Lesson 3: Addressing Trauma from the Body Up

In the free Principle course, I cover somatized trauma. I talk about how trauma gets stored in our tissues when it's too much for us to deal with in the moment and how the body protects those areas with guarding and forgetting. 

Other modalities—like different forms psychotherapy—will try to address those traumas through discussion. There's also a burgeoning interest in addressing somatized trauma through body awareness practices, movement, EMDR tapping, and other methods that work with what's stuck in the tissues.

But if you go to see your primary care physician, they're not thinking about your body as a collection of latent traumas that could be resolved in order to reveal your whole, healed self. That is what we're doing here though!

Your physical body is the ground zero for storing trauma. Physical trauma gets stored there, of course, but so does emotional trauma, trauma from past lives, energetic patterns from family members, which we call miasma... they all can get stored in the body. That makes your body this incredible access point for healing. It's not a car that breaks down, as the materialists think of it. From a consciousness point of view, it's a repository of your information. 

Every trauma burden that we lift from your body reveals the underlying wholeness, which shows up in the physical body as healing. So this process of resolving your old traumas is actually de-aging. You revert to the health you had before your injuries. 

There's another way to think about this, which may be helpful. And that's that your body is a collection of planes or platforms for consciousness. They converge in the density of our physical experience and that's why we get confused about materiality. But the physical body is a gateway that intersects all these other consciousness platforms. 

So having a body gives us this wonderful opportunity to heal all these tight, protected areas in our consciousness. Your body is not decaying meat. It's a gateway for expansion and coherence and unfurling into your wholeness. We're here to heal and we do that through our bodies, but our bodies, let's remember, are made of light and, ultimately, consciousness, so they're a lot more flexible and adaptable than we normally think of. Again, remember that spontaneous remissions happen all the time and placebos are highly effective.

Other cultures heal their bodies by healing their consciousnesses. They go inside their bodies and heal them with sweat lodge ceremonies, plant medicines, talking intimately and vulnerably with one another, shaking and ritualized dance.

But our culture teaches us all kinds of ways to cover up our disharmonious feelings. We stuff ourselves with sugar. We fill our eyes with grotesqueries and our ears with dischord. We meet our need for love with porn. We indulge every masking technique you can imagine. Most of us have no idea what it feels like to be healthy. 

Maybe, when you’re not overriding your body with caffeine and alcohol and pharmaceutical drugs, then you notice that you feel bad, but you’re still not told how to metabolize your somatized trauma. Instead you’re prescribed more drugs. You don’t have to live that way. However, if you don’t want to live that way, then you will have to look at what you’ve been ignoring and that can take courage. 

So congratulations! You’re here and we’re now going to explore the tools I use to get really specific with somatized trauma. It’s a journey that requires compassion and humility. But the reward is stable health and true liberation. And what else is there?  

In the next module, we'll learn how to start. Join me.