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

by Judith Blackstone

If we feel the quality of our intelligence in our head, it becomes more difficult to judge ourselves as stupid or to doubt our own insights and understanding. We begin to enjoy the feeling of being who we are, the experience of ourselves as love and intelligence and power and sexuality.

as we inhabit our body and shift from objectifying ourselves to experiencing ourselves, this self-consciousness dwindles away.

We can still tell how others are responding to us, but this awareness is outweighed by our loyalty to ourselves, our experienced knowledge of ourselves.

This means that we can gradually let go of our watchful grip on ourselves....

Grounding in Our Foundation

If we did not feel securely held as children or if we could not rely on the support of our parents, physically or emotionally, it is often reflected as a pulling up away from the base of our body.

When we inhabit our lower body, we feel more connection with the floor beneath us, and we can rely on its support. This helps us let go of the effort that most of us exert in order to keep ourselves upright.

The natural support of the ground beneath us can provide us with a sense of security and even help alleviate the psychologically based feeling of insecurity stemming from a lack of support in our childhood.

Some people feel very heavy when they first practice inhabiting their body while standing. They feel as if they have been glued to the ground.

In addition to our particular relationship with our childhood environment, social factors may also cause us to live more in the top of our body than the bottom.

Although this is not true of everyone, it is a general pattern in our culture to live “above the belt.”

Anxiety also produces an upward displacement in our body. When we are anxious, we rise upward in ourselves, away from our foundation.

This upward movement of anxiety is acknowledged in our language with the expression “My heart was in my throat.” Many sensitive people grow up with some anxiety and with this anxious, upward displacement in their body.

Inhabiting the whole body, including the bottom of the body, can help alleviate a hab...

Our main foundations are our feet and the bottom of our pelvis...

PRACTICE Foundational Grounding

Conclusion

Although anxiety and feelings of insecurity and uprootedness usually originate in reaction to trauma, they can become habitual holding patterns that persist even when our present-day circumstances are calm and secure.

As we inhabit our body, and learn to rest comfortably within our body, our authentic reception of life and our ability for authentic self-expression becomes an ongoing way of being, an ordinary, everyday reality.

Grounding, resilience, self-love, agency, receptivity, and presence are just some of the ways in which inhabiting the internal space of our body helps us heal from trauma and returns us to the birthright of our true nature.

4 THE QUALITIES IN THE BODY Emptiness is the field in which each and every thing—as an absolute center, possessed of an absolutely unique individuality—becomes manifest as it is in itself. KEIJI NISHITANI

The Quality of Intelligence

The Quality of Voice

The Quality of Love

The Quality of Power

The quality of power that we can feel in our body is not power over other people. It is not an aggressive feeling. It is pure, natural power, like the power of a waterfall. It gives us a sense of internal buoyance, vitality, and strength.

Men often also suppress power in reaction to gender stereotypes, in which male power is portrayed as abusive and dominating. They fear that if they allow themselves to feel power, they may become those abusive men themselves. Just as women have been taught, for centuries, that power is unattractive in a woman, men have been taught, in our current society, that male power is unattractive and threatening.

When we do not experience the quality of power in our body, we often continue to feel overpowered by other people as adults, even if they are not being abusive toward us.

The Qualities of Gender and Sexuality

The following are practices for attuning to the three main qualities of fundamental consciousness: awareness, emotion, and physical sensation that can be experienced pervading your body and environment, and then for attuning to the more delineated spectrum of qualities within your body.

PRACTICE Attuning to the Qualities of Fundamental Consciousness

5 HEALING TRAUMA FROM THE CORE OF THE BODY

The organismic ground is not truly unknowable in that it may be directly contacted in wider states of awareness. SHIN’ICHI HISAMATSU

The subtle core of the body is important for spiritual awakening because it is our entranceway into the pervasive space of fundamental consciousness. It is also of key importance for psychological healing and maturity.

In the Realization Process, we attune to and breathe within points along this subtle core as part of our approach to healing trauma.

I call this channel “subtle” because it is not part of the physical body. It is not composed of physical tissues. It cannot be found in an autopsy. However, it has a particular “feel” to it, and it provides us with particular ways of experiencing ourselves and the world around us, which I will describe in this chapter. And it is conceived of as a channel in both Hindu and Buddhist systems.

PRACTICE The Core Breath

Our Entranceway into Wholeness and Oneness

From the core of our body, we feel that we are living in the very center of all our experience.

To live within the core of ourselves feels like we are living within the source of our ability to think, to feel, and to sense.

As we let go of ourselves from the core, we find ourselves, more and more fully, in the fundamental ground of our being.

Increasing Perspective

The subtle core of the body is our entranceway into oneness with our environment, and at the same time, it is also our grea...

Inhabiting the innermost core of ourselves increases our perspective, on both our internal experience and our pe...

This perspective gives us a sense of scale so we are less overwhelmed by ordinary irritations. It allows us to see the “big picture” of what...

It can also help us put our memories of our traumatic past into perspective so we can gradually accept and accommodate that these things have happened to us, tha...

In reaction to trauma, we may hold chronic feelings of anxiety, fear, sadness, or anger in our body that influence our mood.

If we hold grief in our body, for example, we may experience that life is basically sad, and we see the sadness in everyone we meet.

If we hold anger or fear in our body, life may seem inherently frightening or frustrating, a constant battle.

These moods also influence our habitual thought patterns, which in turn serve to maintain our mood, r...