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

by Judith Blackstone

We attune to the ground of awareness in, around, and above our head. By awareness, I mean that part of the ground within which perceptions and thoughts occur.

We attune to the ground of emotion in the mid-third of our body—our chest and mid-section. By emotion, I mean that part of the ground within which emoti...

We attune to physical sensation through the bottom third of our body—our lower torso, legs, and feet. By physical sensation, I mean that part of the ground in which physical sen...

Although I divide the qualities of FC into these three categories, they are experienced as a spectrum of qualities in our body, rather than a...

If we do not attune to all three qualities of fundamental consciousness, we will have only a partial contact with ourselves and a partial openness to life.

Our design of constriction and openness determines where we live in ourselves. It can also determine what we cultivate in meditation.

Meditation practitioners tend to dwell, during their meditation, in the parts of their body that they are most accustomed to and where they are already most open.

So someone who lives mostly within their head will dwell within their hea...

In this way, they will become increasingly open in this part of themselves as th...

Likewise, someone who lives primarily in the emotional aspect of themselves will dwell within their chest during meditation and become increasingly open emotionally without opening the rest of their body to fundamental consciousness.

Opening to all three qualities of fundamental consciousness is important for psychological health because it brings balance and fullness to our ordinary life experience.

Someone who dwells mostly in their head or the space around their head may be cognitively adept but cut off from their emotional and sensual experience.

Someone who lives mostly in their lower body may become so engrossed in physical sensation that they become ruled by their love of sensual pleasure, without feeling what would nourish them emotionally and without recognizing the possible negative outcomes of following all of their sensual desires.

We need to be attuned to all three qualities of fundamental consciousness in order to reach our most subtle and most complete experience of ourselves and the world around us.

3 INHABITING THE BODY

I’ve been reading about this stuff for years, but I never thought I would be able to experience it, and now I can. A REALIZATION PROCESS STUDENT

In the Realization Process, we discover the ground of fundamental consciousness by inhabiting the internal space of our body.

we cannot actually realize fundamental consciousness without also inhabiting the internal space of our body.

Inhabiting the body is not the same as being aware of the body.

Inhabiting the body means that we live within our body, that we are present throughout the whole...

It means that we feel that we are made of consciousness ever...

Inhabiting the body takes practice because, for most of us, we are changing a life-long habit...

Most of us grow up living in front of our body, and very often ab...

The protective constrictions and other rigid organizations in our fascia obstruct our inw...

Just as young children may cover their own eyes in order to hide, one of the ways we protect ourselves from others is by hiding from ourselves.

If it felt safer in childhood not to be present within one’s body, then coming back into the body can feel frightening. It can also feel taboo, as if we are breaking a rule that we have lived under all our lives, a law against existing as individuals.

When we live within our own skin, we become separate from other people, even as we enter into the dimension of oneness with them.

It is not often recognized in conventional psychotherapy that there is an underlying wholeness, or a potential for wholeness, that we can access as we let go of our patterns of fragmentation.

Inhabiting the Body and Attuning to Fundamental Consciousness

There will be parts of ourselves that we cannot inhabit just by changing the habit of disembodiment. Those are areas of ourselves that we have constricted so tightly for so long that the connective tissues of the body (the fascia) have become glued together.

These constrictions are often unconscious, split off from our conscious e...

Or they may be experienced as chronic ten...

We may feel that we are inhabiting our body as a whole, but these deeply held, unconscious constrictions will not be inclu...

Many body-oriented therapies cultivate body awareness. However, to inhabit the body is different than being aware of the body.

To be aware of our body in this way is much better than not being aware of our body. But it is not the same as living within the body. In order to experience the difference, you can try this: PRACTICE Inhabiting Your Hands Rest your hands, palms down, on your legs. Now take a few moments to become aware of your hands. In becoming aware of your hands, you may feel how tense or relaxed they are. You may feel the temperature of your hands, whether they are cool or warm. This is becoming aware of your hands. Now enter into your hands. Become present within the internal space of your hands. Let yourself feel that you are the internal space of your hands; this is part of who you are. This is inhabiting your hands. I remember one man’s response to this exercise when I first taught it to him. “This is going to sound strange,” he said to me. “But it feels as if my hands fit inside my hands. I’ve never felt that before.”

Exercise for 'being inside' your hands.

PRACTICE Attunement to Fundamental Consciousness

People sometimes experience trembling when they begin to inhabit their bodies. This is the result of long-held tensions releasing.

The Gifts of Inhabiting Your Own Body

Becoming Present and Receptive

It is this sense of individual ownership, this right to be separate and distinct from others, that is damaged in abusive relationships.

Regaining Agency

The loss of agency from trauma also sometimes stems from a sense of having failed oneself, of having “allowed” a terrible thing to happen to oneself. Children almost always feel responsible for the harm done to them. They feel guilty about having been abused.

We may grow up feeling that we cannot rely on ourselves to guide our own lives effectively.

Restoring Resilience

Inhabiting the body is also important for healing from trauma because it makes us more resilient to external stimulation, such as abrasive sounds or other people’s intense emotions.

Instead of feeling that sensory or emotional stimuli impinge on us sharply, we have an internal depth in which to re...

As fundamental consciousness, we are not detached from experience, we are disentangled from it. This is a big difference.

We still feel both what comes through us from our environment and our own response to it. But we allow the movement of both our reception and response to occur and then to dissipate naturally, rather than either obstructing it or holding on to it.

Developing Se...

This residue of self-doubt or self-loathing undermines our attempt to be confident and effective in our lives. It can obstruct our ability to love and to receive love, and to feel worthy of love. But if we inhabit our chest, we naturally experience the quality of love that dwells there.