There is only one decision you need to make;

either you are working at your Freedom,

or you have accepted your Bondage.

Robert Adams

May 2010 bring you all you need to support you in your healing journey.

Warmly,

Gloria

If you bring forth that which is within you,

then that which is within you will be your salvation.

If you do not bring forth that which is within you,

then that which is within you will destroy you.

The Gnostic Gospels

“Let me not pray to be sheltered from dangers, but to be fearless in facing them.

Let me not beg for the stilling of my pain, but for the heart to conquer it.

Let me not crave in anxious fear to be saved, but hope for the patience to win my freedom.”

Rabindranath Tagore, Indian Poet/Saint

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.

“If you want to intercept the secondary waves rising, you need speed and clarity of perception, an acute self-awareness.  If your lake is muddy and impure, if there are lots of toxins in your system clouding your vision, clarity of vision is impossible. . .  Someone who is clouded, toxic, sluggish, discontented (blaming others is a prime cause of discontent), and restive in mind is never going to catch a secondary wave coming to the surface.  It will have expressed itself in action before they even notice it.  It is through the acute awareness and speed of action that we cultivate in asana (postures) and pranayama (breathing practices) that we can reform ourselves.  In addition, by breathing before acting, we are able to slow down our responses, inhale divinity, and surrender ego in our exhalation.  This momentary pause allows us the time for cognitive reflection, corrective reaction, and reappraisal.  It is the momentary pause in the process of cause and effect that allows us to begin the process of freedom.

The endless process is breath, cognitive reflection, corrective reaction, reappraisal, and action.  Eventually this process blends into the present moment, no past, no future, but action and right perception soldered together in a peerless moment, and then another moment and another.  Eventually, we are no longer caught up in the movement of time as a sequence or current sweeping us along, but we experience it as a series of discrete and present moments.  No rising thought wave can escape the sharpness of such vision.  It is what we call presence of mind.”

How present are you to the activity going on in your own mind?

“If consciousness is like a lake, there are primary waves or fluctuations of consciousness on the surface of the lake. These are easily discernible. An example is that if you are invited to dinner by dear friends and, at the last minute, they ring to cancel, then you’re very disappointed, you’re unhappy, you feel let down, and you deal with that on the surface. You have to calm yourself down, get over your disappointment. This is a challenge, an external challenge as it were, that causes a ripple on the surface.”

“The secondary fluctuations or waves are different. Those are the ones that rise up from the bottom of the lake. The bottom of a lake is covered in sand and so, if in life you experience a sufficient number of disappointments, the ripple on the surface creates a wave that goes down to the bottom, and imperceptibly that ripple creates a little bank in the sand, so there is a little mound of disapointment. As a result you will find yourself frequently disappointed or sad at this mound at the bottom sends off secondary fluctuations or waves.”

“Let us look at another common example. If you constantly find yourself being irritable, annoyed by something – your wife, your children, your parents, or anything at all – a sufficient number of irritable reactions will create, imperceptibly, not in one time only, a little mound of irritability at the bottom of the lake of consciosness, and that will eventually make you what we call an irritable person, an angry person. If you have smoked since you were sixteen, every time you pick up a cigarette in the day you are also brainwashing yourself. “In this situation I pick up a cigarette” mound. That’s why cigarettes are more difficult than almost anything else to give up. Aside from their physical cravings, we create mental cravings because the habit is very repetitive. The habit of smoking puts itself into every situation. The triggers to that situation are so many that many smokers still sometimes want to smoke even years afer they have stopped because the mound is still there . . .”

“The practice of yoga is about reducing the size of the subliminal mounds and setting us free from these and other fluctuations or waves in our consciousness. Everybody aspires to be free. No one wants to be manipulated by unseen forces, but effectively, the banks of samskara* in the dark depths of the unconscious do just that. As stimuli from the conscious surface travel rapidly down through the levels of the lake, the encounter uncharted banks of sediment that cause secondary waves of thought. These in turn stimulate, in a way that is beyond our comprehension or control, behavior that is both reactive an inappropriate. Our reactions are preconditioned and therefore unfree. We cannot break out of the old pattern of behavior, however much we long to. In the end, we may accept the situation and just say, “It’s the way I am,” “Life always lets me down,” “Things just make me so angry,” or “I have an addictive personality.” But it doesn’t have to be this way. There is a way out.

In the next post, we’ll look at the nature of Yoga and how it can help us to effectively overcome our negative habits.

* subliminal mound; mental impression

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.    

It was particularly exciting to learn about new approaches to the treatment of  psychological trauma and the neurophysiology that underlys it.  It was heartwarming to learn there was a strong research interest in the treatment of psychological trauma from a Yogic perspective, and to see recent research revealing its positive effect on symptom reduction.  It was so encouraging and validating to learn this as for over 10 years I’ve been weaving Yoga philosophy and practice into my counselling and coaching work with people struggling to overcome the psychological effects of trauma and addiction.  Now a part of me can breathe a deep sigh of relief as this approach is proving to be as effective as my clients and my own practice has taught me it is.

Yoga is such a sophisticated science.  It can meet the individual where they’re at and offer relief from painful or troubling symptoms across a range of conditions, and with a depth that is out of the reach of our traditional medical doctors.  We’re in an exciting era of coming to understand from a scientific perspective the depth and breadth of Yoga’s effectiveness!  Of course the ancient sages, seers and enlightened beings who’ve been behind it over the past five or six thousand years have known all along what western science is beginning to learn about Yoga’s viability as a therapeutic model:  It works!   Here’s hoping more research will be done internationally to continue to demonstrate its efficacy to Yoga enthusiasts of all persuasions.   

For more information about the recent symposium or the growing Yoga therapy profession, consider contacting the International Associaion of Yoga Therapists at IAYT.com.  For further discussion about Yoga in the treatment of psychological trauma and addiction, I welcome your thoughts below.  This is indeed a very exciting time to be a Yoga enthusiast!      

One way of liberating feelings from our bodies can be through the practice of Yoga. It works in a way traditional talk therapy doesn’t, through bypassing the thinking mind and accessing the body directly where feelings are stored. It is a safe, gentle and effective way of allowing our feelings to emerge in the present moment, being with them there, and holding this experience as a pathway to liberating them from our bodies (and by extension our minds, as the two are intimately connected). For those of us who feel the need to share our experience, talk therapy provides a wonderful environment for sharing the experience of what coms up as we allow the healing process to unfold. It too is safe, gentle and effective.  Each method will usher the willing participant into the heart of healing, and as a result, an enhanced state of well-being.

I’m in the process of writing a document called ‘Ten Secrets to Psychological Healing’. It will be available soon to those of you who elect to subscribe to the site.