Trauma, in any of
its forms, is not a failure or a mistake.
It is not something to be ashamed of, not a sign of weakness, and not a
reflection of inner failing. It is
simply a fact of life.
We emerge, as
infants, from a relational matrix and then struggle to come to terms with the
trauma of aloneness.
Trauma forces one
into an experience of the impersonal, random, and contingent nature of reality,
but it forces one violently and against one's will.
In dissociation the
personality wards off becoming fragmented.
It does this by withdrawing from that which it cannot bear. The shocked self is sacrificed, sent to its
room for an endless time-out…. In order to go on, the self cuts its losses and
dissociates its alarm.
In dissociation
there is no self-reflection -- in order to survive trauma the devastated self
is immobilized and hidden out of view.
The emotional impact has nowhere to go, however. It becomes stuck, in a frozen state,
inaccessible to the person's usual waking consciousness. It is never digested, never symbolized or
imagined, never processed by thought or language, and never really felt.
There is no single
word for meditation in the original language of Buddhism. The closest is one that translates as
"mental development".
Mindfulness, in its
fullest flowering, actually balances two distinct mental qualities: relaxation and investigation.
Feelings are always
present. They accompany every moment of
awareness. They can be pleasant,
unpleasant, or neutral, and they can be based in the body or in the mind. They flow continuously, although we tend to
intervene reactively, dissociating from the painful feelings, clinging to the
pleasant ones, and ignoring the neutral.
Our egos, in our
relentless rush to normal, pulls us away from our feelings when they are
difficult and immerse us in them unconditionally when they are alluring.
Dreams are
dissociative by definition. They occur
when the rest of the mind is shut down, and they allow difficult feelings to be
expressed in symbolic form.
Awakening does not
mean an end to difficulty; it means a change in the way those difficulties are
met.
