trauma passed down..
Many of us absorbed these terror patterns in childhood passed down.. Some of us such as Lisa saw her father terrorizing their mother, with slammed doors, freezing looks or nasty comments (in my family it was another way with Mum terrorizing us at times and Dad going absent!).
When I listened to her sharing about this experience I thought of my living sister and what she was, at times the receiving end and later learned to dish out. In nasty manic phases its been like a slap in the face to me, some of the things that were said and some of her withering looks have frozen me in the past when I tried to open up to others and share emotions such as grief.. Sadly she has been slow to realize the impact, but how can someone give something they were never shown or given much themselves.. Often this kind of thing presents itself, even as hidden as a later breakdown.
Also on the narcissistic end many of us empaths also know what it is like to be with partners who begin the relationship by building us up, only tear us down and sadly we may also have learned to do this as well or do it to ourselves inwardly with damaging introjects. (internalized voices).
Pete Walker points out at length in his book on Complex PTSD From Surviving to Thriving what a huge role both the inner and outer critic play in these conditions and when the critic is so invested in shutting us down it can also stop our breath, he highlights in this book the Four F patterns via which Complex Trauma manifest.. fight, flight, fear, and fawn.. In her book Sonia recommends that we work to be more mindful before we move into a reactive phase in response to demands from the inner our outside world, stopping for a moment to pause and connect to our breath and also to listen to what our inner voice or intuition may be trying to tell us in our body. But this too will end up taking a lot of time and inner insight healing work for so many of us just over run and running on unconscious programs instilled into us in childhood.
Sonia’s book is an interesting read for those of us undergoing spiritual awakening, for sadly, for so many of us in our culture a spiritual awakening is not recognized as such, lost of connection with our true spirit may be cut off, the movie Pray Away that I linked to in yesterday’s post shows how when we give the power in our life away to outer voices and judgements based on rejection of the ‘flesh’ as sinful then we fall into problems but we can also be cut off from our spirit in many other ways.
Illness, depression, inner crises of faith and sexuality, in relationships or due to accidents may also be times of potent spiritual awakening and spiritual emergency as well as emergence. Sonia tells the story of a young man in her book, Robert who becomes ill at 23 and wakes in what seems to be like a dream in a room with a Native American Grandmother holding his hand, surrrounded by a host of other Grandmothers, at the time Robert was close to death but this vision of this journey inward and the information he tapped into then in terms of spirit and his life later led him to embrace a totally new path devoted to healing, music and Shamanism..
For myself meditating on my own accident at 17 today I also saw the ‘gifts’ of being taken out of life and school for those three months at the end of 1979 in my final year of high school.. That accident separated me from my peers, I had a lot of other experiences of loss and separation that followed, ending perhaps with my husband leaving and then my older sister and Mum dying in 2017.. The past years involved with my sister’s struggles with mental health, trying to connect to others (including men) in loving ways while having to face a deep level of my own narcissistic wounding and codependent/low self esteem patterns has also been part of what I would now choose to call a profound spiritual awakening.
When our spirit is asleep or put to death by forces around us we suffer but our suffering may be, for many of us, the birth place of our ‘real’ the wake up call that challenges us to fall deep into the void or abyss to find out what will truly fulfill both our spirit and soul This may involve negotiating a lot of wounding for some of us. And this awakening may be, to me, the deepest message of this morning’s 8th of the 8th Lion’s Portal awakening.. At this time the Moon met the Sun in Leo and Leo is ruled by the Sun. This Sun shines down on us and radiates from deep within us when we learn to embrace our authentic inner life, joy and power.. When we seek the ways to light our own inner lamp with a divine spark of self, perhaps nearly extinguished and begin to use it to find our path out of the dark night of the soul we so often fall into in a culture that separates us from inner self and spiritual knowing as well as from unconditional love.
For this many of us empaths or HSP’s we also much need to dial up the inner Solar light of our own precious Ego.. for in the words of the iconic 70’s Aussie rock band Skyhooks “ego is not a dirty word!”
Anita Moorjani talks in depth about this process of ego strengthening for empaths in her new book Sensitive Is The New Strong and Lisa Romano in that talk I will share below touches on many of the same themes. As empaths who may have been neglected, invalidated or undervalued in childhood we often learn to turn towards others in giving or service and end up being hurt, betrayed, sucked dry or used. We are often low in self esteem due to inadequate parental nurture and recognition of our valuable inner gifts, but this wounding situation as well as the manner in which it replays in our outer lives will also be the situation that most encourages us to look for another way. Learning to tap into what feeds our soul, brings us joy, raises our vibration and strengthens, rather than depletes our inner power are all lessons we need to learn.
Recognizing too when we may be attracted to those on the more unhealthy end of the spectrum of narcissism will also end up being a most essential and important task for us.. People with NPD will ask too much of us, they may build us up only to tear us down later and be successful in completely dismantling our ego with their barbs, insults and criticisms, this most definately happened to me at the end of that last painful relationship… And we may have a lot of positive ego building to do coming out of such a relationship..
This healing also involves taking responsibility for being loving and self loving, knowing where the limits of unhealthy helping end and what it might actually mean to become capable of healthy, nurturing, mutually receptive relationships.. that for me seems right now to be the biggest ongoing work in progress.. When transiting Saturn goes forward again in October it will leave my 6th house and it had a glimpse into the 7th of relationships around May.. together with Mars now crossing onto the planet of transformation and stored emotions from the ancestors in my first house I am hearing and feeling even more about this.. When I get to tune within I get messages and it pays to heed them, therapy helps me to consolidate all of this by sharing and listening to the experience of others also helps me to ground the knowing.. To get confirmation of the way this kind of spiritual awakening and core healing can manifest in the lives of others too..
Emerging From The Dark Night 