Dealing with Deep Trauma in a Relationship
"Expecting the worst, you look, and instead, here's the joyful face you've been wanting to see. Your hand opens and closes and opens and closes. If it were always a fist or always stretched open, you would be paralyzed. Your deepest presence is in every small contracting and expanding. The two as beautifully balanced and coordinated as birdwings." -Rumi (1207-1273) "Birdwings" "For many wounded individuals, their body has become the enemy. The experience of almost any sensation is interpreted as an unbidden harbinger of renewed terror and helplessness." -Peter Levine from In an Unspoken Voice As Rumi suggests, there is [...]
Trauma and Spirituality
"When a man has learned within his heart what fear and trembling mean, he is safeguarded against any terror produced by outside influences." -I Ching, Hexagram 51 "For in my flesh I shall see God." -Book of Job Perhaps the best work done on the connection between trauma and spirituality comes from the chapter in Peter Levine's book In an Unspoken Voice called "Trauma and Spirituality". I've seen a few other people make this connection, including El Collie in her book Branded by the Spirit especially the chapter called "Cracking Up", but mostly in passing and not nearly as direct [...]
Emerging from the Depths of Trauma
"The culture expects one to be manic: hyperactive, spend and consume and waste, be very verbal, flow of ideas, don't stay long with anything—the fear of being boring—and we lose the sense of sadness…It's so ego identified that we don't even see it as a syndrome! What we see as a syndrome is slowness, sadness, dryness, waiting. That we call depression, and we have a giant pharmaceutical industry to deal with it." -James Hillman "Of all the demeaning forms of prejudice, aspersion that categorically denies the validity of one's experiences is most undermining. Even blatant hatred is not so [...]