Taking steps from trauma to Light

Trauma and Light

Talking about trauma isn’t pretty. People tend to turn away, hoping it never happens in their lives. Or deny that it has happened – to them. It can seem inconvenient to take time to feel into these tender places – especially in a culture that prizes staying busy and producing. When we carry the baggage of trauma, we live with a loss of dignity. To be socially acceptable, we pretend we don’t have a hole inside. We distract ourselves by staying busy. We prize Doing – and disconnect from Being.

Here, I share some specifics, to make the universal process of bringing Light into your Shadow more personal. Traumatic experiences, when seen as having value, can be a map to wisdom wholeness.

Once upon a time, a long time ago…. I was a baby, hurt and neglected by my mother. Only years later, as an adult, did I learn that Mom had been diagnosed with postpartum psychosis. Because the diagnosis was kept secret, Mother and child went untended. The hurt was never talked about.

Learning of my mother’s diagnosis was grounding – her erratic behavior and harmful ways with her children had been observed by other people. This helped me have more compassion for all of us.

My mother’s childhood was traumatic. Because she did not have the resources available to her that we have now, she stuffed her feelings and did the best she could. The compassion I felt for her didn’t heal the wound.

When trauma occurs in our first 2-5 years of life, the neural pathways in our brains develop in response to trauma messages. Alarms turn on and stay on – even when they no longer serve us. The state of alarm alters our brain chemistry, our adrenals, kidneys and hormones.

Thanks to what we now know about our capacity to generate NEW neural pathways, even decades later – this effects of trauma can be lessened. Here are steps for healing from Trauma to Light. You don’t have to do them all. Read them and see what pops out at you as alive for you.

First: Uncover the memory. To my surprise, a traumatic memory surfaced while I was taking a medicine bath with essential oils and flower essences. Even more amazing, a wound actually appeared on my body. Along with that came a memory that had been buried – which is exactly what my nervous system needed to do, to survive.

I reached a point in my life where I was ready to move beyond surviving.

I treated the wound as if it was recent, with lavender oil and Rescue Remedy. I watched it heal over a period of days. I was tender and with my body.

Months later, the emotions I had internalized came to the surface. I raged and cried out feelings that had been frozen in my body for decades. As my body released and relaxed, I felt better.

My next challenge was to disconnect the sensations in my body from the trauma story. My emotions and my story were like a ravenous tiger. The tiger let go of me after I fed it. I wrote in my journal. I talked with therapists and a compassionate friend.  I published an essay in Mother-Daughter Memories: Love Revealed about what happened.

I told the story for as long as I needed to – as long as it was alive in me. Many people told me things like “you’re not your story.” Or, “let go of the story.” For anyone with early and pervasive trauma, this is not quite so simple.

Over time, I started to lose interest in the story, not because people told me I should. Once I felt fully seen – with compassion and kindness – I naturally began to move on. I became interested in observing how I responded to the event, what beliefs I developed about myself, about my mother, and about the world–all because of what she did when she was in a psychotic state of mind, disconnected from reality.

For years I thought she hurt me because I was unlovable or unworthy of her love. As I grew up, she often called me cruel names and reinforced my feelings of shame.

I understood she hurt me because she was so badly hurt by her mother. From both the stories she told us and what I intuited through the Akasha, I sensed generations of mother-daughter abandonment, neglect and loss of safety. Victimization was a prominent theme in the maternal lineage.

I believed at one time – that my life purpose was to break the pattern to STOP. I was and am highly motivated not to pass this on to my own children. So I kept plugging away. I kept bringing all the compassion I could muster to myself, to her, to the lineage – and to all mothers and daughters throughout time who have suffered abandonment, neglect, mental illness and abuse. At times it felt like slogging through mud. One foot in front of the other….

I explored past lives with my mother. In one, she was my daughter who I abandoned. I was to be tried as a witch in the Inquisition in Europe in the 1400’s. I gave my 4-year old daughter to another woman to raise as her own. I didn’t even tell her goodbye. Everything was rush-rush. I was terrified. I didn’t want her to know I was going to be tried as a witch. I wanted her hidden safely in the woods. I didn’t want the authorities to know she was my daughter. I believed that was the best way to protect her. Under the circumstances, it was what had to happen.

From a 4-year old’s perspective, what could she think but that losing her mother and her home was due to some lack or flaw on her part? She believed she was being punished and abandoned because something was wrong with her. Not knowing the truth made her crazy.

That’s what children do. When a parent hurts them, they believe it happens because something is wrong with them.

Resolving karma isn’t actually about balancing the wrongs and hurts we do to each other throughout time. It is more about seeing beyond the surface to the deeper truth of who we are as Divine Beings in human form.

At some point, the mask came off. I saw my mother’s true nature as Absolute Love.

But I still believed there was something wrong with me.

My next insight was the realization that she couldn’t see me clearly. My mother couldn’t see my true nature. She didn’t know who I was. I had to find that for myself.

Another huge aha came when I realized that my mother injured me – and herself, and others whom she loved – because she didn’t know who SHE was.

All that Knowing released me!

HOW MANY OF US KNOW WHO WE REALLY ARE, ALL THE TIME?

I am able to see my mother now. She is both human and Divine. We all are. Behind the mask of the “wounded human” is Absolute Love.

You may not need to do all these steps. If your healing journey feels endless, have courage. Love who you are–right now, in this very moment.

Here’s the process I’m describing, one step at a time:

• Reconnect with the wound. Come out of denial and let it come forward. Do this as a way of claiming your humanity. The dark parts of you deserve to be heard, seen and loved.
• Cry; express emotions. Write and talk about it. Process it for as long as it holds emotional power. Yes, you will come out of it. The way out is through.
• Take care of your Inner Child. Become the safe, adoring mother/father you never had to your Inner Child.
• Study the archetypes of victim and perpetrator. I especially identified for a long while with Persephone and Hades.
• Identify the traumatic themes in your ancestral lineage.
• Learned from your past lives.
• Notice what themes are being repeated.
• Come to a neutral, curious and compassionate place with the themes, the characters and all that happened.
• Get a better feeling for your Soul’s infinite capacity to heal and to love.
• Dedicate yourself to embracing the Divine in all things, the Inner Jewel at the center of all Beings.

When we feel hurt, threatened or angry, it is hard to see the Divine at work. Even so, the Divine Spark is what ignites the life force. No matter how deeply it gets buried or tarnished, it is still there.

One of my clients recently said to me, “I need a session because I can feel that I still have work to do.”

I had to smile. We all have work to do, places to go. Our Beingness wants to expand and evolve. Walking this path gives me the nitty-gritty insider view to help you walk your path.

Whether or not you’ve experienced trauma – and most of us have had some kind of trauma – the limitless potential of Akasha will help you go to your next level.