Beyond Trauma

If it is possible to live without trauma, would you choose it? If it is possible to live with ease and enjoy actually being alive, would you choose it?

What does living beyond trauma actually mean? I suspect that there are very few people living with this planet who have not experienced some kind of shocking event or events that have left a traumatic imprint on their psychological, physical, emotional or spiritual wellbeing. If we have survived such events, do they still control us in the context of the types of choices that we make, or the relationships that we seek or don’t seek, or the places that we will or will not visit? If we make choices for our lives based on what happened in the past, then we are being controlled by the ‘past’ and not actually living, never mind thriving.

There is something very noble in surviving traumatic events, and through the amazing capacities of our bodies and their ability to adapt to situations, we can become accustomed to functioning at less than our normal selves or, in extreme circumstances, we access accelerated functioning to move through emergencies before slowing into recovery mode. It can be easy, through the continued need to adapt, for us to forget that we aren’t ‘firing on all cylinders’.

For the individual, it can look like boredom, depression, lack of direction, disinterest in new projects, irritability, long-term grieving, hyper-vigilance, supposedly irrational fears, insomnia, searching for the nearest escape hatch, aggressive behaviour, loss of their voice, chronic illness, disassociation, and many more words that we would use to describe ourselves and our behaviour. It can feel like wading through a bog, every step a gargantuan effort, all the while knowing that it will never end: it’s going to be like this for the rest of my life. Wow! Really?

These traits being expressed by many people together could become a way of life that is then normalised and we forget what it is like to live without those trauma imprints that control our every move and thought. As groups, we loose sight of a way of living that is hope-filled, generative, creative, inclusive and all the ‘positive’ adjectives that we might like to consider would apply.

Something got down-graded to a ‘less than’ situation. We slow, or even stop, our attempts to live and recede into mind and body-numbing apathy. Is that truly a way of living that we would consciously choose? Do we slip into it as the trauma mounts up and we forget what it’s like to live without that exhaustion?

Could we say that living without trauma is the opposite of what I have described above? Well, perhaps. Firstly, is it actually possible? In my experience, yes it is.

Back in March this year, 2020, I had a conversation with a friend, Megan Sillito, on the topic of trauma, and living beyond trauma. Megan is a wondrous resource of information and connectivity of many different methods of personal transformation. She is one of my heroes of consciousness, not giving in to the craziness of the world and instead, chooses to explore living through her own magic. She also has many years of experience through her own business in working with clients to release trauma.

Megan was curious about a process to release shock and trauma that I had spoken about, so we arranged a couple of sessions where we explored what might be possible in reference to certain traumas that she was aware of. We started with a long-standing trauma, which shifted within seconds, and then worked with an ancestral story-line that had impacted the family for generations. Much changed in her world over the next days as more energy that had been held in the ancestral field was released.

What grew out of our exploration was a series of four online calls during April, graciously hosted by Megan, for people to experience the shock release process and move beyond the trauma patterns from which they had been living. It was exciting, a little daunting at first, and profoundly powerful in the group setting. We had two calls working at the individual level, then two calls with the ancestral fields of the people on the call. We were all changed in ways that are still rippling through our lives. I am hugely grateful to her for the wealth of her experience in this area and for her encouragement to make available this unusual process for releasing shock.

I had already done some Beta testing of this new process and the calls precipitated more exploration of what’s possible when the shock is released from someone’s universe. It’s really exciting to witness the person relax, to watch faces change, hear the quality of a voice change, see smiles become freer and breathing become easier and to hear confirmation of spontaneous, effortless changes in life choices that had previously been very challenging.

Megan has also been a catalyst in assisting me to shift some trauma that I kept experiencing around numbers. I know, it sounds bizarre, but it’s true: maths lessons at school was always more torment than other subjects. The Rapid Eye process that she used to unwind the trauma I was living with around numbers shifted it immediately and there is now a clear, playful energy that I have when I’m working with dates, money, weights or anything else that uses numbers or measurements. It’s very cool!

There are many techniques to releasing trauma and shock. All of them have their merits and assist people in moving beyond the debilitating cycle of trauma that they have been living, or not-living, with. Some involve specifically guided therapeutic processes, others, such as Reiki, Access Consciousness Bars, Theta Healing, etc, can allow greater ease in the recovery process.

This simple and very potent process that I have discovered and developed also allows any who choose it, to easily drop away from the dread and anticipation of ‘something terrible happening’ into a calm, relaxed and fulfilled way of living. More refining of the process continues in the practice of releasing shock and then re-calibrating the nervous system to a different way of functioning.

There is a difference between shock and trauma, in my perception. The shock point is that moment of impact or interrupt of how we naturally function as the acoustic wave. Within a nanosecond and beyond of that shock point we can begin creating the ‘story line’ of ‘why, should have, should not have, they did, I did, I didn’t, it means …’ and everything else around the event. This leads to holding onto the interrupted wave, now particalised, in that form. Addressing the symptoms of trauma may provide some relief, and unless the original shock point, or interrupt, is released from that form and restored, the trauma is likely to continue looping.

It is possible to shift multiple shock points simultaneously, and sometimes it is relevant to focus on just one. As the majority of them have faded I get to perceive and translate the world around me in a very different way. Much of the tension that I was holding in my back and shoulders has faded. That’s big progress!

As the old trauma loops fade, the choices that I can make for my future living are very different. My relationships are different: I no longer anticipate ‘the worst’. It is easier to breathe a lung full of air where previously it was almost impossible.

It does require a willingness to be present with any trauma that surfaces, either mine or another’s. Why is this relevant? It points to a lifestyle choice: an active choice of the space and freedom with which I wish to live. It is now possible, and living is an entirely different experience than it used to be. Facing the future of unknown is no longer terrifying - it’s exciting … most of the time ;-)

Is it possible to live without trauma? Yes. Would you choose it?