Do we ‘heal’?

I am asking this question of myself today, after watching the video from Jeff Foster on illusions many of us carry around ‘letting go’.  He talks in that particular video of how we put a lot of pressure on and talk a lot about healing these days, but what can occur with our projections of or hopes for ‘healing’ is that we turn away from our experience.  Instead what we could do, and many of us don’t like to do, is just spend time with our wounds and get a stronger idea of the shape, feeling, pulse, character and texture of them.  In this way we could deepen into our experience, our deeply felt experience (outside of all the things our heads may be telling us while we do it “this is just too painful”, “I don’t want to feel this way”, “Why did this happen?”,  “Will anyone ever love me again if I just don’t heal?”  to name a few.)

Escaping the prison of our minds and all the ideals and ideas they place around us in some way involves seeing how they take us out of the present moment of pure being.   A large part of trauma means we get locked in our minds but the body has its own deeper agenda going on.  Feeling too much can be intolerable so we try a million ways to escape and shut it down.  In truth everything in our upbringing and culture possibly functioned to increase this way of responding.  Then we may just get trapped in a way feeling there is no way out and then we find ourselves involved in an oppositional relationship with our symptoms.  All of the reading I have done on trauma by those who actually help people to deal with it involves increasing our tolerance for painful, uncomfortable feelings which remain stored as a vibrational charge within.

The work Peter Levine does involves pendulating between those old painful trauma imprints and sensations and more positive sensations that don’t belong to the past, such as the feel of the clothes on your skin or the breath of the breeze on your face or drinking in the vibrancy of colours and beings that surround us.  It has to do with removing filters so we can see more deeply and feel mord deeply, which is not really what modern culture encourages us to do.  Instead we are told to project outside of ourselves, asking others and things to hold our value or prove our value.  We don’t get to turn back within and deeply embrace the values in side of us or appreciate all the miraculous gifts in our world that simply surround us and fill us up for free!  And we often devalue who we are and yes, even our deepest symptoms which are often, as Jungian analyst James Hillman points out symptoms of soul seeking expression.

And this idea of healing in some way contains a deeper paradox because according to Buddhist traditions there is a deeper part of our essence or spirit which in some way remains untouched by all of the experiences of pain and trauma we go through on earth.  In Buddhism they speak of our Buddha nature that part of us the just glows like a sun behind the obstructions of clouds that pass over us.  Yet our body can and does suffer too. In trauma as I have pointed out in other posts real neurobiological events and changes occur in our tissues where charge is stored.  Our sympathetic and parasympathetic nervous systems get discombobulated.  Witness those shell shock survivors who returned from World War One whose bodies became contorted.  I go through some thing vaguely similar with my own trauma symptoms on a daily basis.

When we as spirits enter this earth plane we are affected and yet there is a part of our spirit or soul that is eternal too, a part that has the capacity to witness it all and in time will shed it all as a snake sheds its skin.  On one level we don’t really need to heal anything and on another we will never be totally healed of life for to live is to be pierced just as Christ was on the cross, which is a profound metaphor for what happens when pure spirit incarnates in matter.  Can we ever fully heal and do we want to if one of the purposes of being unhealed or wounded is that we grow in wisdom, depth and understanding?  Maybe at heart it is a paradoxical question, with both yes and no answers,  never the less it is an interesting question to reflect upon.