Trauma: The Light Shines through the Broken Places

Welcome friends to the Tara Brock podcast. I'm so glad you're here. Each week I share teachings and guided meditations to help us awaken our hearts and bring healing to our world. You can learn more or support this offering by visiting TaraBrock.com where you can also join our email list. Now let's explore together the many ways we can live from the love and presence that's our deepest essence. Namaste. Namaste. Welcome friends. Thank you for being here. It's said that there are five types of fear. Terror, panic, username or password is incorrect, we need to talk, and 14 miscalleds from mom. So I thought that was a good definition of fear. For most of us, fear is an ongoing background hum. It can get quiet sometimes and it can get really loud. And it's intrinsic to how our nervous system operates. Fear is part of our survival equipment. And there's a wide range of what can trigger. To the degree our survival feels threatened, fear lets us know it's here. It can really, really spike. I heard from a nurse recently who had a panic attack after her shift at the hospital. She was a nurse manager. Staffing's been reduced, patients, some in critical condition are not getting proper care. She was hugely stressful for all, really overwhelming. And she had some past trauma and the feelings of powerlessness really got triggered. Fortunately, she had a partner to help hold her and practices she knew to help regulate what was going on and it was awful. So as many know PTSD, symptoms that come up after trauma like panic, other kinds of strong fear, shaking. This is increasing everywhere. PTSD is increasing. It locks down with the feeling of danger and insecurity and cruelty and violence in the world. PTSD is increasing. And after talking with this nurse, I decided to share a talk with you that I did a while back that takes a very direct look at how mindfulness and meditation and compassion practices, different meditative strategies can serve in working with trauma. So we'll look at what trauma is and the different ways PTSD expresses and those meditative strategies that not just calm the traumatic response but actually help us reconnect with our own most awakened heart and spirit. While the focus is on trauma, the practices and teachings are really for all of us navigating a world that's caught in the shadows. So I hope you find that this is helpful. I often talk about trance so I thought I'd start tonight with an illustrative story. And this was shared by a mom who very much is into organic foods and a healthy lifestyle and describes one evening when she hadn't had time to get to the grocery store and she was exhausted. And I'll read what she writes. She sent this recently as an email to me. She says, I looked for what we could possibly eat for dinner and thank goodness there was a frozen pizza in the freezer. Okay guys, we're going to have frozen pizza for dinner. I tried to keep the guilt out of my voice that it wasn't going to be handmade, homemade, organic with love meal. My son instantly resisted. But I don't want frozen pizza. I remained calm and said, but that's what we're having tonight. And he remained resistant getting more and more upset on the verge of a tantrum. I don't want frozen pizza. I don't want frozen pizza. I tried to remain calm and repeat out loud a calm mantra. This is dinner tonight. It's what we have in the house. It'll be okay. Have you ever had frozen pizza? All the while going crazy in my mind. I'm such a bad mom. Of course my kids don't like frozen pizza. I don't like it either. I'm doing the best I can and I'm falling short today. But it's the best I can. And I've created a monster of a child who will only eat healthy, organic, homemade food. He's spoiled and doesn't understand how much work it is. I've completely lost my sense of myself to these kids. They're taking over. I'm raising entitled brats. I'm a bad mom. Maybe I could make it to the store. No, that's just giving in. That is what we're going to have tonight for dinner, sweetie. And I'm tired and that's what we'll have. It'll be okay. I say relatively calmly. I take a deep breath and look at my son's tear-streaked face. He looks at me and says, actually quite calmly for a three-year-old, okay, mama, but could we at least heat it up? So this is a mild-mannered trance story as a kind of prelude to really what I'd like to explore tonight, which is a much more painful kind of trance that occurs when our… Because trance means that our perceptual filters have narrowed. And we're just taking in a kind of a sliver of the world. And when it's driven by our negativity by us, or the kind of sense that something's wrong, we get very torqued. It's a lot of suffering. So I'd like to explore how we work with trance when the trance is very strongly driven by fear or trauma. And it feels like a really important domain to explore because trauma and strong fear are so pervasive. Even for those of us that don't think of ourselves as traumatized, we all have seasons where we get in the grip. So we'll be exploring this tonight. And for those that are interested, next week I am starting an online course that fleshes out a lot of this subject called Awakening Your Fearless Heart. And you can find out more about that on my website tarbrach.com. So, a question I am most regularly asked after classes or workshops or whatever is, what do I do if it feels like too much? Because the instructions just throw off and come into the body and open to what's here. Be with it, with kindness, with clarity. What do I do if it feels like too much? What if I do if I feel like I am going to get overwhelmed? What do I do if I feel so agitated I just can't even sit with it? These are the kind of questions I get. And the reason it keeps coming up is because many of us have within us pockets of fear and agitation that we actually organize our lives around not feeling and often they are trauma-based. I'll give you a little bit of the statistics. It is estimated that 70% of us have had a traumatic experience in our life and that 20% of those of us that have had that go on to experience the post-traumatic stress syndrome, and there are different symptoms that circle around trauma. So that's one of five of us that are sitting here or that are listening. And there is further research that kind of narrows it down. It says one in five Americans were sexually molested as a child. Four was beaten by a parent to the point of leaving a mark. And one in three couples engaged in physical violence. That's a lot of people. So we sometimes think of trauma as emotional, as sexual abuse, or physical abuse, or war, or major natural disasters. But there is a whole range of life experiences that are traumatizing. And they can include surgery and illness and loss of a loved one, sudden loss of a loved one. They can then include the ending of a relationship when it is not expected, even when it is. In our society, and I think many people can feel kind of plugged into the nervous system of our society, there is a lot of trauma. And it really, it's from all sides of the political spectrum. It's the trauma, many segments of the population traumatized by loss of jobs, sometimes for generations. Traumatized by poverty, the trauma of immigrants, the trauma of refugees, the trauma of non-dominant populations that experience regular violence, injustice, oppression. And a lot of the trauma is generational, I think, so often. Like, what is the trauma of slavery, of having your people transported as slaves to another continent and then continued violence and violation through the institutions of that country. It doesn't go away really quickly. And now research is showing that generational violence is handed down. You can actually see it biologically handed down. Faulkner says, the past is not dead, it is not even past. Okay? So you can see it in families. Families that have, you know, emotional abuse that's handed down through the generations or sexual abuse. It goes on and on. So I wonder here, and just us that are gathered in this room, and there's probably about almost 300 of us, how many of you have known trauma close up, either in your own being or with someone in your close circle? Can I see by hands? I just want to, for those that are listening to the podcast, and thank you, I appreciate you sharing that. That was most every hand. I saw a few that weren't up. And that may be the case. I mean, some of us just aren't for some blessed reason. But the reason I ask that is because if we want to be able to help ourselves and each other in our society, we need to understand the challenge of trauma. It's very easy to see the effects of trauma and just be angry at yourself or the person that's traumatized or the society that's traumatized, and not get the tremendously powerful set of circumstances that are driving it. There's something that I've noticed, and this is now the other side of things, which is, for though there are many people that when they are not in a good mood, they are not in a good mood. There are many people that when they have come to terms with, okay, there's trauma here, and they've actually gone into a path of recovery from trauma, have come into an experience of profound spiritual healing. So trauma and the awfulness of it when faced can bring about a very deep kind of a waking up. Many of you know Leonard Cohen's well-known line, in the broken places the light shines through. In the broken places the light shines through when we deepen our attention. So I've seen and I've worked with so many people that have been traumatized and I have it very, very close up. My life too, like all of you, most of you, I've seen that trauma is a cutting off. And we're going to explore what trauma is. It's a cutting off within our own body, it's a cutting off with others. That's the pain, the pain of separation. But the process of recovery is a reconnection that can really reconnect us to the sacred, to a real sense of spirit. So this is what I want to look at in this particular talk, like how can… What's the path of recovery that really goes all the way to that deep sense of freedom and awakening? And we're going to do it in four parts. And this is somewhat of a new talk, although some of the pieces I've drawn from other talks and some… We'll see if I can fit it in. The first part, we'll be able to recognize and understand the suffering of trauma. Because as I mentioned, if we don't, we'll blame. There's a lot of shame that surrounds trauma for those that are traumatized and a lot of blame outward. So that's the first, is that we can relate to it with compassion if we can understand the nature of its suffering. The second is how can we resource trauma? How can we bring in enough safety and love to begin to work with it? Part three is presence. How do we reconnect with the unlived life that's there that we've been avoiding? And then the last part is how do we then live from a more fearless heart? Okay, so number one, what is trauma? And in a simple way, you could just say that when our nervous system is overwhelmed and our coping strategies don't work, we get traumatized. When our normal ways of coping fight, flight, freeze, being able to navigate a situation don't work, we get traumatized. And if the trauma is not processed and we aren't eventually able to fight off what's attacking us or get away from it or in some way manage it, then we freeze in a way that the fear, the unprocessed fear gets locked in our body, in our tissues. It's there. And then that brings up all the symptoms that are called PTSD that include anxiety and include depression and include dissociation because we're trying to get away from our body and includes intrusive thoughts that come in and really torment us. It includes sleeplessness for many people and then avoided behaviors that very much turn into addictive behaviors. As I have come back to a couple of times already, PTSD is almost always very much coded by and held together by a sense of shame. It's like, it's a really terrible catch-22. Something happens, we get traumatized, we're coping as best as we can with these strategies and we hate ourself for it because they don't look good and feel good. And that shame, by the way, binds the whole process. So what is actually going on inside us when we get traumatized? And this is what gets interesting to me because I'm beginning to more and more understand trauma as a breakdown in communication. We have, when we're an integrated person, we have communication going on through all parts of our body. There's a flow of energy and information moving through. But when we get traumatized, that breaks down. So there's certain parts of our brain that have evolved to monitor for danger. And what happens is when they get over-activated, in other words, when we've been traumatized and they're over-activated, they're constantly monitoring for danger and they pick up on all sorts of triggers as, oh, this is trouble that might be just associated in some way in the mind but are not really dangerous. So the body is constantly in a flash of stress and reactivity. And we're seeing the world basically instead of through rose-colored lenses through the lens of pure fear. And the way I've shared and meant, those of you that might be familiar with it just to, for those that aren't, for me, the most useful way of understanding this breakdown in communication that goes with trauma is an image from Dan Siegel who's a psychiatrist and author where he says, okay, so this is your brain, this fist. You might want to make a fist yourself if you haven't done this before in particular. This is your brain and if you open it up, this is your spinal column going up into the heel of the palm, the brainstem. And your thumb is your limbic system, okay? And your brainstem and your limbic system work together to regulate arousal, fight, flight, freeze, emotions, okay? The four fingers come over, this is your frontal cortex here, okay? And your frontal cortex is, first of all, thinking of the cortex as thinking and reasoning, and the frontal cortex in particular where your forehead is. That's the site of mindfulness, it's a site of compassion, that whole compassion network. It's a site of morality, it gives you kind of moral direction, perspective. Now when the brain is integrated, this frontal cortex down-regulates what that means is you might get a message saying, danger, danger coming up. The frontal cortex will say, no, it kind of seems like that thing that happened in the past, but now is now and you're okay. And so it calms down the limbic system in there. Now what happens when you're not integrated and in good communication? In other words, when you've been traumatized and there's not good communication going on when the frontal cortex isn't giving its information is fear and messages of danger come up and you flip your lid, okay? You're basically totally lose contact with the frontal cortex. And so you're going around in an unintegrated state where this subcortical looping, all fear-based, is in control, it's hijacked your system. Now here's what I didn't know until more recently was the stress chemicals, mostly cortisol, that flood through your system when we're really frightened, actually destroy neurons. And they particularly have an effect on the neurons that connect the more far-reaching parts of the brain so that if you've been traumatized there's less communication already between the frontal cortex here and the limbic system. And it's much more quick that you completely lose contact and then you're living in that place of completely feeling like I'm in the thick of it. I'm in the thick of endanger with no really good ways to deal with it. That's the communications breakdown. If you think of the opposite when communications are flowing, in a way the state of enlightenment is a state of full integration or everything. All the circuits are connected and you're able to really light up, right? So not only do we have a communications breakdown internally when there's been trauma, but our interpersonal communications also breaks down. Why is that? This frontal cortex that down regulates emotions also is what allows us to pick up really important information from each other to be able to have empathy, to be able to sense what's going on for another person. And when there's not good communications internally, we can't tell whether another person means well for us or another person is a threat. And we're much more at the mercy of that negativity bias that's perceiving threat and feels unsafe and can't trust. Does this make sense? Is this connecting for you? Because I feel like revisiting it really helps. Now, just to say everything that has been disconnected can be reconnected. I'm going to move on to the whole rest of the talk will be how we reconnect. But I want to say that because it sounds pretty awful, okay? Communications are cut off inside and they're cut off with the world. But when we're in the state of trauma, it is pretty awful, okay? Now, interestingly, to communicate fully in order to be able to play and to mate and to nurture our young and to nurture each other, we actually have to be able to turn off our defensive systems. You can't really make love and be nurturing if you're in high alert and your defenses are on. And there was a very interesting experiment that happened. This was back in 1998, a neuroscientist named Jack Poncep. He had young rat cubs and they were in their cages and he observed them doing the whole rough and tumble of their play. And he watched them for a number of days playing. And then he took one cat hair, put it in the cage, left it there for 24 hours and then removed it. And what do you think happened? They stopped playing completely. As soon as that trigger for danger was in their cage, completely wiped out their play. And then gradually they began to play some but never again in the same way. So it brings up a really important question for us. And this is even if we haven't been traumatized, which is where in some way are we perceiving a cat hair? You know, where do we have that embedded association with danger, danger that's keeping us on defense and stopping us from playing? And I actually mean the word playing because we don't play very much, you know? We get very caught and so whether it's being able to be playful or nurturing, loving whatever, there's a cat hair in there. And for some it's way, way more ongoingly triggered than others. So this is part one and it's basically saying that we get cut off and then we add on shame. We blame ourselves for the ways that we're not communicating well. We blame ourselves for the ways that we are self-soothing and behaving in addictive, avoidant ways. We blame ourselves over and over again. I'll share a story from a few years ago when there was a horrific, you know, the economy dropped way down and one man I was working with, his company had downsized, he'd been laid off and he just tried over and over again. I caught him like a year and a half later after he'd lost his job still looking and he was traumatized. He was traumatized. It's like his work really, it defined him and he was really, really panicking about, you know, his family and all the repercussions. And so panic, depression, he was sleepless, he was on anxiety meds and he was addicted to them. He was avoiding social situations and his marriage was really going south. So the whole thing was wrapped in shame as I've been mentioning. So we were working together and, you know, he was telling me what was going on, how hard it was. And I said, and I said, I paused and said, do you realize that this is trauma? You've been traumatized? And he said, and it was like startle, like he had never named it that way. Now sometimes naming it can be a box, you know, it can be a category that locks us in. But sometimes it can be really freeing when we get, wow, okay, this is the form of suffering that's really intact. And I added to it, this is trauma and it's not your fault. You're not alone, there are a lot of people I know that this is really the case. Losing a job can be really traumatizing. And there's a lot of people for other reasons that are traumatized, but it's not your fault that your nervous system is responding this way. And that's when he began to weep. Because the burden of feeling terrible and then hating himself or how he was dealing with it was crashing. Trauma is important, it's important we identify it, it's important that we begin to loosen the bind of shame around it. So this is part one, okay? Part two is once we've got it, okay, this is trauma and even though it takes a while to deshame and it happens in you can see in 12-step groups how powerfully helpful it is with addiction to be able to really get it of, okay, we're all in the same boat here and it's less personal. Well, so it is with trauma and we get a lot of people are traumatized. This is how the nervous system does it. Then we start beginning to say, okay, how can we resource? How can we begin to reconnect and reintegrate? And it's interesting if you kind of look into the way the shamanistic cultures put it. It's believed that when a person is traumatized their soul leaves their body. And it's a way to protect it from intolerable pain. And so in a process they call soul retrieval they bring together a community of people that basically are with the traumatized person creating tremendous amount of love and safety and the souls invited to return. And so likewise in different healing contexts whether it's in the care of a therapist or friends or a group of friends or with a teacher, we begin to find ways to create containers of safety and love. That is the beginning. Because we were wounded most of us in relationship and most of us need relationship to heal. I mean if you think about especially the huge pervasive amount of traumatic wounding and early childhood when there is neglect or when there is abuse, there is this basic lack of safety or trust and that creates huge, huge stress for the infant or young child. So much stress that huge floods of cortisol and at the key developmental period for them. Key development for the brain and for the parts of the brain that allow for socializing those neurons that connect or destroy. Luis Cozolino says it's not survival of the fittest, it's survival of the nurtured. It's a really, really good line. So when we're traumatized the first need is safety and love. There is one man I know, a young man who lives with a huge amount of anxiety and he's tried every modality I have ever heard of. And he said after doing all of these different processes and techniques, all of them, he said there is only one thing that works and it's kindness. You would see it with children. There is one story of a group of children, they are having a really big fight and they go to bed after their fight. And then there is this horrific thunderstorm in the middle of the night and this woman says she heard a noise upstairs and she called to find out what was going on during the thunderstorm and a little voice answered, we are in the closet forgiving each other. And another similar story I heard, there was again a storm at night time which is just, you know, children get scared and this little boy wanted to sleep with his parents and each time he'd call his father and say, please can I come into your room and his father says, you don't have to, God is with you. You know, then 25 minutes later he'd hear his son calling again and he'd come in and say, God is with you, you are okay. And finally the third time the little boy said to his dad, I know God is with me but I want someone with skin on. We know from research that relationship, when we are in relationship it reduces fear. There is all this research shows that when somebody is filled with fear and they hold hands with somebody that they love or trust, you could watch their brain, they are hooked up to an MRI, you could watch everything calm down, okay. And we know that hugs, you know, you should get the oxytocin if you stay in a hug for 20 seconds, that really is incredibly soothing. And you can do the inner practices of love and kindness and compassion that in your mind invoke a person you care about with you, loving you. And that can create the same biochemical shift. Reducing the sympathetic nervous system, getting the parasympathetic nervous system going. In clinical research, and this is bringing us now to meditation, how we practice, it has become very clear over the years that it is not useful when there is a lot of trauma and really strong fear directly say, okay, I am going to dive into the fear and open to it and jump off the cliff and be with it fully. That if, especially if it is trauma-based, that first it is really important to do the kind of soothing and calming and bringing in a sense of safety and love. And then the presence comes after that. So what I would like to do with you is share a story that illustrates now how we can use meditation in concert with, you know, specific mindfulness practices and practices that bring in that sense of safety to work with really strong fears. And we will do a little bit of practice built into it. This is for the last twenty minutes that we have together. The person that I would like to describe was a parole officer in a state prison facility and she came to classes here and tended for about four months before she asked if we could meet and basically said, you know, that she is so restless it is hard for her to sit through the class and she could not feel her body, you know, when I do a body scan, it is very hard to feel her body. And even trying to close her eyes felt hard sometimes. She said, I am hyper-vigilant and I am just very scary for me. And those are real signs of trauma. Many, many people find that if they have been traumatized trying to meditate, close your eyes, come into the present moment, feel your body, it is the exact opposite of what you can do. The more trauma, the more dissociation. So we talked together a bit about, you know, her past and she had had, as I had imagined, repeated sexual abuse her uncle for a number of years and then her pattern continued in abusive relationships with partners. So she had a lot of shame. I mean, she basically considered herself damaged goods and was very hard on herself and tough on others in her job. She was tough. But when she got triggered she said, I am just like this scared little girl and there is no center, there is nothing there. And when she wasn't immediately triggered she was self-soothing, a lot of overeating cigarettes. So the beginning is what I already described as the Shaman described. She needed some sense of relationship, love, safety to be able to calm her down enough to begin to actually go to where the unlived life was. And I asked her some questions that I often ask people who are meditators and want to be able to find that internally. I asked her, you know, what is it that in your life gives you a sense of when do you feel safe? When do you feel loved? For her it was when she was with her sister or she had one best friend. And then I asked more questions and she included me in it over the months as one of the three. She called us her spirit allies. But I asked her some more questions. I said, when you are feeling with people that are safe and loving, what is it like? And I said, I want you to imagine it right now. And so she had me there already and she imagined her sister and her friend. She said, you know, it's like being surrounded, being in this warm bath. And I said, and when you are in that warm bath and feeling surrounded, what is your deepest, deepest prayer? Just may I feel completely safe, may I feel fully loved? That became her practice. So even if we weren't around, I mean the Shaman talk about having the whole community there, she was able to invoke her community of spirit allies, right? She could bring us to mind and sense that warmth and sense being held. And she would use as a mantra that prayer, you know, may I feel safe and may I feel loved. I also taught her a few other, what I consider, you know, really powerful ways to resource ourselves when there is trauma or strong fear. One is called grounding. And I would like you to… I am going to guide you a little bit for a few moments right now so you can kind of get a sense of them yourself. So grounding, and this is for any of us when we are caught, when we are stuck, when we are in that trance of reactivity, is to feel the pressure of your bottom against the seat that you are sitting on, the weight of your body, the warmth, the place of contact, the floor and your feet. You really feel gravity, like just be aware of gravity connecting you with the earth. You might feel with your hands or on your legs or touching each other. Grounding means to know you are here, right here. You can also ground visually by… you might open your eyes and just sense whatever you see, if you kind of scan around in front of you, might be… you see feet, shapes of feet, you see the wood of the floor, you see the different shades of color in the wood. It might be that you see the back of another person. So part of grounding is to become aware of what is right here in the moment visually. If you are at home you could look outside and… and so you can actually name what is here so it brings you fully into the present moment. Now if you close your eyes, another way of resourcing is to feel through your body and sense if there is any place in your body that feels like safe space where the sensations are pleasant or neutral. So again you are grounding in your body in the present moment, anchoring. It might be just the sensations in the hands. Just feel them right there. Another way of grounding is to let the breath collect you. For some people that have been traumatized the breath is really helpful. For others it is completely not helpful so you have to kind of experiment. But if you want to use the breath to calm down your nervous system, it is a long, deep breath with a slow, long exhale. So breathing in together now, inhaling. And then a slow out breath. And a slow in breath. Counting to six seconds. If you count to six seconds, is about it. And a slow out breath. So you are matching the in breath, the length of the in breath with the length of the out breath. They are each long and slow and no space in between. It is a circular breath that just keeps going. There is much research at this kind of breathing and there are variations on it. But this kind of breathing can help to quiet and calm the nervous system. Now the final piece for resourcing that I will share with you is a bit of what Dana did in terms of bringing to mind others. And you might begin by placing your hand over your heart. And sense that your touch is light enough that you can actually feel a quality of tenderness. So this is part of resourcing as you are beginning to bring this quality of kindness, this safety presence right here to the inner life that needs it. Let your breath be slow, long, deep. Feel it in the heart. And scan in your mind to sense a time in the past when you are with someone with whom you felt safe and cared about. Could be a person that is alive now or not alive. Could be not a person, could be an animal, could be your dog, could be a friend, teacher, healer. Or maybe a relationship that is not so personal but you feel the presence of that person in your mind, a spiritual figure that really helps you to feel safe and loved. Like Jesus or the Dalai Lama, the Buddha, Kwan Yen. Just imagine and sense the presence of this being with you right now. And notice what the feelings are like. Sense if there is a kind of warmth that can wash through you. And when you are ready to relax your hand down and just sense that this experiment and resourcing is something that you can do at any time. And especially when you are not caught in fear. And you can start finding the pathways back to integration. The pathways back to back home again. Because the more you practice any one of these the more quickly you will find yourself coming back. So with Dana this is what we did. She was practicing this regularly, especially her allies around her. Then we began the… this is the third part I wanted to review with you. I am going to have to do this more quickly, running out of time here. But she began the presencing. And the whole thing with presencing meaning being exactly with what is here is that you have to get familiar with what we call the window of tolerance and the window of distress. If you hit distress that is a sign to go back and resource some more or to go have a cup of tea or go for a walk. Not to re-traumatize. Because the bottom line teaching here is that it does not serve to try to be mindful and present with something if it re-traumatizes you. So if you hit distress give yourself permission to stop, to do something else to try to get a little more online and integrate it again. But gradually you find that you can more and more be present with that unlived life that you are running from. And so that was Dana's process is that she was practicing doing that. But her time of most intensely being with that, with the pocket of trauma came when she wasn't with me in therapy. It came at a time she had just broken up with her boyfriend. And he was enraged and she was afraid that he was going to be stalking her. And so she was, had a hard time sleeping. And she realized how terrified she was. So she began doing the grounding, the breathing and the calling on her allies. And yet the fear was really, really intense. But she felt like she had just enough of a resourcing anchor there that she could be with it. And as she described it was like broken hot glass kind of tearing through her. It was really, really intense. And so she kept whispering, you know, she would whisper our names and she would re-ground and let it happen. She would say, you know, may I feel peaceful, may I feel safe, may I feel loved. And finally her body was trembling uncontrollably. And she was, yet she started feeling like she could be with it. She had enough safety and love that she could let that huge amount of intense energy move through her. And she said, gradually she noticed a shift. And here's what happened. The fear was still there. But she was more and more aware of the space around it. She was more aware of space inside it. And she said, she described it, the space of loving that she felt held in was larger than the scared self. And that space started filling with this very warm luminous light. So it was like I was part of that light and then I realized my soul was back. She said, I started crying feeling how all these years I had been lost living without this light, living in a broken self. That experience of being present with was a soul retrieval. What does it mean her soul is back? She was reconnected to the spirit, the awareness, the love that is intrinsic to her. And she was beginning to trust it more and more. And it brings up what makes us willing to go through something like that. It's really, really hard when there has been trauma to revisit and go back into the parts of our body where it is held because it is scary. And we have to be resource enough. But here is what makes us willing. There can be a time for many people that is really long that there is a sense with trauma that our spirit has been tainted or destroyed. There is that much of a sense of being cut off. For Dana she felt like she had lost her soul. But it is not so. There is no amount of violence that can corrupt that timeless inner presence. No amount of violence that can stain that. It might be that the waves of shame and fear temporarily feel like they are taking over. But if we continue to pay attention and to resource and then gradually get more and more present, we will discover that loving awareness that really brings grace to our life. We intuit it. We know even when we are cut off there is something more. We intuit that. So I want to share with you after this experience at Dana had she had many rounds of feeling fear and having to reground and having to call on her allies. But I want to share one particular experience that really touched me which is she described this was months after that soul retrieval experience. And she felt like even though she sometimes was feeling cut off she knew her way home. Like when she would get lost she knew her way back. So she described getting a phone call, a phoning, a recently paroled client who had missed one of his relapse prevention meetings. And when she confronted him he went on a rant that was, he was cursing and yelling and basically saying, you know, you are like all the rash, you don't give a shit what my life is like and he hung up on her. Her heart was pounding and her body was shaking and she felt like she had done something wrong. And she was in kind of, it set off some trauma. So she did her practice, you know, she sat still, she grounded herself, she called on her allies. And she started relaxing and sensed again that warmth and that light. And she said, I sensed the larger me holding myself. Then, just as she had been with her inner self, she started asking, well, okay, so what about this man who has been so aggressive and threatening? You know, what has he been feeling? So she started trying to feel into what it was like for him. And suddenly she could sense the humiliation that he felt when she called him. She was confronting him about missing a meeting and he felt humiliated. And she could sense the fear under his anger. And then when she asked herself, well, what does he need most? She got it. How much he needed in some way to feel safe, in some way to feel like he mattered. So he comes in for his appointment. She is nervous but she says she felt open and confident. So first he is very swollen and doesn't look her in the eye. But then she has this evident concern. She is asking questions and so on. And he becomes more disclosing about, you know, how wild his friends are and how hard it is to stay clean. And right before leaving he said, you know, maybe I got you wrong. And I am sorry about that. Thank you for being on my team. This is a woman who was hugely hard on herself, hugely hard on others, wasn't able to read people that found her soul, her spirit and then could live it with another. So I want to close on that note. We are going to just do a brief kind of reflection. That this path of recovery and healing and awakening is one of reconnecting to the life inside us, reconnecting with each other, reconnecting with all beings. And it begins in a very simple way. That we create a safe and loving container for what is right here in the moment. So I would like to invite you right in this moment just to scan and sense if there is anything asking for your attention right now, for your acceptance, for your inclusion. And sense the possibility of whatever is here of being able to offer some space of safety, some care. It might be simply the message you belong or I am with you. It might be that you breathe right into the place you are feeling vulnerability or that you bring your hand gently to your heart and let the touch itself convey, I care. Whether we have disconnected for a moment or for ten years, we can reconnect with our heart and spirit as we begin to offer this safety and this presence to our own being. We close with the words of Rishan Ere. There is a brokenness out of which comes the unbroken, a shatteredness out of which blooms the unshatterable. There is a sorrow beyond all grief which leads to joy and a fragility out of whose depths emerges strength. There is a hollow space too vast for words through which we pass with each loss out of whose darkness we are sanctioned into being. There is a cry deeper than all sound whose serrated edges cut the heart as we break open to the place inside that is unbreakable and whole. Thank you for your kind attention.