“Be careful with your thoughts,  for they become your words.

Be careful with your words,  for they become your actions.

Be careful with your actions,  for they become your habits.

Be careful with your habits,  for they become your character.

Be careful with your character,  for it becomes your destiny.”

Anonymous

Yours in healing,

Gloria

Yours in healing,

Gloria

~ White Eagle ~

As a beloved family member prepares to make her journey to her true home in the spirit, I’m doing what I can in my small ways to love her and comfort her before she leaves.  Doing so is taking up much of my time these days.   I’ll be returning to my treasured blog when the grieving is done.

Ever wondered if there is anything you can do to grow out of the psychological conditions labelled ‘addict’ and ‘trauma survivor’?  Well, there are.  Eventhough each carry the burden of feeling trapped in a world of unending pain and suffering, each also hold the potential for relief and transformational change.  The question is how ready and how willing are you to do what you can do for yourself, right now, to move out from where you are and into a new condition of mind and body?  It’s a big question.  And for some one that rouses a genuine fear of the unknown.

What would happen if you stepped out of the warm emotional nest of an old identity, one you’ve been tending for a very long time, even if it’s been a painful one, and into an identity you’ve never experienced before?  What would happen to the comfort of the familiar pain?  Where would it go?  More importantly, how would you feel without it?  Exposed?  Frightened?  Relieved?  How would you identify yourself when the words ‘addict’ or ‘trauma survivor’ no longer apply?  Then what?  Who would you be then?

The good news is the movement out of a comfortable emotional nest of an old identity and into a new one is a natural process.  It can be a process that unfolds at a pace that is comfortable for you, where you can do what you need to do to take care of yourself, in the now, while you grow steadily into a new you.

What would this process look like?

• Creating safety and preventing relaspe, and getting clean time under your belt.  This lays the foundation for the emotional work you may know you need to do.
• Learning to regulate your emotional experience in order to be in control of it once again.  This will help you to feel safe through the healing process, and to prepare yourself for future emotional work.
• Creating a container for your felt experience through your body to learn to be in the present moment as it is, unfettered by wishful thinking about the past or future.  The present moment is your point of power for healing and forward movement.
• Enlisting the support of compassionate others who are both walking the same path as you, and who have walked this path before and  know the way through.

Together, this approach will meet  you where you’re at to enhance your power to change by working with, and not against, your natural healing instincts.  It will help you to grow into the person you already know you are deep inside.  Stay tuned for details about an innovative new program being designed to support you through this life enhancing process.

How does this translate into the ‘real world’?  Well, take drinking for example:  What if you’ve been conditioned to want a drink whenever you feel stressed?  And what if there was a moment when you’re desiring the drink when you could allow the desire for the drink to be okay?  To see desire for what it is . . .  just another desire . . . and to feel desire in the body . . . to name what it feels like in the body . . . and then within the privacy of your own mind, lean back from desire and simply be there with the perception of it, without taking any action (yet).  What would happen then?  Well, it would give you the ability to . . . pause . . . to consider the ways in which you could respond to desire, before you actually did anything about it.  Rather than being pulled back into a tour of duty with the addictive behaviour.

How can you let desire for something be okay?  You do it by learning to hear the Witness.

In Steven Cope’s masterful work ‘Yoga and the Quest for the True Self’ he talks about how the Yogis discovered that if we can work with our awareness in a way where we acknowledge sensations as they arise in the body, experience these sensations fully, and perhaps most importantly, bear them, we can find freedom and no longer be bound to the world of duality.  We would no longer have to feel compelled to react to sensations as they arise.  In bearing them, we let them be.   In letting them be, we can see them for what they are.   In Yogic practice this is called the Witness conciousness.  It holds the power to free us from our own conditioned responses and to the play of opposites in the world of duality.  In learning to work skillfully with the Witness, psychological healing will flower.   This is awareness in action.

What is recovery all about anyway?  What does it mean to recover?  What was lost in the first place that needs recovering?  Webster’s online dictionary defines the word recover as to regain, as in, ‘to bring back to a normal position or condition’.   This implies a movement back to a place of origin.  What would this place of origin be for the person in recovery?

In a previous post, addiction was defined in part as a condition surviving in a space of separateness through which the individual has lost a sense of connection to self.  (’What is Addiction?  March 21st, 2009)  It is a dissociated state of being that exists suspended from the experience of being itself.

To be, means to exist.  To exist, means to be present.  What’s missing in the life of the person in active addiction is their undoctored present moment experience.  How do we gain entry to our present moment experience?  By paying attention to our experience in the here and now.

The Yoga tradition teaches through the vehicles of the breath and the body that we can become attuned to paying attention to our experience in the here and now.  By watching, sensing, and feeling what is happening in the body, and by following the rhythm of the breath, we can leave the experience of separateness in a bygone moment.  In so doing, we become better able to re-connect with our authentic experience in the present, no matter what it may contain.  For the person in recovery, coming back to our place of origin implies coming back into our authentic experience in the here and now.    

What can make matters even more confusing to the trauma survivor is our society perpetuates old misinformation about what trauma is.  It contains a number of misleading beliefs that can barrier you from getting the help you need to move on emotionally to live a fuller richer life.

Here are a number of misconceptions about trauma that our society holds true:  

• You cannot recover from a traumatic life event.
• You need to abstain from an addictive substance or behaviour before you can begin to deal with trauma.
• Your body needs to be in danger from someone, or something, in order for the event to be considered a traumatic event. 
• You are responsible for the traumatic event(s) that you’ve experienced.  It’s your fault.

Do you believe any of these myths about trauma are true?  Are any of these myths in the way of you getting the help you may need to heal?  For instance, do you believe you cannot recover?  Do you believe you will be living in the same frightening state of mind forever?  In the relm of psychological healing, our beliefs hold the potential to pave the way to the coveted state of well-being, or on the contrary, keep us locked in a painful and constricted psychological reality.  The truth is, you can recover.  Many people have done so before you.  As long as you are breathing, there is hope.  And, depending on your circumstance, the healing process can begin while you are still engaged in an addictive behaviour.  You don’t have to stop the addictive behaviour before the trauma work can begin.  The two can be looked at at the same time.   

Furthermore, trauma is actually a psychological experience of an event where any visual harm to your body may, or may not, have occured.  Consider mental and emotional abuse for example.  While you cannot see its effects on the body, you sure can feel its effects in your soul.  It’s your subjective experience of an event that defines it as a traumatic one, not whether or not there are bruises on your body.  And if there are bruises on your body and your gut is telling you you’ve been traumatized . . . you have.  You are not responsible for the traumatizing action(s) of another.  Ever.

You might want to pause here for a moment and . . . take a big breath in . . . hold it in for a moment . . . and  e-x-h-a-l-e   d-e-e-p-l-y . . . before we move on.  Now that a number myths about trauma have been clarified, what’s next?  One option could be to allow yourself to search out the kind of support that would be meaningful to you at this time in your life.  This could include finding a competent therapist who is trained in trauma to help you navigate your way across these potentially stormy emotional seas.  It could also include finding a skilled Yoga teacher who understands the healing process who would provide you with a safe emotional  environment where you could self-explore and resolve long held memories from the past.  The point is to consider getting the help you need when you need it.

One final note before we say good-bye.  Our mission here at psychologicalhealingandyoga.com is to support you in healing the effects of trauma and addiction.  As time goes on there’ll be ’home grown’ products and services available through this venue designed with you in mind, to enhance your power to change.  They’ll be created from only the best cutting edge information from the fields of trauma, addiction recovery and Yoga, and will include skilled and innovative support to help you make your way through an emotionally challenging period in your life.  To learn more about our developing work, stay tuned for future NEWS updates.  In the meantime, take care and stay safe.  As always, I welcome your thoughts below.

In the meantime I’ve written an article called the ‘Ten Secrets to Psychological Healing’, which you can get for free when you sign up to this site.  It talks about the things you can do right now to enhance your healing process, and is based on many years of experience teaching Yoga and facilitating change in thousands of individuals.   

Thanks for stopping by.  

Yours in healing,

Tashina