Many people, maybe even most people, are in various degrees of trauma recovery. They are either making peace with their lives as they are or finding ways to numb the lingering effects of traumatic events. In other words, they are finding ways to cope. Although useful and certainly appropriate at times, coping strategies ultimately don’t fulfill our deeper yearning for a life that is truly free from the bondage of the past.
Whether it is from the trauma of being abused or thinking of oneself as abused, of being harmed, hurt, oppressed, or imprisoned, our nervous systems cope and recover as well as they are able. And there are many for whom the nervous system doesn’t cope well at all, and trauma continues to be a lived experience.
But there are people in every walk of life who find that their experiences of trauma ignite within them a call home. Often it is trauma that sets the stage for the search for lasting inner peace and freedom.
When you are ready to acknowledge trauma without running from it, fighting it, denying it, or indulging it, trauma can be a doorway to a deeper realization of true self. Trauma creates a tear in the universe that gives way to rebirth. A freshness is revealed, the promise of new life, of your true life. You survived, and now, as you continue to grow and evolve, you get to live life in a new way. You get another blessed chance to realize who you really are and what you most want for your life.
There are many therapeutic avenues available to process trauma and heal a dis-regulated nervous system. What I am offering here is the possibility to cut right through trauma and discover what has never been affected by any experience of the past. Through direct self-inquiry, you have the capacity to not be defined by anything. This is the healing. Who you truly are in the core has never been touched by any experience of trauma. You may even find that if you stop “working” your suffering-- the telling and re-telling of the story of your trauma--then suffering can begin to resolve itself naturally.
Are you ready and willing to stop defining yourself as the result of traumatic experiences? To stop the masochistic turning of the knife in the wound? In this you are both perpetrator and victim. Are you ready to stop the victimization? You are inherently free, and you always have been. Those traumatic experiences never really touched your true nature as infinite, unchanging, incorruptible wholeness.
Without trivializing the origins of our traumas or the suffering that they created, and with all due respect to the pain that has been experienced, the suffering of trauma can also be exposed as no longer necessary. It doesn’t have to be a life sentence.
The Stopping Is the Healing
When I was a child, my mission was to fix my mother’s alcoholism. It was useless, of course, because she wasn’t interested in being fixed. I would write her furtive little letters and leave them by her bed, begging her to stop drinking. My sense of victimhood was based on “if she were different, if I weren’t embarrassed about my mother, then I could be happy. Then everything would be fine!” She never even acknowledged those letters, and this was part of the central psychic childhood wound that I carried into adulthood.
Eventually, when my mother was on her death bed, I went to see her. She knew she was dying, and at her bedside I saw that I desperately, deeply, profoundly loved her. I also saw with clarity that all along she was never going to change unless she chose to, and that truthfully my life could be free of her choices. As a result of that realization, I could simply be there with her and with the love that was so clearly present between us. When I finally dropped my agenda, I saw her as beautiful just as she was, and that she had taught me so much.
My invitation is to stop searching for relief from your suffering, at least for a moment, and see what is always here. See what has no need of healing because it is already, unbreakably whole.
You are not your experiences; you are the consciousness in which all your experiences occur. Pure consciousness is the truth of who you already are and have always been—not your name, not your body, not your history.
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Gangaji is the author of The Diamond in Your Pocket, Freedom & Resolve: Finding Your True Home in the Universe, You Are That, and Hidden Treasure: Uncovering the Truth in Your Life Story.