Remember, your life is sacred.
Yemaya, 12 October 2021
Humans are highly intelligent, relational beings, for us, healthy attachment, empathy, compassion and a sense of belonging are crucial factors for our health and wellbeing, throughout life, but particularly during infancy and childhood. In over a decade of working with clients, I have never met anyone with chronic pain, disease or mental illness, that had not experienced significant trauma, particularly in their early life. Trauma describes an inner separation,
dissociation or fragmenting of our sensate experience and our cognitive reality, it is a natural intelligent survival response that enables us to postpone immense pain and stress in the moment, however this functional altered state of awareness is not meant to be permanent.
If the opposite of separation is togetherness, naturally the antidote to the dissociative or detaching phenomena of trauma, is congruent relationship, thus trauma cannot be healed alone and when left unacknowledged, it literally carries on recurring generation after generation, inherited via chemical coding within our DNA. For avoidance of doubt, the recently scientifically proven phenomena of 'Generational Trauma' and the ancient knowledge of 'Ancestral Karma' are synonymous (welcome science, so glad you could make it!)
Humans are adapted to living in relatively small multi-generational communities, growing and sharing food, marketing wares locally and contributing to a system of economy aimed at sustaining and preserving Earth’s material resources. It was once our understanding that we belonged to Earth, the Mother Goddess, and not the other way around, we also used to understand and accept that the Mother Goddess was autonomous and didn’t need us, but that we needed her, so what happened? According to Professor of European Archaeology and Indo-European Studies, Linguist and Anthropologist, Maria Gimbutas, a dramatic shift in our worldview happened.
Maria's advanced and thus ridiculed estimation, which have since been vindicated, was that our transition to patriarchal values began conditioning our psychology around 6500BCE, when Proto-Indo-European warrior tribes, who had not integrated the trauma of the apocalyptic events bookending the Younger Dryas ice age, began carrying out invasions across Europe, and the rest is literally his-story. It is very important to note that although parts of humanity were not able to process its trauma, and subsequently became barbaric in their struggle to survive, other parts were, for example recent archeological findings have revealed giant flaws in our mainstream origin stories and scientific theories, and unlike humans, Earth cannot lie. The truth of our origins and deep ancestral knowledge is emerging and being shared, it is clear that our ability to maintain our humanity and thrive rests on our ability to transfer our wisdom through the ages.
Right up until the very end of the Neolithic age, when the first invasions started marked the beginning of colonisation, we lived in peaceful, co-regulating relationship with Earth and each other. Imagine hundreds of thousands, if not millions of years, of continuous and consistent refining of our species inherent and extraordinary capacity for adaptation based on instinctual empathic resonance with both our environment and each other, thriving in intimate self-sustaining communities that were egalitarian in nature. The Greek Island of Crete was the last place in Europe to remain this way with the Minoan culture ending at around 1500BCE. So, what happens when this level of instinctual and intuitive intelligence is brutally overridden, oppressed and required to exist in great, noisy, over-populated and electrified ‘smart’ cities, where food is invented in labs or forced into being in lifeless soil with toxic chemicals and delivered to us premature and unripened from all over the world? Trauma. Numbness where there was empathy, lethargy, atrophy, pain and disease where there was vitality, vigour, passion and joy, and a gnawing, psychosomatic torment caused by the subconscious schism between all that is felt, seen and heard and the shared delusions we desperately cling to in order to avoid disillusionment. Under our current value system of ownership, control and profit, whether we observe the results of our separation from nature in terms of Earth’s ecosystems, collectively in terms of our societies and communities or individually in terms of our life-force and creativity, the devastating consequences are abundantly clear.
There’s a golden rule in the realm of rehabilitative therapies: “Move it, or lose it”, take this into account and consider that our archaic ancestors had smaller frontal lobes, but much larger brains than we do now. Has our innate extrasensory perception atrophied as we’ve adapted to value logic, rationalism and materialism over our senses? Of course our evolutionary imprinting, being far more deeply coded than our man-made customs, rules and laws, means that although our psycho-sentient abilities have been suppressed into latency over the last 12,000 or so years, like bulbs buried in soil, they live and are eager to rise up when nourished and nurtured. The human spirit is immutable.
Born the least developed of all the mammalian species on Earth, our physiology, psychology and ways of relating have necessarily evolved in close harmonic resonance with our universal laws. Without empathy, instinct and intuition, as well as a careful dedication and attention to child-rearing and mutually beneficial interpersonal relationships, our species simply would not have survived, let alone thrived, and believe it or not, we did until very recently. Through our archeological discoveries and learning from our few precious ancient tribes, with their original cosmologies and ways of life intact, we have begun the process of re-membering ourselves beyond the records of His story. We know that our ancient ancestors hardly put their babies down, the average age a child was breast-fed until was four and whenever it became known within a community that a member had experienced an overwhelming event and was showing signs of psychological distress the shamans and shamankas gathered the tribe to share the individual’s suffering and help them discharge their emotions and grieve their loss. In fact, it is still understood by our native American Brothers and Sisters that of all human experience, it’s grief that brings us closest to the 'Great Spirit’ or ‘God’, thus communion with those who are grieving is considered a scared privilege. We once naturally embodied compassion, which literally means; ‘to suffer together’, because it was well understood that the survival of a tribe relied on the health and wellbeing of each of its members.
Traumatic distress has become a chronic disorder (PTSD), illustrating our journey from resonance and response to distance, denial and distortion. What if we accorded to our inner wisdom, without delay?
From 1995-97, the world’s largest governmental study into the long-term health effects of childhood trauma was carried out in the US by the CDC and the Kaiser Permenente Institute. The Adverse Childhood Experiences (ACE) study collected data from 17,000 patients during GP visits and found that childhood trauma causes disease, addiction, shortens our life-span and that the higher a person’s ACE score, the worse their health outcomes are in adulthood. The expression of heart disease, mental illness, inflammatory and auto-immune disease, fibromyalgia, chronic fatigue, phobias, eating disorders, self-harm, suicide and addictions is rooted in the stress of the suppressed neuro-emotional charge of all that is unfelt, unprocessed and unexpressed.
Panic attack or unacknowledged need to stop, be and breathe?
Addiction or suppression of pain?
Nocturnal teeth grinding an unconscious attempt to complete suppressed pain?
Depression or denial of the grieving process?
‘Dark night of the soul’ a summons to evolve beyond stupid question like this?
Our reclaimed soul-parts end up serving as our most needed, extraordinary, formidable and sublime characteristics, when integrated they know exactly what to do, they resolve and complete our memories and stories, and open new psychosomatic channels for energy and expression to flow through us. Our authenticity is, without exception, necessary for our health, inner peace and creativity. The first step towards wholeness and becoming who we really are is the rejection of cultural conditioning and self-abandonment. When we commit to our individual journey of becoming, we unapologetically shape-shift, we shed the adapted skins of the past and pour our life-force into the new evolutionary karma that is seeking to be imprinted within us and contributed to our collective. And it's never too late to start.