Trauma and the Unbound Body: The Healing Power of Fundamental Consciousness

by Judith Blackstone

INTRODUCTION THE UNDIVIDED LIGHT

To know all things, including the painful and difficult, are lit from within by undivided light.

AURA ...

Wholeness is not a vague ideal, but a lived experience. It is a potential, inherent in our human nature. To be whole is to be conscious and in contact with ourselves everywhere in our body, to live within our body.

When we inhabit our body, we experience ourselves as an undivided consciousness, a subtle, unified ground of consciousness, pervading our whole body and our environment, at the same time.

This book offers a method, called the Realization Process, of understanding and healing trauma. T...

Trauma fragments and limits ou...

In the following chapters, I will show how trauma separates us from our body, how it disrupts the unity of body and mind and the oneness of self and othe...

even though this fundamental, unified ground of our being is right here, as simple to reach as living within our own body, most human beings never experience it.

This is because the traumatic events that occur in all human lives cause us to fragment and diminish our ability to live fully within our body.

There are two categories ...

extreme events, such as severe injury or abuse, that impact us with great force, and relational trauma that everyone faces, especially in childhood, when ordinary events are too a...

In general, relational trauma consists of small painful events that are repeated over time, while extreme trauma can occur just once in...

In reaction to traumatic events, both big and small, we constrict and fragment our body and withdraw our consciousn...

We organize ourselves in ways that dampen the impact of intolerable experience or that restrain those aspects of our own behavior and ...

Someone who is consistently denigrated, for example, by a spouse or a boss at work may react in the same way as a child does to an abusive sibling or adult, by forming lasting beliefs about themselves and others and creating chronic bodily patterns of constriction that express these negative beliefs or that protect against the full impact of the abuse.

Because children also mirror the patterns of constriction in their parents’ bodies, we embody not only our reactions to our own trauma, but we take on some of our ancestors’ reactions to their trauma as well. This is one of the ways in which trauma is passed down from one generation to the next.

Our history of trauma, bound within our body, may haunt our present life as chronic feelings of sadness or despair, as distracting bouts of fury, or as spells of terror. But it can also be present as numbness, as a chronic static in our perception, as if ...

This pain, whether it be conscious suffering or that slight sense of unreality, is often mistaken for our basic nature, something we just need to...

Just as an open hand is hidden within a fist, our true nature, with its innate capacities for happiness, love, and wisdom, is ...

A Process for Healing and Wholeness

The Realization Process is a series of practices that I have developed and taught over the past four decades.

Its effectiveness has been proven to me consistently over this time, both in its application to my own healing and to the healing of the man...

These practices approach the healing of trauma in two ways. There are practices that directly facilitate body-mind integration through inhabiting the internal space of one’s body, attuning to the unified ground of fundamental consciousness and the inherent qualities of one’s being that emerge as we know ourselves as this ground. And there are practices that utilize our attunement to fundamental consciousness in order to precisely and lastingly release the trauma-based constrictions in the body. This relea...

When you inhabit your body, you do not just return to the relatively unguarded, unfragmented state of early childhood. To come back into the body in this conscious way produces an experience that is probably not available to most children a...

It is the experience of yourself and your environment as pervaded by or “made of” the subtle undivided consciou...

By applying fundamental consciousness to the healing of trauma, we enter territory that has tradition...

For this reason, in the Realization Process, psychological healing and spiritual awakening are considered to be two intertwined and inevitable aspects of...

I cannot make any definitive metaphysical claim about fundamental consciousness, because I do not know what it actually is. Descriptions of what seem to be this same experience appear in Asian spiritual teachings, especially within certain Hindu teachings, such as Advaita Vedanta ...

Some Asian teachings say that this ground of consciousness is our own individual mind, our own awareness, that we are perceiving along with the objects of our perception.

I do know that the experience of fundamental consciousness is available to us. It appears to be a given aspect, an innate potential, of our human nature, in much the same way that love is.

When you experience fundamental consciousness pervading your whole body, you experience the internal coherence of your individual being. You do not need to create this unity or integration—it occurs spontaneously.

It feels like the deepest contact that you can have with ...

Through my years as a teacher and therapist, I have found that finally knowing yourself as fundamental consciousness is crucial for psychological health.

As a method of psychological healing, the Realization Process can be classified as a body-oriented, relational, transpersonal psychotherapy.

The approach presented in this book differs from other methods of healing from trauma in several key ways.

It is a body-oriented approach to healing from trauma because of its emphasis on the psychologically based, bound patterns in the body.

Most of the popular methods of body psychotherapy today focus on the flight, freeze, or fight functions of the nervous system that may become chronically activat...

In contrast, the Realization Process focuses on the shaping of the whole body in reaction to trauma, even the relational trauma of ordinary b...

It is most likely the fascia of the body that is the shaper of the body in reaction to trauma.

Fascia is the connective tissue in the body that surrounds all of our bodily structures. Our fascia is itself a dimension of wholeness. It is made of interconnected tissues that reach everywhere in our body.

In the living body, it is a fluid medium that appears to react to both physical and emotional stresses, and then harden, ove...

Although this requires more research to establish scientifically, there is a great deal of anecdotal evidence to suggest that the fascia stores the emotional charge of trauma and even the memories of the trauma, or at least, provides access to those memories.

Fascia shapes the body and stores physical traumas.

The nervous system naturally relaxes into its parasympathetic mode as well, as we release the constrictions within our whole body.

The Realization Process also focuses on more subtle facets of the body—energy and consciousness.

The Realization Process provides a method for refining and deepening our inward contact with our body in order to contact and live within these more subtle aspects of ourselves.

Like many current transpersonal methods of psychological healing, the Realization Process aligns itself with the category of spiritual teachings called “nonduality.”

The Realization Process is also distinct from most nondual teachings in that it does not consider nondual realization to be the eradication of the experience of individuality.

But in the method presented here, we see that the realization of ourselves as fundamental consciousness actually deepens and matures our inward contact with ourselves, rather than eradicating it. It heals and deepens all of our human capacities.

Many of the spiritually oriented people who come to work with me ask if meditation is sufficient for becoming whole or if we can release the constrictions in our body that obscure that wholeness without knowing our personal history.