The first thing I do with a new client in my work as a healer, is to see who that person is at a soul level. 

The healing journey is really a journey of discovery of the self, removing what does not belong or serve and revealing to the client who they truly are and them owning that.  There is empowerment in this process, as clients come to understand and lovingly accept their true nature.  The work is really a process of helping my clients to see themselves as I see them.

In the course of the work, I’ve noticed patterns and overlaps in many of these cases, meaning that the journey towards healing is similar for many of my clients.  As I worked through these issues with them, a formula for healing emerged even when the issues being dealt with were very different.  (I’ll teach this formula at the Retreat in September.)

We are meant to be intact, solidly whole, with an understanding of our individuated identity as the very the premise of the self.  When we do not have this, we don’t know who we are and we feel lost, or adrift, and life feels lack-lustre and flat.

So far, in these blogs, I have talked about the self, who we are, who we are not, and who we are designed to be.  Now I want to talk about what happens when something goes awry, that is, what happens when people have issues, problems to overcome, trauma, inherited patterning or some other kind of energetic interference.  How does that show up, even if we don’t know why we are experiencing what we’re going through?  

A Sense of Self

By far, the greatest challenge that individuals endure when faced with ruptures in their lives is that they can lose their sense of themselves.  When we get dis-regulated, we can get disconnected from our authentic selves, but, most importantly, it happens often without us even realising it.

We can feel a sense of feeling ‘lost’ and not know why or how to fix it.  Brain fog, a sense of ‘something missing’, or even a lack of passion for life or a sense of direction can become our default mode.  Sometimes we can tell ourselves that we don’t know what is wrong, but that maybe if we just got a ‘good night’s sleep’ or were in a relationship with ‘the right person’ or that if we ate better, worked out more or were kinder to ourselves, that things would be resolved.  In the worst case scenarios, some clients can come to believe that maybe life is just ‘meant to be this way’, and there is little we can do to fix our suffering and that we have to just put up with it.

The Body Keeps the Score

Possibly the world’s most prominent psychiatrist, Bessel van der Kolk, says that “the body keeps the score”, and he’s right!  The body registers any and all issues that are not healed.  Van der Kolk says that “trauma is not just an event that took place in the past; it is also the imprint left by that experience on mind, brain, and body.”  He says that trauma causes brain injury and that “if the memory of trauma is encoded in the viscera, in heartbreaking and gut-wrenching sensations, in autoimmune disorders and skeletal/muscular problems...then talking can’t access it.” 

When the body is encoded with imprints that don’t serve us they become unconscious prompters that can impact us in horribly thwarted ways.  This can result in people struggling with feelings of being stuck, anxious, or unfulfilled, and often without understanding the root causes.

A broad range of bodily issues can be caused by these types of unresolved problems, including, but not limited to lower back pain, brain fog, forgetfulness, anxiety and depression, chronic fatigue, alopecia, anorexia and bulimia, inability to get pregnant, mysterious aches and pains, migraines, a sense of something missing, insomnia, quick to temper/rage, numbness inside, a lack of a passion for life or a lack of a sense of direction, addictions, disassociation and/or feeling disconnected.

It Didn’t Start With You

The method by which the trauma gets trapped in the body doesn’t have to be personal to the person carrying the trauma imprint.

Unresolved trauma, whether it happened directly to you or to your ancestors or to any group to which you belong, will show up in your body.  The fascinating study of epigenetic changes in the DNA structure of the decedents of Holocaust survivors shows that directly because of their ancestors’ experiences, ten or more generations prior, people today have had their DNA changed as a result.

Inherited intergenerational trauma is a real thing and can be equally as debilitating for the decedent as for the ancestor against whom the atrocities occurred.  It could be argued that the debilitation can be worse for the decedent because at least for the person who experienced the trauma, their anxiety, depression or other autoimmune disorder had an understandable and verifiable origin.

The Body Processes Unresolved Emotional Pain

If trauma is left unresolved, there is a cost for that, and the body will attempt to ‘rebalance’ that indebtedness by ‘playing out’ the trauma in the body in the form of symptoms.  Often, knowing just the symptoms is enough to know the cause of the problem and how to resolve it. 

The small of the back, for instance, is where the body presents unresolved righteous injustice.  This is the type of injustice where that person was ‘in the right’ but the person who did the injustice to them had that person “bending over backwards”, or ‘over a barrel’, where they couldn’t argue or fight back.  

For example, the body registers righteous injustice in the lower back where an ex-spouse going through a divorce feels that they cannot ‘fight’ for fair terms because if they do, their ex-partner has threatened to make access to their children difficult.  The parent threatening to curtail access has the other parent ‘over a barrel’ and the parent who cannot ‘fight back’ will have a weakness in his lower back as a result, if the injustice remains unresolved.

And, again, the injustice doesn’t have to be done directly to that individual.  A Jewish person, who identifies with the suffering of his race, will be prone to having lower back issues.  It isn’t that the injustice caused the lower back pain, it’s that the body registers this unresolved trauma in that area and that person now has a ‘weakness’ in that area of the body that is now at risk of injury.  They may recall slipping on ice and falling as an attributable cause for the injury, but it is the pre-existing weakness in that area that means that if that person hurts themselves, suffering will likely show up in the weakest area first.

Similarly, the profile of women who present most often with breast and uterine cancers are ‘over-reachers’ or ‘over-carers’.

Is it true that if we resolve the injustice, or the ‘over-reaching’, that that will reduce or remove the issue showing up in the body in the way that it has?  Yes, if the physical representation of that trauma is not yet well-established.  

Everything that shows up in the body pre-existed somewhere else first, whether it was in the mental, emotional or spirit bodies.  The physical body is always the last place for trauma to show up and to heal the body, you must first remove the cause of the issue.

The Body is Divine

The body is divine and is infinitely more intelligent than the mind.  Being divine, the body is in service to us and will help us in any way that it can.  This is why it strives to process the unconscious trauma for us, if we haven’t been able to process it emotionally, mentally or through the spirit.

We will go into more detail of how to clear influences in the system that cause a myriad of issues at the Retreat, more details of which are on the recently revised Retreat Page. 

Blessings to all on the path!