Healing In the Non-Linear Now

Speaking with a friend last night, the subject of reliving past trauma came up. We marveled that even if events occurring in present time are hardly traumatic or dramatic, we are often triggered and plunged into a state of fear, anxiety, rage, and especially shock.

When we are in shock, there is often no traceable, ‘good’ reason for it showing up in present time. Here are a few scenarios, for example:

- Your girlfriend calls and asks when the two of you can go shopping for a Christmas tree together. She says she has the whole weekend free and wants to spend the entire time with you, baking cookies, wrapping presents, and snuggling. For no ‘reason’ at all, you freak out and seize up. Your old wounds of being smothered are tripped up.

- You live abroad in a totally foreign environment for several years, in a completely different cultural mindset. You return to your home nation, now immersed in a western, materialist world where the focus is on having and doing, rather than being. You find yourself incapable of functioning, wondering if something may be severely wrong with you. Why are you paralyzed in this infrastructure while everyone else seems to be getting along so ‘normal’?

- You’re sitting in a restaurant with old friends enjoying a great night out, laughing, talking, eating excellent food. The rambunctious party seated next to your table suddenly kicks it up to a particularly boisterous, drunken gear, and the smell of their liquor of choice – scotch whiskey – starts wafting over to your corner in gusts. Your olfactory center is triggered from a dark time in the long ago past. Like a fast-wilting flower, you are suddenly no longer having fun with your friends. While your buddies are still joking and carrying on with joy as before, you now feel depressed, lonely, and isolated – for no ‘reason.’

What do these three vastly different scenarios have in common? Shock.

How can you tell if you’re in shock? For starters, your internal GPS system completely blows out. You can’t think clearly, you may not be able to form a coherent sentence or come up with a clear answer. Someone might ask you a normal question and you won’t be able to get the words out. Your heart beat could go off the charts, or your palms might sweat. Extreme tension may arise in the body, especially in the gut or solar plexus. You could experience searing pain in the sciatic nerve.

Often, we turn freezing cold: when any animal goes into shock, the life force energy congeals itself in the deepest center of the body in order to preserve and protect, while the appendages are cut off from warmth.

Shock can be set off simply by the way a lover ends a phone call. The way a boss signs off an email. The way holiday shoppers prance around you at the mall with Christmas music blaring in your ears. The way a man looks you up and down as you board a bus. The way a seemingly normal discussion of finances with your mate sends you into an irrational, reactionary state.

None of these situations directly has anything to do with what is happening “now.” It’s what they are triggering in you from the past – or potentially even the future (intuition). Your animal instincts are up. It’s fight or flight, to which I now add – freeze. Fight, flight, or freeze.

The Blazing Flame of Awareness

How to come out of it? Interestingly, the solution is also an f-word: FEEL. The answer is to feel.

When we go to the place in the body where we most experience the seizing up, we automatically bring warmth via the light, the blazing flame of awareness. We go where the trauma, tension, lock-up or quiver is located, and observe what exactly is happening there.

That’s the first step. The second step, which is key (and easily avoided by those who prefer to stay in their intellect or spiritual superiority), is to FEEL the uncomfortable, nauseous, stuck, painful, fluttering, spinning, gut-wrenching, or even indescribable sensations that you’ve got going on in there. You might be surprised: there could even be pleasure, or a sense of soaring or floating. Usually, there are layers, and we keep going in, and in, and in to uncover until there is nothing left but spaciousness.

Feeling the sensations on a body level (see also bioenergetics and somatic therapies) brings healing awareness to a happening that made us lock up and freeze at some point in the non-linear now. Will we know or find out exactly what specific incident occurred? Maybe. It’s not important, however. The important thing is to stay with it – and breathe.

Whether we take five and excuse ourselves from our desk or the dinner table, head to the washroom and find out what’s going on in the body, or we have half an hour to lie in bed at home and feel the fear in the body – we must give it our attention. Otherwise, the shock rules us and we are zombies, the walking wounded, and cut off from our essential self. Traumatized and trapped, suffering animals.

But what about the external people, places, and things that are triggering you? What do we do about them, you ask?

NOTHING.

You sit there and breathe into the stone in your solar plexus or that sciatic nerve spasm arising (and stretch, and drink water!). You feel that heart beat so ferociously it seems your chest might explode. And breathe. As the hologram of an individual that you are, you’re delivering awareness to the point in the past or future where the actual event, trauma, trigger happens.

You’ve just given yourself a huge helping of natural healing – in the present, in the Non-Linear Now.

Erin Reese is a freelance writer, editor, and astro-intuitive healer. She works remotely with clients all over the world. Find out more on her magsite, www.erinreese.com.

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