what to do or how to feel the vacuity if there are unresolved traumas all over your self.
i got traumas that i don’t remember but i know i had them. so that creates a big continuous paintfull trauma that i call the thing in my head. i try to remember before i got those traumas and i can’t remember how it was life. so i can’t reconect to a pleasure memory of ho i was before all the traumas. trying to find the present moment in me is what i do but seems impossible, always comes to mi mind some trauma or the big one that is acumulation of traumas.
seems there is no part of me touched for the big trauma, allways there in my mind, it takes some times the color green. i have a diagnossis, but i search for an alternative or integral view. there’s no such thing in me that i can call home, there’s allways psycological paint, i can’t meditate i can’t think clearly. if there’s someone ho have find a similar situation in himself or in a patient and is getting better let me know. alll sugestions are welcome.
to resume the topic is. i always think in me as a foreigner ho have something very wrong in his mind. and i also have the same terror sensation that is stig in me all the time allways the same sensation, and i can’t get out of there. im in prison from tought and emotion and i wan to escape.
thanks to all suport and thanks for this great place that is integral life…
I just watched an episode on Sounds True with PETER A. LEVINE, PHD and he was talking exactly about that. There is a way to release trauma which you don’t really know where it comes from. He gave some good practices, and he has a book published there, too. The series is still available today for free, then for purchase. https://content.soundstrue.com/wisdom-of-the-body-summit-access?utm_source=bronto&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=C190819-WOB-Participant8&utm_content=Day+8:+Feeling+worn+out?+Learn+a+modern-day+“rest+cure”+.+.+.&_bta_tid=09461029425476418810300132751620780015039818619803240332989475570630124214940046774767938148426991583834&_bta_c=ktm48f3m3nwy4jzbu4x2azzfecnf3
I found most of the guests absolutely amazing and I learned a lot!
thanks a lot. the video is called the body of earth?
it’s only avaliable for 24 hours i must go fast.
Healing Through Embodiment and the Flow of the Felt Sense
Hey Raimon. I can imagine how having trauma/negative sensations can be frustrating, especially if English isnt your first language and trying to express what’s going on in your heart is difficult.
Maybe, in time, you’ll be able to throw out all that’s holding you back through whichever voice feels natural to you, whether that be your native tongue, english, or any of the universal languages: (the arts) drumming, singing, dancing, painting, etc.
I can’t tell you when things will get better but I will say that if you hold the intention, the desire, the unquestionable self-belief that you will get better, then you will.
Releasing trauma can be taboo in some cultures so be prepared to an lot of solo-work until you find an community that you resonate with, and are not attending for some other egoic/cultural reasons.
Grow your knowledge of the world, yes, practice meditation, but learn as much as you can about all of these practices before giving them any go. If what you’re going through is correct, then meditation might just be an coping strategy and not an legitimate long-term solution.
If there is one book that I can recommend, I know it is kind of obscure, but The Artist’s Way by Julia Cameron is great. It offers an guide towards the type of introspection you’ll need to be doing in order to resolve these blockages.
Best of luck to you.
Godspeed.
I would vouch for Levine’s work as well. ‘Waking the Tiger’ is a bit of a classic, another one that helped me enormously after going through therapy helped but really didn’t get rid of alot of the deepest trauma or symptoms - ‘The Body Keeps The Score’.
Personally the somatic angle these two both come from is alot more deep and relevant than more talk kinds of therapy, which have alot of truth to say but as others have said, deep trauma tends to be very primal, by it’s very nature overwhelming, preverbal and basically feels like relentless fight/ flight responses against threats one doesn’t understand or can barely articulate. Just reading the above books relieved me of shame of feeling thoroughly physically inadequate to be able to function properly, and understanding that is no point in revelling in historic pain if one cannot moderate stress levels enough to be able to make sense or be with them in the first place. At it’s most basic is learning to self soothe and calm one’s nervous system down enough to be able to feel safe in one’s body and the trauma , slowly anyway, then your innate ability can take over and be able to put such feelings in context, understand them and ultimately feel slowly better. There are solid techniques that both authors advocate, somatic therapy itself, EMDR, neurofeedback.
“i always think in me as a foreigner ho have something very wrong in his mind. and i also have the same terror sensation that is stig in me all the time allways the same sensation, and i can’t get out of there. im in prison from tought and emotion and i wan to escape.”
This sounds like a classic description of trauma Raimon. If you’re anything like me, these experience are inherently hard to understand or be with, put in context, as you say, prison, terror, like a tiger you can point to that’s always there but you can’t see, piont to or seemingly understand. And perhaps worse of that is the feeling of being utterly alone in that, like nobody could reach or understand. ‘The Body Keeps the Score’ for me helped me to understand that’s actually normal, and almost universal trauma symptoms. Which doesn’t take them away, but gives me the important distance from shame and instnat confusion to be able work with them or giv emyself permission to self soothe and understand that reducing stress on a daily level is mandatory when you have trauma like this.
At it’s most basic somatic therapy basically allows one’s felt sense of embodiment and safety to come back, the bedrock and foundation of any real healing, and also in many ways a welcome thing as doesn’t necessarily mean endlessly dealing with the past, just the here and now.
If you don’t want to jump straight in to the books Levine has some great videos on youtube, some simple searching should glean some general idea of the modality. Here’s one for example: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AFUZHz6_0XE&t=11s
Dear Raimon,
empathizing with you it seems to me that you might be going through what I have come to call a night of the soul experience. My longest night of the soul experience lasted for 5 years. The only thing that kept me from losing my mind was to “practice” what Pema Chödrön calls to “relax into the groundlessness of my own existence” or in other words, to open up to causal presence beyond any of the mental and emotional chaos that kept coming up relentlessly in my awareness space.
To deal with the constant sense of oppression, I used describing in detail in my diary what was going on, simply to create a tiny little distance between a “witness me” and the inner horror of a continued “deficiency conversation”, that I had no control over. To move from “I am deficient” to “I am the space within which the deficiency conversation arises”. I could not run away from it and nothing would stop it. Sometimes it felt as if I was on a continuous acid trip without having taken acid or that I would simply lose my mind. I had no idea what was going on and I could not talk to anyone as I knew/felt, even if they were sympathetic, they would not know what I was talking about, as long as they had not experienced what I was going through. And there was no one around with any kind of similar experience to talk to. So I felt stuck in a cosmic prison of eternal deficiency and uterly alone.
As my mother had told me that she had wanted to abort me, it made some sense to me to interpret this experience as how I must have felt as a fetus when she tried to abort me. I learned how important it is to have an “explanation” or a cognitive framework with which to make sense of the inner chaos I kept being overwhelmed with. And I must say that although the trauma therapeutic approach made some sense to me, it still doesn’t seem to grasp what a night of the soul experience is, because this seems to me a dimension beyond emotional trauma.
A night of the soul experience is for me the process of losing the exclusive identification with the emotional body (as distinct from losing the exclusive identification with the physical body, which seems like a first step in inner evolution). If there is any “trauma” then it is the trauma of contracting into an emotional body in the process of incarnation, contracting from a causal presence into an emotional body - and that has very little to do with the traumata acquired in the relationship with our parents. In other words, if one finds oneself in a night of the soul experience, and interprets what is going on in one’s awareness space as the result of trauma to one’s emotional body, one might misinterpret what is going on and therefore be caught in an “interpretative prison” from where there is absolutely no “escape”.
Over the years of witnessing my inner process, I watched how the “impossibility of escape” from this inner prison, triggered an automatic emotional fight/flight impulse. Simultaneously with it arose the recognition of the utter futility of this impulse, as fighting fear only increases it and running away from fear is impossible. The clash between the automatic emotional fight/flight impulse and its utter futility used to trigger virtually unbearable “cosmic panic attacks”. They seemed to have little to do with emotional trauma established in the relationship with my parents (which also exist and are a continued source of “integral practice” for me 
)
Eventually it dawned on me, that by simply witnessing this process I was developing my “causal” or witness body as Wilber might call it (each domain has its own body i.e. gross, subtle, causal). This allowed me to slowly suspend the automatic contractions in my emotional body that used to trigger cosmic claustrophobia and panic attacks. From reading what you wrote I get the impression that you might be experiencing the same emotional survival panic that I used to experience and came to interpret as losing my exclusive identification with my emotional body.
If this rings true for you, all I can suggest to you is to practice “relaxing into the groundlessness of your own existence”, suspend your automatic emotional fight/flight impulses, embrace as best as you can the unbearably painful situation in which you find yourself and cry “tears of recogniton” that inevitably come up in me, when I stop fighting and embrace my own pain and deficiency. Even if this practice sounds impossible to you, if you try it, you will probably stabilize your causal presence, increase your compassion for people’s suffering and cultivate the inner freedom from suffering the Buddha kept talking about.
However, I don’t know if you are going through a night of the soul process or if any of what I shared or suggested makes any sense to you or might be of any use to you. If it does, I wish you the best and send you my support. If it doesn’t just ignore it and find the way that suits your evolutionary journey best.
… “what’s even more important than the specifics of what happened to us is how we’ve reflected on and made sense of our own childhood experiences. When we gain clear insight into our memories and how the past has influenced us in the present, we become free to construct a new future for ourselves and for how we parent our children. The research is clear: if we make sense of our lives, we free ourselves from the prison of the past and gain insight that helps us create the present and future we desire. But what does it mean, specifically, to make sense of our lives? Making sense of our lives is all about developing what’s called a “coherent narrative,” where we reflect on and gain insight into both the positive and negative aspects of our childhood family experiences, so we can understand how these experiences led us to become who we are as adults. We’re not running away from and dismissing the past, but neither are we consumed and preoccupied with it. Rather, we’re free to reflect on it and choose how we respond.” Dan Siegel, The Yes Brain.
I would suggest a course by Doshin Michael Nelson Roshi. He is super on shadow and is integral. His course is starting September 1. Here’s a link. https://integralzen.org/integrating-our-shadows-webinar/
im doing the full spectrum mindfulnes course, and i found that im stuck in magenta (sex) a lot stuck there.being special it have been my religion for 3 decades, now im 35. so if anyone knows any practices to get out of there, faster i will welcome his advice.
i constructed my identiti arround the magenta, i really have a patology in there, a hard patology but im aware of, so that’s maybe the good news.
it’s ass hard ass imaging all the time that im another person. i wan to be diferent ass i am all the time, and i feel i have lost my true self, that i can’t be relaxed in me couse seems that my subconscious mind is working trought an imaginary self. i notice that but i can’t find myself that’s the problem, i always trouble within my, personality and the special i wan to be.
i will continue doing the full spectrum course, i really love it, and practice what its told there.
but i repeat, that if anyone knows how to speed up my situation i will embrace all knowledge given.
thanks great comunity.
Raimon, your courage to describe in detail the very amorphous topic of all-consuming trauma experience is wonderful. I have and still do experience the same (in that I could use the same words) as you describe, and my writing can be quite skilled. You did beautifully without English being a first language.
The sharings here are all caring and insightful; thanks, everyone. Would like to add a few of my own hard-lived and well-researched experiences that might apply. Besides pre-verbal body-felt trauma looping tracks that can be continually re-triggered by people/environmental interactions, the following can make trauma healing, life and consciousness development much more complex and layered:
- Un- or mis-diagnosed viral or bacterial infections such as Lyme Disease, with its many microbial co-infections, some still being discovered. Lyme trashes the neuro and immune systems, often lies dormant and hidden for years and decades in untestable tissues, and can way over-amplify perceptions of the whole self. Also, one’s self-concept can be extremely fragile courtesy of learned self-judgements from early life religious dominator hierarchy guilt trips once one is diagnosed with a mysterious “invisible illness” like “Chronic Fatigue Syndrome/Myalgic Encephalomyelitis” – meaningless names for often deadly circumstances. More trauma layers, this time from medical industrial complex sources who, in Postmodernism, are considered gods by many who follow these as some once followed organized religion.
- Environmental toxins from water, air, soil, gmo foods that destroy the body’s powerful natural defenses. Gut and brain health together become imbalanced over time and further disrupt healthy neurology and perception, especially for those who were raised starting in the '70s. Humans are exposed to a chemical soup of about 80,000 industrial and manufacturing chemicals daily since WW2; only 5,000+/- of these have been tested for effects on humans. Humans and pets can experience anything from numbing out to panic attacks according to individual genetic predisposition from systemic overload of these accumulating chemicals in body and brain tissues. (Not to mention cancers of all types.)
- Mold mycotoxins, which can actually penetrate through concrete. It is estimated that about 65-80% of all structures are WDB, or water-damaged and are generating unseen mold growth. Mycotoxins in parts per billion are actually used in biowarfare to disable and kill; again, these affect perception and trauma experience strongly. Few are aware that this is even an issue in their depression, anxiety, and all kinds of brain malfunctions. See the article “Brain on Fire” by psychiatrist Dr. Mary Ackerly/online.
- The Perfect Storm: a. familial and social trauma/injury at various developmental stages; b. add in 1.-3. above. This creates a situation some have labeled “Good luck, bro.” Doctors, family, community, social services and friends become so overwhelmed by the multiple overlapping situations that they abandon the experiencer in indirect or overt ways. The experiencer, often by this time long impoverished and isolated from society, becomes overwhelmed by research and self-care efforts. Greater layers of trauma and trauma sensitivity occur. At the same time, a dogged persister can be perceived by others as badass – in a good way, even though the person may not observe much “waking/growing/showing up.” Exponential causal growth may indeed be happening throughout this wild ride! Some might point out that this is actually happening, and I have been lucky enough to have one masterful practitioner point this out to me.
So there are ways out of a nightmare prison if one can persist. I have experienced (still do in real time, today) all the above growing out of control all my life, with some situations now more under control. It is true for me that meditation has often not been a good experience because it can allow too much Shadow content to emerge quickly.
Some ketamine (FDA approved Spravato) clinics are now offering hope for those stuck too deep. Somatic practices seem to be intuitively healthier rather than intellectual learning. Grounding practices seem to be a main key for survival. Learning to recognize and avoid the overwhelming amount of channeling, New Age, and LGATS/large group awareness trainings plus cult stuff on the net, and in every corner of the planet, has been greatly helpful. Wise kindness to self and establishing ever better boundaries rock. So does a spiritual practice of upping the game of better diet and supplements avoiding all environmental and household toxins. There is so much we can do in small daily steps that brings true light – and some increasing comfort – into the overwhelming, complicated lostness of complex long term trauma. All of it works together, including safe community.