In the broken pieces...

.. the light shines through."

Leonard Cohen

Few notes from Tara's talk on Healing Trauma

Trauma is cutting off. Pain of separation. Recovery is a process of reconnecting. 

What is the path of recovery? Going all the way back to that deep sense of freedom and awakening. 

Understanding the trauma, otherwise we go outward and blame. Relate to it with compassion and understand the nature of its suffering. 

How do we work with it? How can we resources it and bring enough safety and love to work with it?

How do we reconnect with the unlived life that is there that we are avoided. 

How do we then live from our fearless heart?

The study/experiment in 1998 where scientist observed rat cubs play for a number of days. He then put one cat hair in the cage for 24 hours and the rats stopped playing completely. Soon as that trigger for danger was there, it wiped out their play. Gradually they began to play some but never again in the same way. 

Where in some way are we perceiving the cat hair? The association that is keeping us on defense that is keeping up from playing?

It is not your fault that you are responding this way. It is important to identify trauma and loosen the bind of shame around it. Even though it takes a while to deshame we need to remember it is less personal, we are in it together. Then we resource and find ways to find containers of safety and love. We are wounded mostly in relationship and we need relationship to heal. 

Goes back to traumatic wounding in childhood, huge floods of cortisol during a part of development that is key destroys the neuron connections. 

Not survival of the fittest. Survival of the nurtured. 

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 joyand a fragilityout of whose depths emerges strength. 

There is a hollow spacetoo vast for wordsthrough which we pass with each loss,out of whose darknesswe are sanctioned into being.  

There is a cry deeper than all soundwhose serrated edges cut the heartas we break open to the place insidewhich is unbreakable and whole,while learning to sing. 

The Unbroken 

by Rashani Réa