Flying into San Francisco I was stunned by the jolt of energy I felt. Having bathed in the soft, yielding, loving energy of Playa de Carmen, Mexico for a week, my reentry into the hard, frenetic and stressful energy of the city was both disturbing and illuminating. Getting ‘out’ made me realize what I had been ‘in’. I wondered if this was how newborns felt as they left the womb and entered the world. For me, this experience illuminated not only my personal level of stress but that of the collective. Further, it helped reveal an unacknowledged source of stress, my unhealed childhood trauma.
Our nervous systems, as it turns out, were not designed to handle the unremitting stress many of us are under. It does very well with short bursts of stress whereby our fight/flight/freeze response is activated (via the sympathetic system) and then balanced by the relaxation response (via the parasympathetic system). However, persistent stress can overtax our sympathetic systems and reset them on high. When one is under pronounced stress as with traumatic events and no viable option for fight/flight are seen, our freeze response may get activated (animals play dead). Unlike animals who instinctively release excess energy from trauma by “shaking it off”, humans are prone to incomplete releases, often leaving the energy of that traumatic event stuck in our energy fields. Our health depends upon the free flow of life force energy.
Research now reveals that those who have experienced childhood trauma have higher incidences of chronic diseases, anxiety and depression as well as changes to the brain, DNA and shortened telomeres. Think of the implications of this on the collective! Those who have been traumatized tend to traumatize others. Our stress and that of others ripples out into the collective creating a field. Although healing begins with the individual, there is much yet to learn about collective healing.
The journey to unwind the effects of my own childhood trauma has taken much time, attention, awareness and understanding, but I can attest to the benefits of making the effort. I have utilized multiple modalities over the years to heal trauma and balance my nervous system. A short list would include giving myself quiet time to “be” and not “do”, aerobic exercise, relaxing in warm water, good sleep, massage and energy healing, touch/holding and revisiting trauma with the help of another or my own inner loving parent. One of the quickest, most effective ways I have found to release blocked energy and bring buried emotions to the surface is Holotropic Breathwork. It is important to have a guide at first to help integrate what arises.
Our personal healing is our greatest contribution to planetary healing. It is how we begin to co-create a new collective energy field, one more relaxed, open, loving and free flowing.
This article was published in the October 2016 addition of SIBYL magazine
