Crawling on broken glass
In my experience, a lot of people don’t meet what they need to do to heal, with ease.
My experience at the start of my healing journey resembled more crawling on broken glass than the laughing buddha.
I remember my very first consultation with a therapist who I would go on to work with weekly for 8 months, til she left for OZ, (which is not ideal when you’ve abandonment issues).
On leaving the consultation she said “Be gentle with yourself”
Be “what” with yourself?
My internal thought was ‘what the fuck does that mean’.
And ‘why the fuck is she saying it to me’.
It made my brain glitch, I couldn’t understand why said what she said.
It took me months to piece together how her advice was totally on point for me. She could see it from a mile off but I was totally unconscious of how hard and rough I was with myself.
It can often happen. I have learned through observation and working with people, that
we can be so resistant to the point that we can’t even understand what the therapist/healer/friend is saying.
Usually this occurs when the advice really touches on the wound of the trauma we have experienced.
This happens because our trauma makes us attached to the way we are. Familiarity is comfort and we don’t have access to our full brain when in traumatised states. Brain imaging shows that the options available to a brain in survival mode are vastly reduced vs a healthy one- our brain, our world, the options we perceive as available to us become very narrow, fixed when we hold a lot of unresolved trauma. Big or small.
Our nervous systems become wired to feel safe in chaos and disconnection when they’re used to that environment or after prolonged exposure.
We learn to feel safest, in control, that we’re protecting ourselves, by being disconnected.
but simultaneously the way we are living is causing our suffering.
What once served us and helped us cope, is now keeping us stuck.
We are called to heal, to crawl over the broken glass into new ways of beings.
Which is a class experience to have on reflection.
I’ve experienced this transformation myself and witnessed it in others.
To go from highly strung to care free, undone, relaxed.
To transform from highly anxious, to settled, trusting, not needing to know everything.
To move from not being able to let the tiniest thing go, to having capacity, compassion and freedom as you’re now connected to much more space.
A big part of healing is bringing conscious awareness to our resistance to ourselves, to healing, which ultimately is a state of love for yourself. Often we become aware of how abusive we are to ourselves and far away from self love.
Lots of our behaviors and ways of thinking that we judge as the devil, are actually protective strategies - usually to acquire love, to validate our worth.
In a weird entanglement, it's these behaviors and ways of thinking that mirror the lack of love we have for ourselves and our disconnect to our inner source of wisdom.
That was definitely my experience.
Trauma happens, you disconnect from the body to escape the horrible sensations to cope.
You fill your days as much as humanly possible so there is no space for your body to breathe or you to feel.
You become attached to your thinking as refuge from the body, from the truth.
Then your mental intelligence gets attention, you are finally seen, validated.
You get into the grammar school, uni of your choice, companies seek to hire a brain as brilliant as yours
You gain a sense of “worth”.
No wonder it's so hard to surrender the thinking and come back to feeling our bodies again.
A personal share is mine of sexual trauma, I became very dissociated, the lights are on but nobody's home. Vacant but highly functioning. Achieving straight As at A level, disguising any scent of being how I felt deeply tainted beyond fixing at this time.
This worked for a long time right up til 28 then everything stopped working. I didn't want to please my corporate bosses anymore, I couldn't care.
I didn't see a future for myself. I had no passions, nothing I cared about.
I remember thinking if I won the lottery I wouldn't even know what to do with it. I was a void. That’s when I got help. And then realised through therapy that I had to unlearn everything that helped me survive, and make mates with my body again which seemed like an impossible transition.
And what is more of a head fuck in my experience is it takes so little effort, the loving yourself, the healing, yet we try to far too hard which interferes with the body’s natural ability to heal and love.
Your survival state most likely has you in a state of constant doing, pushing, trying hard, more more more. It might feel counterproductive to slow down and just be, but that’s exactly what’s needed.
“You move too fast so you miss the information that is in the present moment in your body”- direct feedback from Tara Judele to me.
It has to be a moment of yielding, meeting and being met.
Not a hit and run.
I hope this helps anyone who feels change, healing is impossible.
That it feels impossible to truly love yourself.
From what I know, that feeling is a very normal part of the journey.
I wish it wasn’t so hard too.
But it is so worth crawling on the broken glass.
Everybody, no matter what, has the ability to heal when they are supported to connect with their higher self - which is always present for recovery- paraphrasing from Gabor Mate.
For people new to this concept that are wondering ‘what is my higher self’? = one of the first principles of yoga is you must bow to the divine within before any other divine. You have a powerful self with you always, that can be easily accessed, you just need to turn inwards rather than seeking the answers outside of you. Connecting to it lays the foundations for healing.
“It is no measure of health to be well adjusted to a profoundly sick society.” - Jiddu Krishnamurti