I have been for 8 ys in an extremely abusive relationship. At first it didn't seem that way. In the first years I could say I was happy or to put it bluntly the red flags that my partner displayed were not obvious to me. The emotional abuse of being humiliated, compared to other women did not seem too important to me. You don't have a sense of humor, he used to say anytime I attempted to show him that certain behaviours he had towards me were inappropriate to say the least. Fast forward. Because I overlooked the red flags in the beginning, they magnified and got bigger and bigger.
He gradually started showing a side in him I never knew was there to begin with. He became violent. The intermittent pattern of his vilelnf behaviour was what actually drove me crazy because I never knew what to expect from him.
The physical violence was not the only type of behaviour I allowed and enabled. There was also sexual violence, emotional abuse. I had no awareness of it. Not because they were necessarily too covert for me to understand what was going on, but because, even overtly punitive, humiliating behaviours I galislighted myself into believing they were not what they were. I rationalized, justified, found excuses and intellectualized everything. And so the unbearable pain that I was going through was completely superspeed and denied not only in my subconscious, but it was carefully stored in my body. I hadn't had the slightest clue that my body kept the score of every little thing that he did to me. Until my body awakening that happened to me after my spiritual awakening. My body and my connection to my body awakened later on down the road of self discovery and healing. It is quite recently that I started noticing how tense, tight and depleted my tissues were. Because I severed my connection to my body, as the physical traumas that I endured were too painful to look at, i was in the dark about the consciousness of my body. It was only when i started doing body scans that caused me to burst into desperate tears that I started to ask myself what was actually going on. I started turning back towards my body slowly and with intense fear. The startling discovery I made forced me to look deeper and deeper into somatic healing and somatic experiencing. I was actually living in the flight fight freeze response every day, every minute. I was so numbed out and accustomed to it that it was only while meditating that I noticed how deeply unnatural the way that I inhabited my body was. Up until that point I did not consider my body sacred in any way. On the contrary. In the beginning of my spiritual and healing journey, I adhered to the philosophy that in order to live a holy life, an accomplished and conscious life, you need to leave the carnality because it drags you down, it anchors you in lower consciousness.
By pushing my body away and the wisdom it had, I was unknowingly doing myself an immense disservice. I was disowning a natural, deep and ancient knowledge that you can only find if and when you dive into your body. Now going back to the way I had the epiphany of my own body. I was doing a lot of shadow work practices when I slowly and gradually started realizing that my severe traumas were to be found even deeper. My unconscious pain was hiding in my flesh, in my tissues. I was stunned. The more I dove into the consciousness of my cells, I started remembering deeply repressed memories of my childhood. Body awareness meditation in conjunction with shadow work practices brought to surface memories that were unbearably painful. Rapes, molestations, abandonment, emotional neglect, but also deeply happy, positive memories that I had also forgotten about.I understood then why I was living in survival mode. Why loud and sudden noises startled me everytime. Why i could not be taken by surprise by anything without an acutely painful reaction on my part.
Trauma does not have to be a huge event or events that impacted you. Trauma can also be anything that is painful, not understood and unprocessed in your subconscious, chronically repeated. Everything and anything that your mind and your entire being could not make sense of. There are so many factors that have the potential to wound and create trauma: an unsafe, unpredictable environment, poverty, witnessing abuse of any kind, absence of love etc. Many people walk this earth living in survival mode because of unresolved trauma. So many people have no idea how their nervous system believes they're constantly on the verge of their lives being threatened. When something really bad and wrong happens to us, especially when we are impressionable children, The flight fight freeze response is the way in which oour mind together with our body decides to save us from that perceived threat.
However if this response is not released from our system it gets stuck and it keeps us prisoners in the past, in the moment of that specific situation. From that point on throughout our lives, we then unconsciously and unnecessarily carry the heaviness of that survival response with us, within us everywhere we go. This survival response is triggered in the sympathetic nervous system, whereas the tranquil state that should naturally happen after the traumatic event has ended is the responsibility of the parasympathetic nervous system. But because we don't know how to process, understand, make sense of what happened to us & hence naturally release the trauma & all the chemicals involved in this process, the flight, fight, freeze response, the activated survival mode remains active and hence stuck within our internal system.
What does that mean? Like I said previously, we remain anchored in survival, our body perpetually believing it's under attack and under some kind of threat. We adjust, adapt, cope with, acclimatize & accustomed to living in fear. It is so pervasive, it becomes our normal and it is only when we deliberately get into relaxing and meditative states that we become aware of the deep unsafety that our entire body operates from on a daily basis. The repressed energy of pain, shock, fear, confusion and whatever other emotions that we have denied to look at is locked into our flesh, cells and everything that this body is made up of. This is what is conventionally called PTSD.
Even if the conscious mind may not remeber the event that caused this trauma, the body never ever forgets. The diseases manifested in the body are simply the momentum of intense built up negative energy of suppressed memories and emotions that the body stored and stored and stored throughout the years.And so in order to prevent this from happening and in order to begin our healing journey, we must begin to turn inward. We must begin to turn to our bodily sensations. If you are somebody just like me who has been comepelty disconnected from your body, then I need to warn you it's not going to happen overnight. The reclamation of your connection to your body will take place in increments, slowly. Take your time. I will give you the practices that I'm doing for my somatic healing. For some of them, the best time to do them is in the morning, right as you wake up, before you drink your coffee and any other stimulants. Why right as you wake up? Because when the consciousness comes back into your body from being out of body all night, you can immediately feel any bodily sensations, any pains or aches that you may have got accustomed to throughout the day. In that moment, there is no filter, your conscious mind & your ego don't have the time to activate yet all of the coping and defense mechanisms. It is a pristine state of being, it is how you actually and genuinely feel but youre not aware of. So, that being said, here are the exercises/practices you can do. Choose one and commit to it until you feel that you need a different practice.
1. Deep and slow belly breathing. This is a classic. Use your breath to slowly scan your body's sensations from fhe top of you head to your toes. Do it slowly and deliberately. Anytime you encounter a tightness or a sore somewhere in your body, send your healing breath in that place. Send that ache your love. Surround it with the light of your awareness and the light of your love. Give it your presence. Ask it what it needs and why it hurts just like you would ask a close friend that is in pain. Let that pain talk to you. Do this practice for as long and as often as you need to. Give that pain a voice and don't rush it. Have patience with it.
2. Ohm chanting or humming. I'm sure you're very familiar with the ohm chanting. This ancient healing is so well known and widely spread because it works. It is one of the best ways to soothe the nervous system by activating and toning your vagus nerve (The vagus nerve represents the main component of the parasympathetic nervous system, which oversees a vast array of crucial bodily functions. Vagus nerve stimulation is a promising treatment for many diseases, but also depression, PTSD).
3. Gargle often. Yes, that's right. If you gargle, you tone your vagus nerve.
4. I put my hands on my chest and I affirm We are safe now. Nothing and no one will harm us ever again. I love you. I am here for you. The touch and warmth of my hand does wonders for me.
5. Intuitive dancing, shaking, pillow punching, kickboxing any type of physical activity that is done deliberately to take you out of the immobility of the survival response. That means that whenever you feel that intense trigger of the response, get up and start moving. But you can also do these physical activities without being triggered.
6. EFT tapping. You can find tons of videos on YT on how to do EFT tapping.
7. Put reminders throughout the day to check in with your body, tune into the sensations and send your body love. This is one of my favorite techniques. It's like texting an old and loyal friend couple of times a day, seeing how they are and what they need and how they feel. Its exactly the same thing.
These are just a few of the ways in which we can tune back into our bodies and hence gain an ancient and deeper wisdom. We all have this wisdom, we all have the capacity to heal ourselves. We all can live the lord of lives that we dream about. We all have the power and the intrinsic capacity to be our greatest versions. And in order to do that, you need to ask yourself if you have the willingness to dive deep and commit to yourself, commit to the purpose of your life.
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