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

by Judith Blackstone

I believe that healing does not occur, or last, without psy...

We need to know our history in order to find and release the exact pathway of our tr...

We also need to become conscious of the unconscious memories and beliefs that color our perception of ourselves and our environm...

If you do not understand the situations that led to your patterns of constriction, you are also more likely to reorganize them whenever ...

Developing the Realization Process

When I began to develop the Realization Process in the early seventies, I had not yet trained as a psychotherapist or discovered the budding fields of transpersonal psychology and contemporary spirituality.

The early versions of the practices that I include in this book came to me as I lay on the floor of my loft in lower Manhattan.

I was badly injured, struggling to recover from disastrous surgery on my spine, and grieving for the loss of my career and my agility as a highly trained modern dancer. The surgery had left me with the feeling of a dense brick in my lower back.

All of the methods of healing that I had pursued had been unsuccessful at di...

I felt abandoned by the medical profession, by the alternative healing professions that I had tried, and b...

So I was desperate. I lay on the floor and focused within myself, as deeply as I could, looking for the key that might free me from this seemingly insurmountable...

I discovered that if I dropped my weight to the ground, currents of energy seemed to arise from the floor and move my body toward b...

When my focus finally reached the innermost, vertical core of my body, I entered a realm of experience that was even more subtle than energy, that felt like a primary ground of consciousness pervading my body and even all of the objects around me in my room.

I found myself in a transparent world where I experienced my own being and everything in my environment as both solid and permeable at the same time, as if made of consciousness itself.

The unwinding process brought to my awareness memories and emotions from my childhood, and even the feeling of myself at younger ages.

In This Book

This is my sixth book on the Realization Process, but it is the first to focus specifically on applying the Realization Process practices to healing trauma.

In chapter 6, I describe how trauma affects our senses, limiting and distorting our perception with memories of painful and abrasive sensory experiences. As we release the trauma-based constrictions from our senses, our environment appears more vivid and unified; we feel that we are perceiving our world clearly and directly.

As fundamental consciousness, we can experience deep intimacy with others without losing inward contact with ourselves.

1 HOW WE ORGANIZE OURSELVES

And do not forget, even a fist once was an open palm and fingers.

YEHUDA A...

From the very beginning of our lives, even from before we are born, we organize ourselves in response to our environment.

We pull away, with our body and our consciousness, from whatever is painful or overwhelming, and we constrict those parts of ourselves that are experiencing pain.

I define trauma as any event that is too intense, too painful—emotionally or physically—or too confusing to be fully received.

in childhood, even small, ordinary events can be traumatic.

These ordinary events are sometimes called developmental trauma or relational trauma.

I worked with a woman who was punished as a child by being sent to her room. This punishment, seemingly so much less severe than being spanked or beaten, was remembered by my client thirty years later with dread, shame, and the bleak despair of the outcast, a feeling she had carried within her body all of her life.

We organize ourselves in reaction to trauma through the medium of the fascia, a dimension of fibers that pervade the whole body and that surround every part of the body, no matter how small.

And through the fascia, we can contract any p...

Since the fascia is everywhere in our body as an interconnected substance, it is a dimension of our internal wholeness. This means that when we constrict the fascia in one part of our body, it pulls on other parts of the body.

Over time, if the same movements into constriction are repeated, they may become well-worn, unconscious pathways of reaction to any circumstances that resemble the initial traumatic events of our childhood.

Our repetitive movements into constriction in reaction to childhood trauma may also cause the tissues of the fascia to become glued together.

In other words, that slight turtlelike withdrawal of our head into our neck may gel into a way of holding ourselves that seems permanent.

This may sound like a horror story, but in fact it is simply the ordinary human condition.

We all grow up to some extent limited in our human capacities, such as our ability to love, to speak freely, or to think clearly, by ...

Although we may be aware of feelings of tension in our body, most people are generally not aware of the limitations in their ability to receive and respond to l...

Most of us accept our limitations as being “j...

Our design of openness and constriction determines where we live in ourselves.

If we have constricted our chest, but remained open in our head, we will tend to think more about life than to respond emotionally.

There is a direct correlation between our human capacities and our physical anatomy.

We cannot keep ourselves from crying, for example, except by constricting the anatomy involved in crying.

You can try this out for yourself. If you have access to your own emotional responsiveness, take a moment to evoke a feeling of anger. Now try to curb that anger, to keep yourself from feeling it, and observe what happens in your body.

You can try the same thing with sadness, anxiety, or fear. The body, as the instrument of our experience, is directly involved in the suppressing of experience.

A sensitive child may even limit their vision to block out overly bright colors or frightening images in paintings or on television. They may limit their hearing to dampen an abrasive sound, such as angry voices or even the ticking of a clock.

These constrictions in our senses, if they become chronically held patterns, will limit our ability to perceive the world in its true vividness.

It is not until they can release the chronic holding patterns in their senses that the beauty in their environment is revealed to them and perception becomes a source of pleasure.

We even constrict our skin against painful or overly stimulating tactile experiences. Later, as adults, this constriction will limit our ability to experience sensual pleasure, as well as physical pain.

So although our constrictions diminish us, and even fragment us, they keep us from shattering.

Releasing these constrictions means that we gradually regain both the fullness of our natural capacities and the clarity of the world around us.