A Healer’s Resource is Her Guide for Healing Trauma
“I’m all I need to get by” — Beautiful Chorus
In my experience, healing trauma wounds requires a resource. A source much greater than the trauma itself, and yet a force able to pull back the layers with appropriate tenderness and grace. So what is it for me? What comes rushing in as I gasp breathlessly in the clutches of emotional intensity? Faith, hope, and somatic awareness; these are my tried-and-true companions on the healing journey.
Reliving the past through the forgotten lens of pain can be an experience all consuming. Drowning in the intensity of shoved down feelings that seek to tidal wave the present moment reality all at once. I’m not sure it’s possible to heal trauma without a resource. A lifeline. An anchor into what is real. Not to discredit the feelings that come flooding in, for they feel all too real. What I mean is the real that is timeless, cast before and after judgment. What goes on even when we’re not here to pay it attention. A resource can come in many forms, it’s the thing that brings us back to the now when the riptide of trauma is yanking us ever backwards out to sea. Locking the sight onto something of beauty. Smelling flowers as they waft their scent to the breeze. Listening for the sounds that nature births effortlessly. Touching the texture of life’s material things. Whatever it may be, sensing the present through the body’s senses can be a balm for a sensitive system aching to connect to a felt sensation of safety.
Noticing the triggers and through what sense it comes, is the door that hides our greatest potential. A vault stockpiled with gifts and with healing, for the self and for the collective species. Some say, and I’ll add my hat to the ring, that trauma wounds are the tangled web of our unrealized superpowers. Those parts of ourselves remained cast in the shadows, when brought to the light and integrated, reveals the pathway for which we may confidently and assertively walk our lives with grace. The inner pathway lights the way forward, lays the bricks of purposeful embodiment, and illuminates our core reason for being.
It’s not all spiritual woo-woo and conceptual hoopla. Nor is it a one way highway in which my way is the only way. All I can say is I’ve become intelligent towards what triggers me, I study myself unceasingly. Thrust myself onto my own examination table and cut me open so I can see how I bleed. So I can pay witness to each time I’m triggered and observe my desperate attempts to flee my body. How every coping mechanism has lost its potency. Either face the feelings or go on believing I’m dying. Either hunker down and heal this now or put a bandaid on the cracked dam and anxiously wait the inevitable. My goal has been and will always be, to heal in the manner most effective to me.
Through my many years of self-transformational healing I’ve experimented with many resources. It’s come in the advice of friends and family, from the studied professionals of therapists, coaches, and psychologists. It’s come in the form of a steady yoga practice, from intuitively moving my body with the rhythms of music. I’ve found it in chanting sacred scriptures and humming melodic tunes. I’ve found it in the repetitive nature of crocheting and creating mala prayer necklaces. It’s come to me as a deep exhalation, as a swim in a salt water pool. Walking barefoot in nature, watching emotionally stimulating movies, hugging my dog, painting, writing, playing music, and so on and so on and so on. I will never stop collecting resources because I will never stop learning. I am the eternal student. I explore for exploration sake, I seek for the sake of seeking. I heal for the sake of healing. Collecting resources and expanding my reach into all things that ignite curiosity is what gives me the confidence in living life autonomously.
That’s always what it’s been about, reclaiming sovereignty, healing these wounds of trauma to be who I and who we are all destined to be. To gather the strength to look dispassionately upon ourselves and resolve what needs to be dissolved back into the fold. To heal what needs to be healed, so that the canvas of consciousness may be a clean slate for us to step in as creators and create our masterpieces.
