Category: Reflections on life

  • Jeff Foster: “Trauma, thank you for protecting me”

    TRAUMA, THANK YOU FOR PROTECTING ME

    Here’s the main thing you have to understand about trauma: it wants to keep you hidden.

    Why? It’s trying to protect you.
    It’s only ever trying to keep you safe.

    It imagines threats where there are none.

    Stuck in the past, it wants to keep you close to what you know,
    close to what you can control.

    When you begin to leave your comfort zone, take that brave step,
    express yourself, assert a boundary, try something new, separate from the know world,
    it will assume, based on past evidence, that YOU ARE IN DANGER,
    and it will do everything it can to get you back to safety,
    convincing you to be small again –
    in order to protect you from failure, ridicule, abuse, further shaming.

    Your mind will scream.
    Your body will shake.
    Your muscles will tense up.
    Your heart will race.
    Your breath will quicken.
    Everything will feel… wrong.

    We can’t destroy this conditioned fear. We can’t get ‘over’ it.
    The more we resist it, turn against it, judge it as bad or wrong, or fight it, the worse it gets.
    The more we reject it, the more we reaffirm to it that the world is truly unsafe.

    We cannot delete the fear but we can turn towards it. Understand it. Have compassion for it.
    Have a more loving conversation with it:

    “Thank you for protecting me, trauma. You served me well. But maybe the danger has passed.
    Maybe I don’t need your protection today. Maybe I am bigger, stronger, safer than I knew…”

    Then, the very same energy that suppressed your authentic self, starts to work for you.
    Liberated, it begins to     express your authentic self, helping you play, be creative, speak up,
    take up space, and take those courageous steps into the Unknown.

    The very same energy that suppressed you, now works to express you.
    The energy that used to shut you down from life, now spends its time trying to open you up to life.

    You learn: IT’S SAFE TO BE ME.

    This is the greatest thing of all. It really is.
    To feel safe within yourself.
    To know that your nervous system is always working for you.
    To love your body, and to know that you are not your body.

    Trauma is condensed life energy, that is all. Stuck, constricted, it longs to be liberated.
    It longs to be seen, known, felt.

    When it’s met with love, it can blossom, YOU can blossom, into pure creativity.

     

    Jeff Foster

     

    What Jeff is saying here, is my own lived experience and I have seen it happen with many others – friends and clients: as soon as we turn towards our trauma (either ‘big T’ Trauma, ‘small t’ trauma or any experience in life that seems to have cut us off, made us small, tense us up)…

    …it gets liberated and this part of us re-awakens to our true, creative self.

    We all have experienced some form of trauma, of life energy getting stuck, and there is a gentle way to return to the pureness of our being.

    I am not a trauma therapist, but it is my job and passion to help all people find inner peace through movement, compassion and breath. On my socials (Insta, Facebook) and in the online school, you will find exercises to help you along your journey.

     
    Image credit: Photo by Matthew Waring on Unsplash

  • Parenting with Presence (book tip)

    A little while ago, a friend had been cradling our then 13 month old daughter as she was struggling to sleep.

    “She required nothing but complete presence,” he said afterwards, “or she would cry.”

    Indeed, when he picked up a book, she would wake up and cry. For her to sleep, he had needed to sit with her in perfect stillness.

    Now how’s that for a Zen practice?

    But good parenting requires more. Perfect stillness at some times, creativity and strong action at others. And especially in those moments when it gets really hard, that’s where the magic happens: we either plant the seeds for further drama, or cut the chord connecting generations of suffering and set ourselves and our children free.

    In Parenting with Presence (Nederlands: Opvoeden in het Nu, Deutsch: Kindererziehung im Jetzt), Susan Stiffelman helps parents find peace, joy and transformation through the everyday encounters with their children. She gives many examples of how we can raise our children and ourselves to be conscious, compassionate and centered human beings.

    I loved this book. It made me even more aware of how connection is so important in any relationship – with myself, my child and my partner. It gave me a sense of lightness about parenting teenagers, which is not the phase that I am in yet but it will some day. And it is just super practical, going beyond wishful thinking pseudo-spiritual blabla into the knitty-gritty of real life parenting and its challenges.

    Recommended by Eckhart Tolle.