Broadly we can consider healing to be “doing the work” which includes attending to our psychological wounds, our past traumas, and even getting to the deeper and subtler stuff of self improvement. For the purpose of this series we are going to use the term healing to include lots of different variations, include attending to our immediate mental well being, any kind of spiritual development, self-improvement, negative pattern and cycle breaking, as well as trauma-specific work. The overall journey we go on is a path that every story seems to tell us about, whether this is through archetypes, about the seeker’s quest, or battles that we fight within. The outer layers of this work can be simpler, but deep work takes working with the nervous system.
At a very basic level our nervous systems help us navigate the world, it senses our external and internal experiences and sends this information to the brain. Our nerves feel hot, cold, and pain, letting us know about the world around us and if we are safe. We have a sympathetic and parasympathetic nervous system, the sympathetic is responsible for our flight and fight responses (and similar) and the parasympathetic controls out rest and digest cycles. When we respond to a threat we go into fight, flight, fawn, flop, or freeze, and each of these have a healthy ways of expression and disordered tendencies. An example of this for the fight response is being assertive versus getting into a fight. Our nervous system can be broadly in three states, homeostasis (which is essentially in balance) where we can rest and digest, or in hyper-arousal which is a heightened that prepares us for movement like fight of flight, or hypo-arousal, a depressed state that reduces our actions and numbs our experiences. These states are necessary for us to safely navigate the world.
The Vagus Nerve, which is a system of nerves that starts in our face and reaches down to about our heart area, is a very important part of our nervous system when it comes to working with it to resolve past emotional experiences and come back into regulation and homeostasis. It connects to our inner ear and to our gut, which is why when you’re nervous you can lose balance or feel queasy. If you stay in a mode of hyper-arousal (anxious state) for too long, you can go into what is known as dorsal-vagal shutdown and be stuck in a functional frozen state from systemic overwhelm. In our day to day lives it is expected to go in and out of both hyper and hypo-arousal from time to time, and our vagus nerve, or what is known as our vagal brake, helps us come back into regulation. If our vagal tone is poor we can have trouble regulating our nervous system and emotions.
We all have what is called a window of tolerance, which is the span of experiences and emotions we can process immediately and healthily without going into hyper or hypo arousal. When we experience trauma, and especially trauma that leaves a post-traumatic imprint, this window can be reduced, sometimes quite significantly. Healing of trauma requires us to improve our vagal tone and re-widen our window of tolerance, as well as releasing and processing stored emotions. Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) can happen when we are quite overloaded from an acute traumatic experience and it gets stuck, for ongoing on long term abuse or traumas this can show up as Complex Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (CPTSD). Even without trauma we can have stuck emotions and experiences in our nervous systems that need attention, from our lives or even left there epigenetically.
There is a narrative of shame around trauma, that if we have mental health problems or trauma in our past that we are permanently broken, or should feel bad for being as we are. This is problematic, not simply because it does not indicate brokenness in any way, just information in our bodies that needs processing, but also because it is simply untrue that we are stuck with it. Trauma can be fully healed, though it will change us we don’t have to live with the symptoms forever. On that note, if we look at trauma as something that is unsafe and trains us in response, we can go back over our lives and especially early on see that experiences that were not loving when they were supposed to be would have this effect. We also live in a set of societal systems that are abusive, by continually keeping us afraid, forcing us to be certain ways, and to participate in many terrible things. In this way we are all carrying some form of complex trauma as there has been no way for any of us, even those with loving homes as children, to have escaped the systemic traumatization. The good news is that this too can all be unlearned and healed.
This bring us to the question of who we really are, given that so much of how we are is learned or even inherited, and this is very important to notice. A healing path is about going deep within ourselves and untangling it all, finding our true selves and healing and letting go all the pieces that aren’t, or that are holding us back. This also allows us to get in tough with our intuition, our gut sense of the world around us. The world of fear and exploitation we currently live in can only function because most people are not in touch with their fundamental intuition of what is fully right and wrong, because we have not had access to the care and love we actually should have.
We also hear often that time heals all wounds, and there is a truth to this in that our bodies know what they need to heal, and will over time process a lot of what we’re been through, we certainly see this with grief and we try to let the waves of it through as they come. For some things though time will not be sufficient because the stuff is deeper than we can work through in the background and needs to be expressed and re-processed, making room in our nervous system for whatever was experienced. Everything is stored in the body, lots especially in the fascia, which those who have experiences repeated verbal abuse can tell you as their bodies will have pain and inflammation as if they have been physically hit each time, but it is invisible. The mind interprets the signals from the body, and our thoughts are approximations of these signals. Sometimes our bodies are yelling at us for attention and we get spooked by odd and scary things our minds make of this, shaming ourselves for who this might mean we are, but if we listen more closely we might be able to find that these interpretations and words in our heads are inaccurate, and if we heal what is asking for healing, they subside.
Another physical manifestation of our internal wounding or unprocessed emotions is muscle armouring, which is essentially when our muscles are preparing for a blow, or reacting with the emotions we are having, whatever the appropriate movement it. Since we’re often out of touch with our bodies we can’t fully pay attention to these signals as they arise so they stay with us as muscle tension which can quite literally bend us out of shape over time if we do not attend to it. In listening to these tensions it will not suffice to try to make them relax, and we will not be able. To massage them away, but rather we need to let the physical motion complete and learn what it was trying to tell us. Some of the things that come up in our minds and bodies, and even our odd fascinations, might not be coming from our own experiences but those of our ancestors. Since we’re all navigating the world and in some way trying to make sense of it and resolve our own issues, we are all in some way already on the path.
Traumatic experiences and deeply ingrained tendencies will generally not resolve themselves on their own, even if we try consciously changing our behaviour. It can be very helpful to develop an awareness of ourselves and our ways of being, and increase the time between when something happens and when we react so we can do so mindfully, but this does not work when we are responding to traumatic triggers or deep patterns. We can end up feeling horrible about ourselves if we shoulder the blame for not being able to change these things, and this can even take us in a worse direction, for it is compassion for ourselves we need in order to heal.
We can look at the overall process of healing, self-improvement, or the spiritual journey with a couple of metaphors. One common one is that of kintsugi, which is the Japanese art of repairing broken vessels with gold, the idea here being that the healed self, or what can feel like brokenness can actually result in something more beautiful. You may have also heard the idea that our cracks are where the light shines in. Extending this idea we can see the path as one of cultivating the golden self, using love to turn the whole being into love, and not just to be an amorphous lump of gold or pile of dust, but a beautiful and unique being. We should be careful though as we want to approach this with gentleness, not smashing ourselves to pieces on purpose, but starting with the pieces that have been shattered by the world already, then gently polishing or filing away the rest.
This work of transmuting pain into wisdom, and filling all the resulting emptiness with love, can be thought of as alchemy. We use love itself to turn the lumps of stone into gold. In processing our pebbles we’ll likely start with the most obvious ones, then move to smaller and smaller ones once they are uncovered. You can think of having a container of sand and pebbles and you shake it to bring the bigger ones to the surface, but sometimes big ones hide too and come up after you’ve moved on to smaller pieces. In this way we can see how the journey of becoming more loving and more healed gets subtler and subtler, but also how some of toughest stuff might be hidden under a pile of easily accessible debris on the surface. And some pieces seem to need the majority to be gold already in order to be available. These things are the pieces of our past and the experiences of our ancestors that were so difficult that we cannot face them unless we are stably internally tethered to a sense of unconditional love.
The goal of this journey (noting that it never really ends as there is always more to learn, but gets easier and subtler) can be seen as wholeness instead of fragmentation, being fully free, being our most loving selves, our most authentic selves, or having self mastery, which is being in control of ourselves rather than being at the whim of the world and our conditioning. We can become unconditionally loving of both ourselves and everyone else, and you will find that these are a reflection of each other. Along the way we cross different thresholds, make significant steps, and somewhere along the line we can let everything go and find a sense of unity and deep peace, and a transformational point after which love runs the show.
In order to endeavour into this work we need safety and safe relationship. This work will require us to sit with our discomfort, but we need safety for our nervous systems to be willing to let things out. When we are ready, stuff will automatically surface, but we need to be watching and sensing to see what they are and need. The other requirements for healing are love, or in practice, self-compassion. You can eventually process emotions and stuck experiences though just breath work and re-processing techniques but you are less likely to actually grow or transform with only that, and it may take far longer. Beyond safety and love, you need a set of tools, which can take the form that you are most interested in or drawn to, but should include some form of embodiment or movement, breath work, and mindfulness.
Movement is for the purpose of getting in touch with your body, listening to it, and releasing things that are physically stuck in it. Examples of movement include dance, yoga postures, walking, etc. The important part is that in doing these exercises you deliberately get in touch with your physical self and pay attention to what is coming up or where there is tension. Break work can also take many forms, starting with deep intentional breathing, to numerous specific exercises depending on what you’re working on, the importance of this is that breath is how we work with our nervous system and actually move information, emotions, and love around our bodies. Think of how we breathe (or don’t) when something unexpected happens. Mindfulness is needed to create focus to we can go deep and really hear, learn from, and release things. This can be meditation but it doesn’t have to be, it can also be anything that gets you in the zone, like repetitive tasks such as knitting or even chopping vegetables, painting and other artistic practices, or walking. Once you have tools practiced you can combine them into spending intentional time healing deep wounds.
The work of changing ourselves and facing our deepest and darkest parts is very hard, facing our pain directly is counter-intuitive, we naturally avoid pain after all. This is why we have to cultivate tools and make space in our nervous systems, and expand our window of tolerance, and watch our patterns, before we can get to some of it. Next week we’ll go into how to set up a practice, how to find and learn different tools, and then the weeks after that we’ll talk about what we use them on. These are essentially all the different parts of ourselves and our lives from birth to death, and especially all things we’d rather not acknowledge.
In terms of what to expect along the way, it’s important to remember this process is not linear, it will be entirely unique to you and your internal landscape. We should never compare our lives and paths with anyone else, and especially because it’s meaningless to try, as we all carry different burdens, tendencies, experiences, and how we progress and in what ways will also be different. This work also takes a lot of time and should not be hurried, consistency more than anything is key to keeping going. The whole of it can be thought of as a fractal of spirals, and we go round and round on the way in facing the core of something, we transmute it finally, then go round and round on the way out again but then each round is easier. Though transformation might take effect immediately we have to integrate the change, in our neural pathways and actions as well as in our gut biome and DNA (for the really deep stuff). This can take anywhere from a week to years depending. We must find rest, allow time for integration, and always approach ourselves with gentleness, not pushing too hard. Only you know what’s right for you, and your internal guidance (and guide) are going to be your best teacher of any and all of this work. The main goal of external support should be companionship and helping you meet your internal guide.