The healing power of witness consciousness

How often have you had the powerful realisation of a witness consciousness within you that removes you enough to help you look upon your past self or inner baby, child, adolescent or adult self that struggled with so much over your life with healing love and compassion?

I had a very powerful experience of this today in therapy with Katina when I was sharing about and feeling the burning energy in my chest around my heart, I had the sudden insight that it was exactly this time last year I started my radiotherapy for breast cancer very close to the second anniversary of my sister’s death and I was talking to her about body memory and the post I wrote prior to this one, and realised my body was remembering how it felt to be burned over that month of treatment last year, all around the first anniversary of radiotherapy, my body remembered.

I then had a two visions, one of me having to move myself onto the operating table just prior to the operation with no sedation and of the many times 30 in all I had to put myself on the table for radiation therapy.  Katina said to me, “Perhaps a year on you have enough time and distance to begin to grieve for all that you went through” and that is how it felt, I saw so deeply into my soul and felt that oceanic swell of grief, love and compassion.  On some level I was conscious of this most beneficent loving presence that was there witnessing the emotional truth with me.

It is not a new experience for me.  I had many visitations from a goddess kind of figure in the darkest days following the ending of my marriage and the accident I had that saw me living in almost complete isolation subject to ongoing panic attacks, along with experiences of being savaged emotionally by negative voices and demon like figures that on some level wanted me dead.  As I look back on that time I am full of sadness for myself but also acceptance.  That was where I was taken in my recovery journey before the Pandora’s box of my past suffering opened up and I had to experience much of it on a somatised (body) level before I finally found good therapy quiet some years later.

That is why when I write about the fact that I believe our soul has the inner power to contain and witness all we have suffered in our lives, it’s not supposition or just an intellectual or philosophical insight,  I just KNOW it with every fibre of our being, and I see how little we speak of soul in modern times and how often we forget it is present in every dark symptom we undergo, trying to make its voice heard.

I felt so much lighter after leaving my therapist this afternoon.  I was speaking to her of how my past grief is now like a dead animal on the side of the road I want to leave behind, but prior to this we were speaking of how my past pain and trauma will always be a part of me, but now it is no longer the whole of me, possessing me entirely from within,  I am no fool in that I know there will probably be lots of other painful dark days but my experience is that the more this loving witness presence is present in me the more I recover and the more light I retrieve from the darkness.  I am a firm believer that we don’t leave the darkness behind, by facing it we illuminate it and in time it is dispelled, like clouds it can come back and obscure the sun again but we know on some level it is not the whole of us, just a huge part of what it was to struggle so much darkness and trauma alone, at a time we were so ill equipped to deal with it.

The one powerful thing I heard the goddess/witness say to me in those dark days mentioned above was this “in time you will emerge from the dark night victorious”.  I often remember y dead sister saying to me in the final years of her life,  “Deb, you know in the end everything is going to be okay”.  Yes, she died but that death bought my nephews back into my life and grief made us all aware of the power of love to unite souls forever.  Witness consciousness fills my heart and soul with so much compassion and love, which I struggle to express here.  And want to bear testament to it, for a I am sure so many of you may also have had this experience and if you have not, perhaps this will give you some hope, some light.