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

by Judith Blackstone

Compensation

As you get older and need to relate with your peers, you may also form holding patterns that compensate for the limitations that you have created in yourself with your protective, compliant, and mirroring patterns.

A child who has been overpowered, for example, by a dominating or abusive parent, will often contract their natural sense of power in their body, usually by ...

When they need to go out into their school environment, and later, their work environment, they may feel easi...

Although this constriction of power is unconscious, they may be aware of feeling somehow less su...

Conclusion

As we release these organizations in our fascia, we have a greater sense of our internal volume, of taking up space.

We gain more of our being, and this means that we actuall...

All of our constrictions are moments of our past that we have stopped in their tracks and held...

They are frozen moments of our past. But what is frozen can unfree...

When we focus within these rigidities, we can free this movement and then inhabit those parts of our body that have been lost to us. Instead of living partially in the past,...

2 FUNDAMENTAL CONSCIOUSNESS

For the nothingness of Zen is not lifeless like emptiness, but, on the contrary, is something quite lively. It is not only lively but also has heart, and moreover, is aware of itself. SHIN’ICHI HISAMATSU

In the Realization Process, recovery from trauma is approached through releasing the bound organizations from the fascia and by doing specific practices for inhabiting the internal space of the body and attuning to the pervasive space of fundamental consciousness.

In this method, the practices for inhabiting the body and realizing oneself as fundamental consciousness precede the work of releasing holding patterns from the body.

This is so we can experience the safety and stability of our underlying wholeness before releasing patterns that may have served important...

When we increase our openness to life by releasing the rigid constrictions in our body, we do not open into nothingness, but into the underlying, ...

Since we have not yet been able to find a conclusive scientific explanation for fundamental consciousness, I cannot say with any certainty, in terms that would satisfy us in the twenty-first century, what this experience actually is. But I do know that we can experience it, and that when we do, it benefits us profoundly.

Fundamental consciousness is experienced as an underlying stillness, but a palpable, lively stillness, pervading our body and our environment at the same time.

Another way of saying this is that as fundamental consciousness (FC), we perceive life with less subjective distortion. Since FC is our own consciousness, it is a dimension of our own subjectivity.

It is now understood by most of science and philosophy that we can never have an entirely objective view of reality. The observed is always to some extent interpreted and changed by the observer.

However, our subjectivity can be more or less distorted. We can live almost entirely in our own world, thickly coloring everything we see with our imagination and with our desires, fears, and aversions.

Or we can become increasingly open to the world around us and increasingly attuned to FC as the ground level of our experience. The twentieth-century Zen philosopher Nishitani called this ground of consciousness the “near side” of subjectivity.

We feel that we have become more real and that our perception of our environment has become more true.

Fundamental consciousness is a dimension of disentanglement, of non-grasping. All of life’s movements flow through the stillness of this ground, without obstruction.

The experience of fundamental consciousness is not of something separate from ourselves. Although we experience fundamental consciousness, it is more correct to say that it experiences itself.

It is realized when our consciousness becomes conscious of itself. It requires, and is, a refinement of our own consciousness.

It is not widely known that our consciousness is capable of refinement.

With this more sensitive attunement, the world we live in is not exactly the same as the world we lived in before this refinement. It is more vivid, nuanced, and even luminous. But it is still the world.

To know ourselves as the subtle ground of our being is a distinct shift from fragmentation to wholeness, but it is who we actually are.

Rather than feeling ethereal or supernatural, the experience of fundamental consciousness fe...

Although I describe fundamental consciousness as pervading our body and environment, the word “pervade” can be misleading. “Pervade” is a verb, and fundamental consciousness does not move. It is experienced as a pervasive stillness.

Objects within this pervasive space appear to be permeable. They appear to be made of empty, luminous space, at the same time as they appear to be material and solid.

This permeability of our environment takes some practice to experience, and it is difficult to describe in words.

It is an actual sensory experience, but it requires the refinement and unification of the senses that occur as we realize fundamental consciousness in order to experience it.

Fundamental consciousness is vitally important for healing from trauma because it cannot be injured.

Only our access to our wholeness has been obstructed.

While trauma fragments us, the realization of ourselves as fundamental consciousness unifies our body, heart, and mind.

We created all of our holding patterns in reaction to our environment.

These holding patterns do not only produce fragmentations within our body, but also between ou...

As this subtle, pervasive dimension of consciousness, it becomes much easier for us to let go of these fragmentations.

We find that as FC, we can be open to and connected with other people without our old fears and aversions triggering our patterns of protection.

We can remain connected to our internal experience, our own needs and desires, without feeling overwhelmed or annihilate...

The Qualities of Fundamental C...

When we attune to ourselves as fundamental consciousness, we find that this pervasive space is not empty in the sense of void. Even though it is experienced as ...

These qualities, which we can attune to pervading everywhere, are experienced as the fundamental qualities of our own being. In this work, we name these qualities: awareness, emotion, and physical sensation.

Attuning to these three qualities can help us feel whole within ourselves and unified with our surroundings.

They do not arise and dissipate like specific experiences. Instead, they are experienced as aspects of the unchanging stillness within which specific perceptions, cognitions, emotions, and physical sensations move.

Before we go further, by “quality,” I mean the “feel” of our experience.

I divide the qualities of fundamental consciousness into these three categories because we attune to each quality through a different section of our body.