Trauma Healing And Spirituality:
Spiritual awakening is not glamorous and it put us in a position where we have to learn how to let go. To learn to let go, we have to learn to let go of control. We all have experiences where we were unable to let go and wanted to control a situation or someone.
This unconscious desire to want to control everything and everyone is rooted in our childhood. There was a time where we felt powerless and to feel safe or survive, we have to learn to grasp on things we can control. This becomes an unconscious patterning that we bring into our adulthood and not realising that we still carry and play out from those traumatic events and circumstances.
What occurred to us during the childhood/upbringing that made us feel unsafe and put us in survival mode, was not something we are to blame for. We are not responsible for carrying the blame or a burden for something we didn’t ask for.
From personal experience, it became a habit to want to control how others saw me. This means that I had trouble saying no and I’d agree to things that didn’t particularly sit well with me. I became a people-pleaser and it was so easy to mesh myself into a person who didn’t reflect who I am authenticity. This type of behaviour is rooted in my childhood and during the time I was embedded in the idea of being a people-pleaser without being aware of doing it until I hopped on the train to trauma healing.
We don’t realise how much trauma creates and embed itself to all areas of our life; mainly in our personality and how we view ourselves. I’m someone who was spiritually awakened because of the path I went on. It wasn’t psychedelics that ‘woke’ me up, it was my pain and my trauma. Those two aspects of myself that I repressed and buried have been one of the most empowering and the precipice of my spiritual awakening.
Many people who jump into trauma healing find a sense of purpose underneath all the trauma that was covering their identity. It’s because, as we suppressed our pain, hurt and traumas we all so suppressed aspects of our self. That’s what trauma does, it chips away fragments of our self until we don’t recognise our self or feel lost in a world that ones were so familiar.
There is one particular thing I have found that is similar to trauma healing and spirituality, it gets us to jump into the unknown. The unknown of who we are outside of our trauma and the trauma response we labelled as our ‘personality’. The unknown of living a life lead by our higher self, soul and intuition.
Living a life that is lead by our soul and higher self is not as easy as it sounds or looks. It takes time and works to learn how to use our intuition, with that comes practising it and taking actions that may look random or ‘out character’ for those around us; although it’s because when we lead and move base on our intuition and the guidance of our higher self it’s not for everyone to understand nor is it their business, it’s’ for us to learn to trust and have faith in our self.
Having faith and trust in our self is not as easy as it might sound although this is where healing comes in. I believe that we have to heal certain aspects of our self and reclaim fragments of our self before jumping into all the metaphysics and spiritual theories.
Spirit In The Human Mind:
For us to learn to trust our self, we have to learn the reason why we don’t trust our self in the first place. We then unpack them and dismantle them so we can reconstruct them from a place of security and stability. That’s what healing is and using the tools of compassion, empathy, kindness, forgiveness and love. Without those tools, we won’t be able to recreate a foundation that is stable and secure. The intention should be that when we reconstruct a foundation it has to be stable and secure, so we don’t have to dismantle each time something goes wrong in our infrastructure.
That is why I believe healing is part of spirituality. We can't live a life that is lead by our soul/higher self if we can't tap into those aspects of our self and are holding on to self-limiting beliefs and narratives.
[Writing piece going in-depth of Learning To Trust One Self]
There is this concept within the spiritual community that we choose where we are born, our body and our situations etc. In some sense yes, although the way our psyche is constructed within this human body and mind, we forget that we intend to push things to the subconscious for our consciousness to make room for new information.
When we are carrying internalized and unconscious patterning, conditioning, beliefs and behaviours etc. and then tell our self that "we choose this life, we chose these experiences", there is a part of us that feels rejected and will continue to internalize the shame, judgment or rejection we are not even aware of.
This is where Shadow Work comes into play. [Writing piece going in-depth about Shadow Self and Work].
The deep-rooted reasons on why we don’t trust our self, intuition and the suppression of our higher self are located in our subconscious; shadow work is the type of inner work that assist us into looking deeper within our self.
It’s hard and uncomfortable to dive deep within our self as it’s something we might be family with, although when having the desire to live a life lead by our soul and higher self, it’s a must. The rewards of being comfortable and at peace with our self is a reward we can not buy anywhere else and it’s not a reward someone can give to us. It’s a reward only an individual can seek within themselves.
Inner Work And Letting Go:
Spiritual awakening is not just about mediation, crystals, sages, spiritual retreats and psychedelics, it's having to unlearn and strip our self from who we are not and then learn we truly are. The being able to practise those theories about our self in the way we move in our life. Having our beliefs and morals that we preach and tell our self which reflect our movement in life, as it's not just in theory any more.
It's challenging because we have to let go of a lot of control when we begin to live a life soul lead and having to trust our self that we will make the right decision. The thing is I believe we always make the right choices in a sense because in the moment of choosing we tend to not know the outcome or the consequences (if it’s a new option of choice or circumstances). That is why having faith in our self is need when we follow the guidance of our higher self.
When we feel hesitate, it’s having to unpack the reasons why we feel this way. Why we can’t seem to surrender and it’s finding the root cause. As we find the root cause it’s important to know that this process has its process in its self. That we are required to learn to let go during this process of unpacking and be open to the idea that we do not know everything.
The biggest challenge we as the collective are going through is taking a leap and trusting our self. We cannot trust our self if we are holding onto old wounds and ignore them. Trusting our self is an inside job and it’s a job that reaps its rewards when we begin learning to do so.
A lot of things within spirituality and trauma healing is about letting go of control, the past, our outdated behaviours, habits, narratives, self-limiting beliefs, old versions of our self, people and environments that no longer align with who are.
When we sit back and think about it, we actually don’t have a lot of control of many things, although looking around we still did alright. We still manage to get up every day and continue with our lives.
It’s grounding our self in gratitude rather than the things we can not control. Learning to shift our focus and energy to the things we can control gets easier as we continue to practise and learn to trust our self. -
Just like any type of habit it takes time, work, effort and practise till it becomes effortless. Just because we fall back to old habits does not make us a failure, we only fail if we stop trying.
Continue with the inner work and learning to be compassionate, kind, empathic, forgiving and loving towards our self. Reconstructing a whole infrastructure and foundation isn’t an overnight job. Be patience and be open to learning.
Be Kinder, Less Critical.